Final Post :(

I decided to use a stop motion video as my final project.  Even though this video is short, it took me forever to do.  First of all, it took a couple of hours just to make the "stage" I used three pieces of wood that were painted white and then I had my friend use an air gun to put them together.  Then, I had to set up lighting (I chose to use flat light--more on that later) and set up the camera angle I wanted.  After this I started out just waiting for the apple to rot but because that was taking too long and I only had a certain amount of time to spend with the materials I borrowed I had to hurry the art process so I took an apple I had rotted earlier and replaced it with the original apple in the beginning.  All in all, stop motion takes a very long time; I have an even better appreciation for it now than I did before. 

My video is based around the fact that time cannot heal pain, despite the saying.  When something terrible happens (such as a death or a break-up) that emotional pain cuts through you--it cuts through your soul or your core (hence, there are clear cut holes through the apple core).  When this happens the first thing to leave your soul is the happiness, love, and optimism you once possessed (represented by the white strips of paper, which are hopefully readable).  These are the types of emotions that leave quickly.  Then there is this period where you aren't really sure how you feel, possibly feeling "nothing at all".  This is represented with a space between the white and black words.  When the black words (misery, torture, desolation, etc) come out of the apple's holes, they are noticeably moving at a slower speed.  This is purposeful because when these "bad" emotions emerge they come out of us slowly, dragging the pain on and on.  At the re-emergence of the "good" feelings, the "bad" feelings surround the "good", squashing them completely out of sight for you.  As time goes on (represented by the moving apple), "bad" feelings seem to linger in the voids of your soul, causing you to essentially rot from the inside, out.  The rotten apple at the end has the word desolation on it because it represents a person literally destroyed by the "bad" feelings that took over their soul.   

Everything in this clip is of utmost importance; everything was done for a specific reason.  First of all, the stage my stop motion was set on was white specifically because I wanted an institutional feel to my video.  However, the white boards were not enough so I decided to use the bleach filter on my video in order to help get the creepy effect I was looking for.  (Unfortunately I think it may have made the words harder to read.)  The reason why I chose to use black and white papers for my words was because I was employing the archetypal black and white as bad and good.  I placed the apple in the corner because even though there is no where to hide from pain, it is still making that attempt.  There are two reasons why I chose a green apple instead of a red apple to represent the human heart (emotional center):  one, I looked up the meaning of apple colors and green represented love and two, green apples brown faster (because they are used for baking) so this made the green apple a better choice over the red apple.  In general, I liked the look of a green apple against the white instead of a red apple.  Another thing that I wanted to represent symbolically was the small ball of hope inside of Pandora's Box (when I had all the white words bunch into a circle).  I wanted to show that darkness would swallow that ball of hope, leaving nothing.  Right before that I have the words love and hurt circling each other, almost like the prelude to a showdown that love is going to lose.  I also have the words "crawling" out of the apple holes so that they look like bugs (worms or ants, I can't decide which).  This adds to the sense of destruction.  On another note, the amount of words used is equal because happiness and sadness are equally strong emotions, just experienced in different ways.  Finally my musical selection (Kesson Deslaf by Aphex Twin) is based on the fact that it is simple and very sad.  It helps evoke the feeling that something is missing and that whatever it is happens to be irretrievable.  Besides the minor mistakes (that I could not fix due to the fact that I had a limited amount of time to spend with the equipment I needed) and the fact that I wish I had shown a whole apple and then each slice from it before the video started, I was mostly happy with this stop motion; I thought it turned out quite nice. 

Looking Away and Seeing Too Much by James Elkins

This excerpt really grabbed my attention because it was all about drawing from memory.  I often do this because I am too lazy to usually grab a picture of what I would like to draw so I attempt it from memory.  Things that I am more familiar with seem to be easier to draw from memory rather than things I don't see on a day to day basis.  For example, I can draw eyes from memory better than I can a flower.  There are so many parts of flowers that I have never looked at in depth that I could never draw from memory.

It is so interesting to see that when you draw from memory you tend to add things that aren't there.  This is probably because of the composite images you have built up in your mind of a certain object.  For example, we all have the image of an apple in our minds but each of us pictures a slightly different apple.  The apple that we are picturing is not the same as every object we call an apple because it is a category for things that look like apples.  It is so interesting that every person has a different image in their mind though.

