PROMPT 2

It’s really interesting how Susan started with the quote of Wittgenstein “Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses with additions from various periods, and this surrounded by a multitude of new borough with straights regular streets and uniform house”. With my experience in linguistics, I realized that all languages have histories in terms of word appropriation and orthographic establishment (standardization). We speak language alright yet when we get to know the histories associated with it and how certain words were borrowed from other culture; it sort of adds some aesthetics to the language. Cities often give people a sense of nostalgia. Places where we used to have fun or enjoy, nolens volens gets transformed into something else. When we see such spaces, they remind us of the original space.

She added, “the suburbs present us with a negation of present; a landscape consumed by its past and its future” ( Page 1) I’m trying to how synchronize the elements of the street with art since these elements for instances signs and symbols make one realize themselves of their presence within that space. I think this also occurs to the reader of art in an exhibition space, especially when she said “The reader becomes a character, a figure who looks for signs or clues-not a reader of signs and clues that fit together into a moral puzzle solved through the eschatology of closure but a reader of signs for their own sake, a reader of correspondence between the signs of the world, the immediate environment of everyday life, and the signs of the novel” (page 4) 

Pompt 2

In architecture, scale is something we always deal with, and manipulate.  I deal with primarily ten to the second, or third.  Scaling a large object down to a miniature helps us understand it relevance to time, and space.  Here are two of my works that are meant to view as if you were zoomed out at ten to the 2nd, or 3rd.

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Pulse Corniche

View video here

Pulse Corniche was an interactive canopy of powerful light beams projected into to the sky by robotic searchlights whose brightness and orientation was controlled by the heart-rate of visitors to the Abu Dhabi’s Corniche. People were free to participate by holding a sensor placed in the centre of the plaza that converted the electrical activity of their heart into a unique lighting sequence. The intensity and direction of the lights visualized the different biometric rhythms of each participant, in an urban scale, transforming the public space into a fleeting architecture of light and movement. When no one was participating, the matrix of lights showed the heart beat recordings of the last 5 people who tried the interface.

Despite the monumental size of the installation and its wide visibility, the project was not intended as a cathartic pre-programmed spectacle like a fireworks display or a son-et-lumière show. On the contrary, the piece was designed to attract constant, personal participation to create an immersive, intimate experience of glimmering light inside the plaza itself.

Pulse Corniche was inspired by Roberto Gavaldón's film "Macario" (Mexico, 1960) in which the protagonist has a hunger-induced hallucination wherein all individuals are represented by flickering candles in a cave. Pulse Corniche is part of a series of biometric artworks that Lozano-Hemmer debuted in 2006 with his installation "Pulse Room."

Casagrande, Poetry Bombing

Video here article here

Pioggia di poesie took place over Milano on Saturday 26th September 2015 at 7.15pm. One hundred thousand poems printed on bookmarks by 80 contemporary poets from Chile and Italy fell from a helicopter over Piazza de Duomo as the sun sets.

Its has been supported by the Chilean Pavillion Expo-Milan, Imagen de Chile, the Embassy of Chile in Italy and the City of Milan.

Performance created by Casagrande, sees poems dropped over cities bombed during military confrontations in the past. The bookmarks are released at twilight and printed in two languages with texts written by both Chilean writers andpoets native to hosted city. It has been held in London, United Kingdom (2012), Berlin, Germany (2010), Warsaw, Poland (2009), Guernica, Spain (2004), Dubrovnik, Croatia (2002), and Santiago, Chile (2001). Milam is the seventh city to host Bombing of Poems.

This performance creates an alternative image of the past and is a gesture of remembrance as well as being a metaphor for the survival of cities and people.

More info: loscasagrande.org/
Music by Los Muebles: losmuebles.cl

Superstudio, Supersurface

Superstudio, Supersurface: An Alternative 
Model for Life on Earth here

Kara Walker: "A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby" | Art21 "Extended Play"

Kara Walker here

Superflex, Flooded McDonalds,2009

Superflex video here

Flooded McDonald's is a short film work in which a convincing life-size replica of a McDonald's burger bar gradually floods with water. Furniture is lifted up by the water, trays of food and drinks start to float around, electrics short circuit and eventually the space is completely submerged. The film is devoid of exaggerated disaster-film drama and intentionally resists categorisation as a documentary or as an art film. Flooded McDonald's hints at the consumer-driven power and influence and impotence of large multinational companies in the face of climate change, questioning with whom ultimate responsibility lies. Flooded McDonalds was first exhibited at South London Gallery in 2009.

