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

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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. 

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“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.