Another part of this writing that fascinated me was the part about war photography.  It is quite unsettling to see people alive in one frame and dead in another, as Elkins points out.  However, at the point between the frames, that moment between life and death, time has occurred and in these pictures a death has been trapped.  After reading about this I really didn't know how to feel but I definitely understood the unsettling nature of the photographs.  The pictures bring the imminent sense of danger to the viewer.  When I had visited the Walter Reed Medical Health Museum in D.C. (which is next to the military hospital) last summer I saw many a picture like this; the museum itself creeped me out--in a good way, I guess.

In an interesting jump, Elkins moved on to talking about how artists sometimes focus on things that really shouldn't matter as much such as the sexuality of Christ rather than his--or her--identity and presence.  I had never really thought of this before but I really feel like he had a good point.  When he then mentioned live modeling and that you find yourself looking at a hand rather than other unmentionables, your sight is being deflected.  In the same breath he also mentions that your eyes are also drawn to certain things.  I have experienced this when looking at works of art.  I am so consumed by one object in the picture it takes me a little while to deflect my line of vision and explore the rest of the work of art.

All in all, I really enjoyed this reading.  A few questions I have are:  1) If you were to take a series of pictures at the moment someone is born, would the entrapment of their birth between the frames seem unsettling such as a series of pictures of death?  and 2) As an artist can your line of sight get blinded by your own artwork?  Is it possible that while making a piece of art you get totally consumed in one aspect of it and ignore the details of others?  If so, what would this mean or do to the artwork?

Last note, the beginning the reading reminded me of Caroline's artist she presented, Wayne Thiebaud.

Critique!

My most recent art project I would consider a success.  When the class was doing a critique of my abstraction of order vs. change I was thrilled to hear that they thought that my project was about exactly what I meant it to be.  In my opinion, as an artist that it is a very satisfying feeling to know that your artwork is easily understood. 

However, looking at it objectively, there are many problems with my canvas.  On the left side that represented order, I feel that the lines were not perfect enough.  They contained many flaws that they should have not.  I should have measured each line so that it would be the same width as all the others and that the white space between the black lines was also of the same measurement.  Another huge mistake I made on the left side was the small imperfections of the black lines (due to the paint used on the tape) that could have been rid of but were not.  The reason why I have such a problem with these imperfections is that it took away from the dramatic meaning of the left side of my canvas.  I felt that those flaws showed some sympathy towards order; since it is impossible to be perfect.  That was not, however, my intention.  The stark black and white lines were meant to create a feeling of detachment.  Even though this was probably still conveyed in some way, I felt like the imperfections of my lines were way too sympathetic to the cause of order.  

Another thing I noticed was that my paint was not nearly as thick as it should have been on the chaos end of my canvas.  The thickness would have added way more texture, drawing the viewer's attention in more, as well as make it harder for the white lines to fit so smoothly over the painting.  That would have added to the feeling of uncontrollable chaos. 

I really feel that my artwork would have been interpreted differently if it were put on a differently colored wall.  It was nice to hear my classmates bring this up because I had considered this prior to presenting my work.  I think it would be interesting to see my canvas placed on a black background because then you could see the white lines more prominently extended off of my canvas.  However, I think that would take away from the illusion that order just disappears inside the cracks of the wall once chaos takes over.  

So after considering the critiques of my artwork, I think it would be interesting to change the orientation of it, perhaps into a cyclical piece or into a sculpture as a sphere.  If I changed the orientation I could perhaps further explore chaos and breaking the confines of the shape.  These are all interesting considerations and I wish I had more time to explore and create all possible options.

The Importance of Auditory and Visual Cues In Film

While watching the iMovie projects in class yesterday, I noticed that the audience's feelings toward them were highly influenced by the filters used in the video.  At times it was easier to understand the mood or situation in the video due to the filter used.  The colors appeal to our senses so it makes sense that the use of color (or lack thereof) helped to create a certain mood.  For example, many students chose to use the dream or romance filter to depict a difference in sense of time and/or reality.  Another filtered used was the black and white.  This lack of color helped to add an element of seriousness to the video and a touch of sadness or emptiness.  Overall, from watching the videos yesterday, I learned that filters are a huge visual clue to the audience because it reveals the situation as well as mood of the video.

