siology:
...food for (lack of) thought
Note to PHO2008 & DIS2601
siology is a collection of thoughts, inspirations and creative processes which have contributed to my practice in first, second, and now third year studying photomedia and art.
Thursday 23 August 2012
Monday 13 August 2012
Studio as canvas
Sculptural working space, acknowledge the space, the bricks, gas pipe, air vents, floor, ceiling... Paint a line on the wall, a big black line that continues onto the floor
Monday 23 July 2012
Semester 2 Mock grant application
Aaaand I'm back! Kick-starting semester 2 with a mock grant application for overseas artist residency
Project description (limit 250 words):
As a part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival 2012, I've been collaborating
with a group of young Melbournian artists on an exhibition and performance
piece called 'Foreplay', which explores Melbourne's sex industry and the public
perception of sex work. I am currently creating a video piece which uses
documented interviews about privacy, intimacy, sex and the body with a variety
of people, and disrupts these themes through a use of audio dubbing, unexpected
video overlays and erratic cuts to the footage. Research into global sex trade
laws has inspired me to compare Australia's sexual culture with that of Asian
red-light districts, which are far less regulated than our own. In particular,
I've taken an interest in Bangkok's Soi Cowboy district, where I intend to
create a photographic sister work to 'Foreplay'. It's essential that the
artwork does not become an oversimplified shock-tactic that exploits
contentious sexual practice; this work will investigate intimacy and
experience, and use sex as a platform for realising another idea of absence,
and the empty spaces left over after an event has occurred. A residency in
Bangkok, Thailand, will allow me to photograph these vacant spaces in Soi
Cowboy, from outside of the usual context in which they are experienced. The
neatly folded bedsheets of a dodgy Thai hotel room, for example, or a bar
frequented by sex workers fully lit by fluorescent lighting. The final work
will combine moving and still images, which question, with subtlety and humility,
viewer assumptions, voyeuristic art and sexual clichés.
Sunday 3 June 2012
Artist Statement: Empty Shells
Empty Shells began as a personal revisiting of my suburban
childhood homes. Though the buildings stirred homesickness in me, I ultimately
came to see them as empty vessels – houses as apposed to homes.
This work picks apart the
tangible from the intangible. It aims to separate the art object itself from
the projected sentiments of a subjective viewer. This separation is an
uncomfortable one, as it questions the connections between reality,
representation and interpretation.
I criticize the high art
aura with deliberate hypocrisy - elevating meaningless photographs on white
walls and plinths. It is important that this dialogue comes from within a
self-referent medium, and that irony, self-awareness and satire come into play.
In many ways, Empty
Shells is a sculptural piece. Subject matter has taken a back seat, and I
have become less concerned with the content of the photograph and more
preoccupied with the physicality of the prints, books, shelves and wall space.
The still-life shell has
come to stand for all objects that are, in themselves, devoid of intellect,
consciousness or emotion. A deeply formal approach to presentation aligns with
my fascination with the way the walls, bricks and beams of a house can somehow
hold emotional significance for a person.
I believe this ‘meaning’ is projected, and often
imagined. It does not come from within the house, object or artwork. Without
the viewer, a photograph is reduced to ink on paper, an art object, and nothing
more – just as a falling tree makes no sound in an empty forest.
Monday 14 May 2012
Installation
The books are hardcover, are stacked neatly on white
shelves. The prints are large and neatly hung, because for some absurd reason
art is only taken seriously once it has been elevated on a plinth.
Sunday 6 May 2012
Final image
As discussed, the final page of my book will be a disruptive image which is a little obscured from the other images but still fits the overall concept of an empty shell. I've scoured the suburbs for 'the house', and this is it. At first I thought the graffiti, fencing and general tumbledownness of the house may be a problem, as I was originally intending to make a critique of the 'perfect' american dream style suburban home which is essentially soulless, despite its material charms. However I took a good look at the other images, especially the eggs, in my book. I realised they are not just fragile and empty, but also literally broken. So i felt the house I chose for the final image should also have an element of broken physicality about it, while still remotely resembling something that used to be whole and 'perfect'.
Assorted Empty Shells: The book!
I've finished and ordered 4 identical copies of my book!! The first draft was delivered a week ago and I was mostly happy with it, but decided it was a bit magaziney so I've chosen to print the final 4 with hardcovers and with the title on the spine as well as the front. Minimal adjustments were made to the pictures themselves, and mostly because the JPG file format (required by blurb.com - annoying) flattened a lot of the brighter colours and the paper darkened some images too much. Fingers crossed the edited books will fix these problems - we'll find out in 2 weeks when they arrive!!