Extract from The South London Gallery press release:

 The South London Gallery presents a new film work by Danish collective SUPERFLEX entitled Flooded McDonald's. Despite their international track record over the past 15 years, this will be their first solo show in London. From large-scale installations, through to long-term process-based projects and, more recently, films, SUPERFLEX's work is founded in economic and political awareness. They create works inspired by the points where definitions and possibilities of art become blurred. Flooded McDonald's is a new film work in which a convincing life-size replica of the interior of a McDonalds burger bar, without any customers or staff present, gradually floods with water. Furniture is lifted up by the water, trays of food and drinks start to float around, electrics short circuit and eventually the space becomes completely submerged.

Flooded McDonald's is SUPERFLEX's second film, the first, entitled Burning Car, 2008, made in the wake of the civil unrest in Paris and Copenhagen in 2007, shows a dead-pan observation of a car going up in flames. Both films avoid the high drama of disaster movies, but never quite echo a documentary style, making their position within established frameworks of cinematic genres or of artists' films intentionally ambiguous. Without being didactic, Flooded McDonald's hints at the consumer-driven power and influence, but also impotence, of large multinationals in the face of climate change. Without pointing the finger at anyone, the film questions with whom ultimate responsibility lies.

Flooded McDonald's is a film by SUPERFLEX.

Produced by Propeller Group (Ho Chi Minh City) in association with Matching Studio (Bangkok) and co-produced by South London Gallery (London), Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, (Humlebæk, Denmark) and Oriel Mostyn Gallery (Llandudno, Wales) with support from the Danish Film Institute.

The exhibition is supported by the Danish Arts Council's Committee for International Visual Art.

Gelitin, Rabbit, 2005

Rabbit read about project here

#2

Explain how narrative (as discussed/defined in the reading) is apparent or identifiable in your actual work.

“The concept of ‘conversation’, telling jokes and joking, and constructing narratives of personal experience, ” such as Susan Stewart notes, is a significant part of my work. In large, I would not be able to have vulnerable conversations to create relationships in a community, without being able to relate to shared narratives. Ultimately, that is what I aim to highlight through photography, and video by capturing these delicate interviews of gender non-conforming individuals. To place importance towards these people’s narrative, I spend an hour before picking up a camera to talk and give mental/ emotional space to the struggles that surround being who you are versus who you are perceived in society. Asking questions to understand a person’s history is more important than the end result, it is the process of discovering narrative and how it relates to my own narrative. Which in turn helps me learn to be more vulnerable, and to make more meaningful art through that process.

Review the two videos discussing Powers of 10 listed on blog. Consider scale and Powers of 10 thinking as it relates to your own art production and methodology. What realms of Powers of 10 do you utilize most in your work? Offer upload images of actual works you have produced.

10 -1 to 10 -5 

I work with humans and myself, at a mostly surface level, but also internally to understand the external. Through the powers of ten everyone looks the same on the inside, the deeper you proceed under a scope, and I think that is relevant to some of the conceptual ideas I have, as well. As Susan Stewart mentions "the invention of a microscope, the mechanical eye can detect significant in a World the human eye is blind to, from exterior to interior."

India-Prompt1

Prompt 1

The Narrative of the piece that I am currently working on has a dichotomy like the cartoon characters, and paintings in The Darker Side of Playland.    The architectural form is at a miniature scale with images of animals incorporated. It looks child like, and inviting. However at a closer look, you realize that the animals on the clock form are all extinct.  The other animals are in a viewing cage, and are endangered in going extinct.  The narrative of this piece highlights a dark side of man, and his impact on animals. It make me think of a quote in The Darker Side of Playland, “The works in this exhibition present the complexities of a child’s experiences in the world created for them by adults.”

Palimpsists

Palimpsists

Noise, Idaho is a sound project I've been doing for a while.  I put out one album a year on the day James Dean died.

Ann Hamilton: "the event of a thread" | Art21 "Extended Play"

Ann Hamilton Gives Voice to Charleston's Invisible History video here



Ann Hamilton: "the event of a thread" | Art21 "Extended Play" here

Charles LeDray The Power of Tiny at the ICA

Charles LeDray, MENS SUITS (installation view), 2009. 
(Courtesy of the artist and Sperone Westwater, New York.)

by Andrea Shea, July 16th, 2010

Miniatures have mesmerized us for centuries. Doll houses, ship models, Matchbox Cars, toy dogs, Mini Coopers, nanotechnology.

But why do we love these tiny little things?