Another interesting thing I noticed is that music is a very useful auditory cue to the audience.  The music is what really helps to set the mood and it even sets up the tone of the video.  Sometimes people used just one song, other times they used multiple.  Using multiple songs allows for the viewer to pick up on mood or tone changes; using one song lets the viewer know that there is one over-arching theme in the video.  For example, Kelsey and I both used one song for our videos which helped the audience to understand that while her video was total happiness, mine was total sadness.  In Kat's video, she had an entire playlist because her storyline went in multiple directions, varying from happy to sad.  Auditory cues really help the audience keep track of the storyline and the sounds definitely tell the audience how they should be feeling.

However, Caitlin didn't really use many auditory cues in her video but she still got her point across.  I think this is because she still gave visual cues through dialogue.  Trying to tell a story without auditory or visual cues would be pretty hard to do.  Mike's video lacked dialogue but included music.  I think that without the music it would've been pretty hard to understand his video.  However, the dinosaur was engaging in activities that we have all experienced so the visual cues were pretty clear.  So, in my opinion, every film has to contain at least visual cues for the audience to understand what is going on; music mostly helps to "set the stage" by providing a mood/tone.

Around the World in 2000 Pictures

This is an interesting video I found by Alex Profit.  His video takes the viewer on a tour through Paris, Barcelona, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Shanghai, Tokyo, New York, and London.

Looking Back

The first half of the semester felt like a lot more reading and learning concepts such as time in relation to space and space in relation to time.  It seems as if our class also spent a lot of time learning how to understand a piece of art and to properly critique it.  The first two questions the class tackled were “What is art?” and “What is time?”.  These are two very important questions to ask an intro art class and the best part about them is that they are open-ended due to their philosophical nature.  The vast array of questions gets the class thinking, exploring different possibilities, almost training the brain to think more like an artist.  Most of the Intro to Visual Thinking course is about understanding what constitutes art and how to go about understanding and critiquing it.

In the first class of the semester we watched and discussed Kylie Minogue’s video by Michel Gondry for her song “Come Into My Wolrd”.  I really liked how he took the cyclical nature of the chorus in the song and visually represented it in such a creative way.  There was so much going on in that video yet the sense of time was not changing, just the events between each start point.  In the second class we watched Cibo Mato’s “Sugar Water” which was another music video by Michel Gondry.  I think that his artistic representation of time is awesome and original.  I personally like how he manipulates time to tell a story a certain way.  This brings me to “Momento” which is a movie that we watched in class.  This too had a unique timeline, making for a different and interesting story.  From the videos and the movie I have learned how to force my brain to view the concept of time in a different way and they have also taught me that time doesn’t need to be represented chronologically or linearly, that’s just the way the mind thinks.  I actually find it to be stimulating to think of time in a non-conventional way.

If I have learned anything from this class, it is how to represent sensory concepts such as time, motion, and sound in my artwork and the type of affect that can create.  Taking a look at Futurist paintings had really impressed upon me that it is possible to simulate motion even in paintings and drawings.  Comic books do the exact same thing.  I never knew the power of simple lines until I attended this class.  Something I truly enjoyed doing was practicing synesthesia.  Not only was it fun but I also felt more emotionally attached to my art by trying to recreate sound rather than motion and time.  This is probably due to the fact that in society today, we are used to constant, rapid movement—it doesn’t fascinate us as it did with the Futurists—instead we feel more of a connection and fascination with music and sound.  Perhaps that is because of the popularization of the iPod.  People are no longer looking up as they commute to and from wherever, but instead they are looking down, generally donning a pair of ubiquitous white headphones.  

So, to wrap this up, I think that the most valuable aspects of the class so far are:  learning that art and time have no true definitions, it is possible for motion, time, space, and sound to be visually represented, and that critique is necessary in art in order to improve upon your skills.  Therefore, presentation and discussion of artwork in class is an extremely important concept to force onto the class because it's the part about being an artist that is more of a challenge than one would think.

On a completely different topic:  our next project for class involves researching an artist for a research paper and presentation.  I have found three amazing artists that interest me a lot.

Jackson Pollock:  Inspired by Indian sand-painting, Mexican muralists, and Surrealist automatism, this abstract expressionist used action painting (coined later than his time) to create very unique works of art.  I like that every gesture on his canvas is a "liberation from value" (Harold Rosenburg).  I wonder if his excessive drinking is the reason that his paintings are so charged with energy.  This is a piece of his that I really enjoyed:

Piet Mondrian:  One of the forerunners of the De Stijl (Neo-Plasticism) movement, Piet managed to express the concept of harmony and order in abstract ways.  However, aside from his most popular work (pictured below) I also like some of his early work where he is inspired by cubism but is still using representation in his artwork.  As an additional note, I'm confused as to why he uses colors like red and yellow which signify anxiety to me when this piece is supposed to be representing harmony. 

