Matthew Sleeth

Red China

 

Feet, 2003

Breakdown

Final video piece for digital audio/video project

An exploration of social pressures and expectation, freedom and self realisation.

Special thanks to Kate Haysom and my other helpers/support!

audio track by Frou Frou

Hans Bellmer

Totally creepy, intriguing, and in a way really beautiful in form and composition. The black and white is really effective - and the dolls themselves of course are sculpturally magnificent - Though subject matter is quite confronting, there's a lovely level of abstracted form in these images, and I understand why Bellmer chose to photograph his dolls rather than just present them as sculpture - the flattening and earie stillness is really what drives these shots for me.

Shaun Gladwell

Just went to see Shaun Gladwell's exhibition at ACMI - loved it to pieces, the common thread which tied all the works together was really simple and consistent - basically a recurring theme of reflection and duality, parallels and pairs etc. Though his works are standalone brilliant, the show also made me aware of how important presentation is in video art: in presenting his dual videos in pairs, one on each wall facing each other, the viewer had to choose which to look at, and couldn't view them both side by side, which was interesting in inviting audience participation on some level, though also keeping control.

Chunky Move 'Connected'

 

Another video documentation of a performance/installation, but with stand-alone artistic power. Would have loved to have seen Chunky Move's latest show 'Connected' but missed it - luckily I think this video and many others do the brilliant performance justice! I'm interested in working with film, the body and sculpture in a multi-media/video piece for DIS2601. Perhaps using elastic and extreme close ups on skin.

Ronic Baranga

 Fascinating, and a little irksome...

Her Morning Elegance

Bill Henson

First of all, I want his studio! It's amazing!
Secondly, I think Henson is probably one of my favourite studio photographers. As much as I obsess over photographing the stranger in his real environment, I definitely see the advantages of controlling your own lighting, models and having unlimited time to shoot over and over again til it's perfect. Although Henson's images are heavily fantastical and unreal, I think the subjects themselves look very pure and untouched. So the studio conditions are not effecting the 'realness' of the end result. I would like to play around with light and background a bit more and so a studio shoot might be on the cards next semester.

Pipilotti Rist

Interior Space at MoMA designed by the wonderful Miss Rist: Architectural space turned organic animal body. I'm sure photos do it no justice but the idea is beautiful.

"The deliciously named Swiss miss Pipilotti Rist, who for two decades has been ravishing viewers with her fiesta-colored video visions, has risen to new heights of trippy bliss. Her opulently beautiful 25-by-200-foot wraparound video at MoMA—complete with two round breast-shaped projector pods protruding from the walls and close-ups of pink tulips, a black pig, and a fleshy nude—is catnip for the eye and a hormonal rush for an institution badly in need of one. It is one of the most seductively rebellious artistic gestures since Lynda Benglis’s notorious Artforum ad in 1974, for which she posed naked wielding a dildo. Benglis’s action slapped a biased art world awake; Rist’s Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters) suspends us in a primordial sea of liquids, and performs a metaphysical sex change on the Museum of Modern Art. The atrium of this bastion of masculinism becomes a womb, and the museum itself a woman. In an abstract way, Rist makes the institution ovulate."

 

Another installation by Rist - similar relationship between building and body. I love this!

Patricia Piccinini

 

Patricia Piccinini, Still Life with Stem Cells

Piccinini's irksome sculptures are subtly confronting/disgusting, but also endearing. They are very textural, and make the viewer want to reach out an touch them. This makes it easier for the viewer to connect with the artwork, but a division is maintained between object and subject thanks to the creepy feeling the bodily forms evoke. While they are human, and pathetic, they are also unknown entities and retain potential to disgust.

It is this disgust that I am aiming to achieve in my panorama project. An everyday activity like eating, which should evoke empathy and understanding from a human audience, suddenly becomes disgusting on a large, close-up  scale and difficult to connect with. It is this dilemma which intrigues me and which I wish to create.

The Body

In theory we've been discussing 'The Body' in relation to Eva Hesse's modernist sculptures, and how images which directly or indirectly reference skin, muscle, organs etc often make a very direct emotional connection with the viewer. While critics such as Michael Fried criticize Hesse's work because the impact of such purely physical, gory images makes them feel uncomfortable, it is obvious that references to the human body are powerful and perhaps even more so on a massive photographic scale.