Full article here

Dario Robleto - the Prelives of the Blues

Dario Robleto video here article here

Dario Robleto reinterprets the meaning of rock, tonight at NOMA

Doug MacCash, NOLA.com | Times-Picayune

 

MAR 24, 2012 

The "Dario Robleto: The Prelives of the Blues" exhibit that opens at The New Orleans Museum of Art... is like a cross between The Da Vinci Code and The Rock N Roll Hall of Fame. Robleto, a brainy Texas-based conceptual artist, embeds his sculptures with buried symbolic clues so obscure that there's no way we'd figure things out without being tipped off.

How could you possibly know that the authentic male and female pelvises in the show were sculpted from pulverized rock n roll record albums, thereby implying the importance of pop music in romance?

How could you possibly know that the silvery drumstick was fashioned from glass produced during atomic bomb tests, thereby symbolizing the brief, explosive life of rocker Keith Moon?

How could you know that the black thread on the spools in the canning jars was really stretched-out audio tape recordings of minor chords, meant to capture a sublime sense of melancholy?

How could you know that those tiny pink seashells had been exposed to hours and hours of Muddy Waters music, meant to … , well, truth is, I forgot to ask Robleto exactly how the delta blues and the seashells add up.

Here come the details.

The “Dario Robleto: The Prelives of the Blues,” an exhibit of music-inspired works by the San Antonio-born conceptual artist opens with a “Where Y’Art” reception from 5 to 9 Friday at The New Orleans Museum of Art, 1 Collins Diboll Circle, in City Park...

Wafaa Bilal - The Ashes Series

Video here and here

David Winton Bell Gallery
5 April - 26 May, 2013

The Ashes Series marks a shift in the platform of Iraqi-American artist Wafaa Bilal. Known for provocative, performative, and innovative artwork often using technology and new media, Bilal has cultivated an aesthetic of conflict, tension, and direct confrontation with the social, political, and ethical dynamics of the modern world. In contrast, the photographs in The Ashes Series are still - almost serene. The exhibition, curated by Ian Alden Russell, is the premier of the complete The Ashes Series - ten photographs of models constructed by the artist based on mass-syndicated images of the destruction of Iraq in the aftermath of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Quiet scenes of a chair persistently standing amidst the rubble, Saddam Hussein's unmade bed, or a lone hospital bed pillow left behind testify to the external violence that literally ripped these spaces open to the public's gaze. In all the photographs, he has removed the human figures that were present in the original images, replacing them with 21 grams of human ashes distributed throughout the ten models. Referencing the mythical weight of the human soul, these 21 grams insert a human aura into the photographs, troubling the serenity of the scenes - the afterimage of conflict. The proverbial dust, captured suspended in mid-air by the camera, will never settle.

Levi van Veluw

Levi van Veluw, Landscape video, 2008. Video here



Robert Wilson, Voom Portrait William Pope.l video here

Narrative and Scale

I've talked a little bit about the relativity of scale in my own work while sharing the Florida coast mapping and its relationship to my exploratory thesis collages. The collages deconstruct an existing photographic image into an operative surface rather than an object. This new surface hopes to investigate basic structure and measure that might inform occupiablility. Scale can be entirely arbitrary. The collages that investigate surface are entirely augmented when inserted into the Florida mapping. Understanding their scale is only possible relative to their context. 

Excerpt from Towards Immeasurability of Art and Life by Miya Yoshida:


Unit Situational: Institutionalizing Measurement - The unit situational visually presents how the notion of measurement can be expanded - and how it can shift the location of accuracy. It proposes re-imagining measurement, and represents a counter-approach to the rigidity previously asserted; it gives more space to the concept of unit as well as to that of numbers in order to show the various possible dimensions of measurement. Situations make the concept!" [PG 71]

I just showed my undergraduate Design 1 students the Powers of 10 video to help understand fundamental field making in architecture. They just started a project called Matrix that investigates the relationship of edges and field conditions outside of the objects they make. The thing they are making is an interpretation of the geometry that starts to shape the stretch of campus between the Fine Arts building and Library West. These collages focus less of the object and more on systems of measurement, hard edge versus soft edge, height, width and registration. The idea is that these studies exist as part of larger (ultimately infinite) fabric of systems. This analysis operates in a similar way to language. The three major components of language are form, content, and use. Form involves three sub-components of syntax, morphology, and phonology. Narrative can exist in infinite variations, but the components that build it are always the same. 

[2][3][4] [Richard Serra]

“Before, there was no way of discerning where anything was in relation to 

where you were, because you had no point of reference. What that piece 

does is give you a point of reference in relationship to a line, and your 

upstanding relationship to a vertical plane, and infinity, and a personal 

relationship to a context." 