Alexey Brodovitch:  A designer, photographer, and teacher of rebelling against convention and embracing the unknown.  He produced many successful artists.  His popularity came from the magazine Harper's Bazaar.  The works that I'm most interested by him though are his ballet pictures that he published.  He went against the documentary-style pictures of his time and kind of did his own thing.  I admire that.  I wonder if Brodovitch ever felt that his work was cheapened because of it being so commercial.  I think that I would definitely feel this way.  Maybe he enjoyed the mass exposure his artwork got.  This is one of his pictures from "Ballet":

Hopefully choosing an artist for my research project won't prove to be too difficult!

Public Art: Community and Politics

On Monday, February 21, 2011 at 4:40 pm, I attended at collaborative art lecture about how public art plays a huge role in community and politics.  The four panelists that spoke were Diana Boros from the Political Science Department, Lisa Scheer and Billy Friebele from the Art and Art History Department, and Katie Ganz from the Languages and Cultures Department.

Diana Boros discussed how politics is prevalent in public art.  She defined politics in this setting as a multitude of unwritten rules and interactions that affect the way people interact with the world around them.  Politics affects the public because it beautifies spaces, creating pride within the community, it is a direct political critique, inspiring protest, and it is a demonstration of new ideas a viewpoints, introducing new concepts to others to share. 

Lisa Scheer then discussed what makes public art public, sharing with us her various sculptures that she had been commissioned to make for the public.  To her, public art usually incorporates the environment and identity of the location as well as the people living in it, making this piece special to the locals who come to feel as if the artwork is also theirs.  Lisa personally adds abstraction to her work.  In her opinion, abstraction is evocative and has many meanings due to latent imagery (i.e. her sculpture outside of the New York courthouse that resembles a flaming torch but also has helping hands which were inspired by the aftermath of 9/11).  When viewing public art, Lisa states that the viewers are not the audience, but instead participants.

Billy Friebele went on to discuss his experiences as an artist, getting his audience to become participants, as Lisa had discussed.  He had his viewers explore the site itself as an artwork.  In doing this, the entire landscape becomes public art.  Another project he did was site-specific mapping in Washington D.C. which was projected onto a library wall.  This is a new age for public art because up until now, that wasn’t something that could be done.  Another interesting thing to note is that public art doesn’t have to just be outside anymore, it is virtual as well.  It truly is a new age for public art.

Katie Ganz brought a new perspective on public art by describing public art in Paris, France in the past and in the present.  She spoke about how Napoleon III hired Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann to put an end to Paris’s identity crisis and create a new sense of pride and community between citizens and government officials alike.  The Baron created new and efficient roadways with monuments at each end, creating a sense of symmetry the city had lacked beforehand.  He also made it so that treelines were even with the sight of a building, again adding that layer of symmetry.  Because he increased the aesthetic beauty of Paris, he relinquished some of the unrest that the city was experiencing at the time period.  Fast forward to now:  direct political critique is rampant in Paris.  There artists have placed all kinds of statements on these 19th Century monuments.  One of the more popular ones that people really enjoy interacting with is the invader art (pictured below).  However, there are more radically political statements seen around the city such as "Je ne veux plus [I don't want any more of...]" which are little pieces of paper in which people write what they don't want any more of in the city.  Also, artists in this day and age do not put their art up in the air but closer to the ground because this is where the modern day viewer is looking.  In these ways, Paris's art is extremely participatory.

After this lecture, I found myself wondering if my art that I consider to be public is interactive.  I made a postcard for class which in its own way is public art because it isn't meant to be hung on a wall or plopped in the middle of a room.  My postcard is meant to be something plain on the outside, but as you open it up (in an unconventional manner) you are forced to view each part of the picture separately.  Also, the motion of opening this card is meant to emulate wind because my card is about how windy it is at St. Mary's. Although the visual aspect of my card didn't come out as nicely as I would have liked it to, the concept still made sense and it still forces the viewer to participate in my work of art.  Going to this art lecture has given me some more ideas about how to present my artwork next time and it has given me a much better perspective on public art.