Monday 30 April 2012
Houses and Homes
I've been hunting for that single, disrupting image to put at the end of the book, as an ode to Ruscha's glass of milk and also as a tool for altering natural viewing habits and for shock factor/confusion. Looking back on where this project started, at the shells of homes I lived in as a child, I feel a photograph of a house, a simple, physical building, would be appropriate. It is catagorically unrelated to the shells so will seem random and thus be effective as a shock, but also has conceptual integrity for what I'm looking at in terms of meaning, if you can call it that, and so it's not a cheap trick or rip off. I hope.
I'm going to take this photo right now, today. The house will have to be right but I hope, as with the rest of the book, the subject itself it less important than its place within the entire book. More importantly, how do I take the photo? The Bechers instantly come to mind.
Funnily enough, the Becher's also made books!
I'm going to take this photo right now, today. The house will have to be right but I hope, as with the rest of the book, the subject itself it less important than its place within the entire book. More importantly, how do I take the photo? The Bechers instantly come to mind.
it looks like a house. just a house, not a home. love that indexical, straight shot. |
Ed Ruscha: interview
"It was a big soup of influence,’ Ruscha says. 'I found myself being influenced by everything: things I liked and things I didn’t like; even the half-way stuff pushed me along." - Ruscha, Telegraph
NOTE for artist statement.
I criticize
the high art aura with deliberate hypocrisy, elevating meaningless photographs
on white walls and plinths. It is important that this dialogue comes from
within a self-referent medium, and that irony, self-awareness and satire come
into play.
The
ideologies of Ed Ruscha, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin and Marcel Duchamp
have fuelled this approach, and are deliberately referenced in the final work
- for example the final page of my book mimics the milk in Ruscha's Various
Small Fires.
Sculptural elements
Question. The wall arrangement will be 'random', staggered, and varied in size, style, etc. These elements, when concerned with photography, are two-dimensional. Will there be a third dimension?
- shadow boxes
- thick mounting
- prints displayed flat on the floor
- actual sculptural elements ie mandarine peel sitting on the floor
- shelves?
- the stack of books
- attachment/hanging techniques such as pins, thick double sided tape...
Space - Wall arrangement
I've been fiddling with composition, image selection, size, arrangement of final gallery presentation etc on the computer, and it's been really difficult to imagine the actual spacial relationships without having real prints to play with. So the next step will be printing, and then hanging, either at a mock up size or real size. So far Adobe illustrator has helped with image selection, a little arranging, and that's about it.
POTENTIAL ARRANGEMENT |
Monday 23 April 2012
Monday 16 April 2012
Cover and Typology
Ruscha was fascinated by the actual physical form of text on a page, hence his obsession with signs and lettering. The books he published all had simple, factual tities, but the words were also selected by Ruscha because he liked them as words in themselves - for example he really liked the word gasoline and that inspired his series of gasoline stations. I am drawn to the word 'empty', and I also feel it's a meaningful part of my work with shells. I also like the word 'assorted', and I feel the subject matter and photos I'm presenting are assorted - not 'collected' or 'various'. I could have used a number, like 'nineteen', but I think this is too harsh and also too close to Ruscha's books.
Labels:
book,
cover,
egg shells,
empty,
text,
title,
typography
Friday 13 April 2012
Other Shells
Subject matter and image selection tends toward the
uncanny, and has been useful in disrupting tendencies toward a narrative or
index; however it does not lead the work.
Labels:
chocolate,
egg shells,
glass,
household,
peel,
photography,
shells,
still life
Monday 2 April 2012
Avoiding Narrative
There will always be a 'risk' (not always a bad risk) in presenting an unexplained body of work to an uninformed viewer, who will undoubtedly form their own assumptions about such an obscure series. Some of these assumptions may involve an unintended narrative, or a sense of some deeper meaning which the artists did not specifically set out to explore.
I can help obscure this tendency by taking a leaf out of Ruscha's book - and including seemingly irrelevant photographs which have nothing to do with an eggshell, randomly scattered throughout the series. For example, a glass of milk at the end of a photobook of fire photographs or a broken glass in a book of swimming pool photos.
I can help obscure this tendency by taking a leaf out of Ruscha's book - and including seemingly irrelevant photographs which have nothing to do with an eggshell, randomly scattered throughout the series. For example, a glass of milk at the end of a photobook of fire photographs or a broken glass in a book of swimming pool photos.
Labels:
book,
egg shells,
fire,
milk,
obscurity,
photography,
random,
ruscha,
snapshot
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