[Richard Serra in an interview with Sholto Byrnes for the Independent] 

This quote from Richard Serra ties back into Stewart's On Longing. [PG 71] "The gigantic becomes an explanation for the environment, a figure on the interface between the natural and the human." This chapter talks a great deal about understanding the gigantic through (human mark on) landscape (more specifically sky). I'm curious to discuss Stewart's ideas on literal versus figurative distance between subject and audience. 

PROMPT 1

With previous work which explored landscape, I'm interested in how Susan's discussion of nostalgia relates to that. “Narrative is ideological both in its unsaid quality and in the fact that its descriptive power lies in its ability to make visible, to shape the way we perceive our relation to that landscape” (Susan Stewart, 1993) In some years ago, my mum used to prepare snail soup to welcome her old friends and family. Snail has always been expensive because of its nutritional facts and health benefits so she loved it. After she picks the meat from the shells, she then throws them away. This had kept on happening for several years even before I went to art school. It then happened again and it put a question into my mind, what is my role as an artist to transform these shells that are thrown away?

I began to analyze how the snail soup is made to serve visitors and how it gives them a sense of pleasure. I started thinking about spectators as visitors and that they could also have the same pleasure if I create art out of these shells. Uncontrollably obsessed with exhibition at that time, I was imagining an art exhibition space as a place where people have pleasure, a place where all fantasies, heart desire or dreams could be displayed. I started collecting more of the shells from market places, sometimes my friends would escort me, mostly my friend Alvin who is currently at Yale University. This was the time that I was getting rid of painting in my artistic practice, even though my background in painting hasn't fully gotten out of my entire. With a strong interest in landscape, I began to use shells which I painted to suggest a sense of transformation, thus a kind of new life given to them. As a painter color was the ultimate medium to immortalize the shells.

In final year, first semester as an undergraduate student, I got an email in one evening, reading that I have been invited to participate in a group exhibition with artists such as Ibrahim Mahama, Benard Akoi Jackson and Jeremiah Quarshie. I was so excited to see how the shells would be viewed in the exhibition space. I told my mum that I would want to take a palm tree to the exhibition space. She laughed and asked how possible that was going to happen. I told her to help me. She hired some strong men to uproot a palm tree for me. After that show, the same palm tree was taken the Museum of Science and Technology, Accra

This work allows me to think about nostalgia in terms of revisiting those experiences that inspired me to work with the shells which gave me an opportunity to introduce me into art exhibition. In Susan Steward talks about Nostalgia as a "desire for desire". I have come to understand that nostalgia could also be a bad experience, a feeling of pain due to loss but also with a longing or desire that such loss particularly a person could come back. I thought that my mum would feel disappointed in me when I stopped painting but she never did.  

There were also some other old materials and various household objects that my mother never wanted to throw away, with belief that they could be used some day in the future. In our house storage room were two old refrigerators within which my mum used to keep old materials. When I began to work with the fridge, I reflected back to that experience by trying to navigate the difference between what she was doing and what I'm doing now. It then occurred to my mind that it is a matter of realizing myself as an artist and how an artist could decide if something is art. This motivated me to collect all kinds of objects and exhibit them in the fridge.

"Memory, at once impoverished and enriched, presents itself as a device for measurement, the ruler of narrative" (Stewart, pg 24)

Below are the types of fridges that were kept in the store room, that were taking a new role different from the original role of a fridge. 

MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES:

BY JENNIFER BAICHWAL

More here

Film Trailer here

Manufactured Landscapes is a feature length documentary on the world and work of renowned artist Edward Burtynsky. Burtynsky makes large-scale photographs of 'manufactured landscapes' – quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines, dams. He photographs civilization's materials and debris, but in a way people describe as "stunning" or "beautiful," and so raises all kinds of questions about ethics and aesthetics without trying to easily answer them.

The film follows Burtynsky to China as he travels the country photographing the evidence and effects of that country's massive industrial revolution. Sites such as the Three Gorges Dam, which is bigger by 50% than any other dam in the world and displaced over a million people, factory floors over a kilometre long, and the breathtaking scale of Shanghai's urban renewal are subjects for his lens and our motion picture camera.

Shot in Super-16mm film, Manufactured Landscapes extends the narrative streams of Burtynsky's photographs, allowing us to meditate on our profound impact on the planet and witness both the epicentres of industrial endeavour and the dumping grounds of its waste. What makes the photographs so powerful is his refusal in them to be didactic. We are all implicated here, they tell us: there are no easy answers. The film continues this approach of presenting complexity, without trying to reach simplistic judgements or reductive resolutions. In the process, it tries to shift our consciousness about the world and the way we live in it.

Feature Documentary
2006
Canada
90 minutes

Koyaanisqatsi

Film here

"An unconventional work in every way, Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi was nevertheless a sensation when it was released in 1983. This first work of The Qatsi Trilogy wordlessly surveys the rapidly changing environments of the Northern Hemisphere, in an astonishing collage created by the director, cinematographer Ron Fricke, and composer Philip Glass. It shuttles viewers from one jaw-dropping vision to the next, moving from images of untouched nature to others depicting human beings’ increasing dependence on technology Koyaanisqatsi’s heterodox methods (including hypnotic time-lapse photography) make it a look at our world from a truly unique angle."

-Criterion Collection 

The Art of Chess

Exhibition here

Weather Report: Forecasting Future – The Nordic Pavilion, at the 2019 58th Venice Art Biennale

At the Venice Art Biennale 2019, the Nordic Pavilion presents the exhibition Weather Report: Forecasting Future. Curated by Leevi Haapala and Piia Oksanen and featuring site-specific works by Finnish duo nabbteeri, Norwegian Ane Graff and Swedish Ingela Ihrman, the exhibition investigates the relations between the human and nonhuman in an age when climate change and mass extinctions are threatening the future of life on Earth. By combining visual art with humanities and natural sciences, Weather Report: Forecasting Future provides a many-fold picture of how humans can renegotiate their relations with the environment and with other life forms. 

For more click here

“It is often difficult for humans to notice life forms that exist on a scale different from theirs, such as microscopic organisms, the slow workings of toxic agents, or durational processes of decaying organic matter. By heightening the visitors’ awareness of the materiality of the space and the artworks, and by assimilating their bodies to other life forms, the exhibition attempts to establish a connection with more-than-human agencies. The biennial gardens are bordered by the Venetian Lagoon, a tourist-infested city, and hubs of mainland industry, all spurring contemplation of the eco-crisis, the erosion caused by centuries of mass tourism, and the survival prospects of marine species native to the lagoon, which compete for space with massive cruise ships. The pavilion itself is susceptible to exterior conditions. Occasional high tides and changes in the weather expose the exhibition to unpredictable forces.”

Tomás Saraceno - Arachnophilia

View Arachnophilia info here

“Forget about spider man and his meek two-dimensional webs! Even though spider webs have been around for at least 140 million years, we have never managed to preserve, measure and display their webs in a three dimensional form. Tomás Saraceno has opened our eyes to the intricate geometry of spider webs with his newly invented scanning instrument that digitized for the first time a three-dimensional web. In fact, there is no single museum in the world with a collection of this kind. His spider web sculptures are a breakthrough in both science and art, and thanks to his methods and technique he has enabled much needed comparative studies in mathematics, engineering and arachnology, opening new fields of studies.”

(Peter Jäger, Head of Arachnology, Senckenberg Research Institute, 

Frankfurt am Main, and co-author of the World Spider Catalog, 2015)

Creativity and Scale

Narrative as story telling plays a part in my small collages.  Often there is a figure, and they are in a place with some objects and there are words that contextualize the emotion or the situation.  Narrative with my bigger works is within process which is what Stewart is talking about on page 56 when she says, “The toy is the physical embodiment of the fiction: it is a device for fantasy, a point of beginning for narrative.”  Beginning with material or an idea and building on that, trying new things, and making new decisions.

 I went through a lot of different ideas of artists who start with a material and build onto it but ended up posting this trailer for the Science of Sleep which uses dreams to explore creativity within a film.

My large work can be viewed from 10 to the 0, the small collages are mostly 10 to the -1, but some collages can be within the 10 to the -2 scale, the size of a pinky nail.  I think about condensing a lot, and I think about relativity of sizes.  Mostly I work small because the material I cut comes from small sources.  If I have an interesting scrap of paper that I want to accent in a piece, I will make the piece a size that is conducive to that so the other elements don’t take away from it.

In this piece “Car” 2019 (Oil and paper on wood), the art it its entirety is 4’ by 4’ but the collage itself is less than 1” by 1”, playing with scale and breaking the elements down to the essentials.  I had the blue car and I wanted it to prevail over the collage and be noticeable among other collages.  It was a challenge because of the size of it.

Also, I just found this picture of me making collages.  It was at the very beginning - maybe my first 10 collages.  This seems to be a good example of how the concept of scale gets warped in my practice.