3 posts tagged “photography”
Originally published at file under "Miscellanea". You can comment here or there.
(Note: This post is part of a series I am doing on my progress through Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way with a cadre of creative ladies. More info about this venture can be found in an earlier post and all of my related posts are under
one category.)
As I'm reading through each chapter, I take little notes in my composition book. Reviewing those notes as I do my weekly check-in, it's interesting to see what I find worth jotting down and how if plays out during my week, if at all. This week, my first note is from page 61 of my book:
Anger is a map. Anger shows us what our boundaries are.
I know I initially jotted this down because my mum talked a lot about the value of knowing your own boundaries, but in retrospect, this should have been a red flag: The whole first section of week three is about anger. While I am grateful for everything I've experienced and explored this week, I wasn't comfortable sharing a lot of it publicly nor would all of it had made sense without an extensive personal history.
What was most interesting during this process was revisiting emotional and explosive moments in this heightened creative state brought about by having my own studio, hanging my art on a gallery wall, and going through The Artist's Way with my cluster. While we often attribute creative endeavors and accomplishments a kind of head-in-the-clouds quality, I found that those things were instead quite grounding as I did this week's tasks and exercises. I started thinking less about the specifics of my life in some instances and more about the underlying themes--moments of bliss in hours of darkness and how to take that joy and do something productive with it, what is secret versus what is shown--and ways to interpret those experiences creatively. In discussing my house sculpture at the gallery opening, I realized these were some of the things I was thinking through, but I would like to do so in a way that retains its personal resonance while being more universal. Exploring the themes rather than directly mining personal history.
Some of week three's exercises/tasks follow, but I'll try to share more of week four's work:
Detective work, an exercise
- The best movie I ever saw as a kid was either The Last Unicorn or The Neverending Story. The former probably gave me unnaturally mature ideas about the nature of regret and life experience, the latter's special effects probably don't hold up today, but really transported me to a different place back in the '80s.
- If I could lighten up a little, I'd let myself take Polka or Bollywood dancing classes.
- If it didn't sound so crazy, I'd make a book out of a suitcase. Oh, wait, I am going to do that crazy thing!
Five childhood accomplishments
- I consistently had high grades and test scores and held my own in honors/advanced courses.
- I won a state-level writer's award and was invited to a young writer's conference when I was around 12 years old.
- When my family raised and bred sporting dogs, I was responsible for the complete training of two dogs (though I assisted with others) and got points on each--one in confirmation showing, the other in hunting trials.
- Attending two pre-college summer programs--McMurray College in Illinois the summer before 8th grade, Washington + Lee in Virginia the summer before my senior year of high school--was a huge honor and really helped me visualize myself as a college student and meet some great people.
- Putting on a school play my senior year of high school; though the school had a drama club we had never, in the time I attended the school, had a school play, which I thought was ridiculous. (Having just spent too much time on said high school's terrible web site, I can't tell if the play is still ongoing.)
Week-end check-in
Artist's Date: First, I spent half an hour on a local nature
trail, just taking photos (forthcoming!) and exploring the various colors and
patterns in Florida's greenery. I came back quite inspired, even accounting for
the heat and skeeters. That same night, I also pulled out a book a friend gifted
me and taught myself a simple pamphlet stitch binding, making three small books.
I feel this is the first week I've been 100% successful at the artist's date and
honestly appreciated the time to myself, with my own ideas.
1. Did someone in my neighborhood recently (in the last month?) do a post that was your day in photos? If so, please message me the link b/c I think I'm going batty.
2. On that note, said post--which I now cannot locate--inspired me to do the same and to drag my best friend in the action. In the next week, I'll be posting a montage of photos--one taken for every hour that I was awake yesterday. Now I just need to clean up the photos, make the montage, upload, etc. Plus, I'm allowing for time for said friend to do the same. If you're intrigued by the idea and want in, pick up your camera first thing tomorrow morning and also leave a shout in the comments below.
Show us something by your favorite artist.
Submitted by Miss Parker.
The idea of a favorite artist is a bit difficult for me. Like a favorite singer or a favorite author, it's hard to pick one person who consistently hits home with me, whose every work/song/word resonates.
This doesn't mean, however, I'm going to let this opportunity to blither about art to pass me by. Instead, I'll limit myself to talking about ten artists/artworks that do affect me. I'm going to bypass what I consider to be some more well-known artists/artworks that also qualify (eg, Jackson Pollock's Lavender Mist, Gustav Klimt's Beethoven Freize, Henri Matisse's Dance (Hermitage version), Maxfield Parrish's Aquamarine, Mark Rothko's Untitled (1953)...just to name a few...) in order to draw your attention to some lesser-known-but-still-outstanding people and things.
In alphabetical order, because any other way would fry my brain...
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80 Backs by Magdalena Abakanowicz. Her use of materials makes me think of a (much) less abstract Eva Hesse. Both artists make very tactile works that benefit from detailed viewing. Often I feel as though my touch might be a comforting gesture to Abakanowicz's subjects, while I think of touching Hesse's works to be an invastion of their space. Abakanowicz's sculptures often make powerful use of multiples, as in the piece I've selected here. There's something interesting to me--emotionally, as well as intellectually--about taking intimate feelings of pain and isolation and scaling them up to a number of figures. Often, loneliness in a crowd is suggested by showing an "odd man out," but in Abakanowicz's work, all are suffering. It's a powerful way to represent humanity.
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Still Light by Caroline Broadhead. I saw this work while studying abroad in England more than five years ago, but it stays with me. The piece is pretty simple in its fabrication: clear threads run from the window to the floor creating a permanent sunbeam. The effect caught my breath, however. Later, as I turned it over in my mind, it seemed like such a brilliant way to achieve this particular effect, more so than taking a photograph of that moment or painting a picture of a sunbeam; instead, Broadhead managed to give the viewer the sensation of stepping into a space where time had either slowed or stopped alltogether. If I ever thought I couldn't find mere monofilament beautiful, this piece proved me wrong.
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The Ballad of Sexual Dependency by Nan Goldin. Seeing this work as part of the "SlideShow" exhibition was probably one of my favorite museum experiences of the last few years. It's not uncommon to see a couple of Goldin's photographs blown up and exhibited as part of a photography collection, but seeing the entirity of Ballad as a slideshow (how it was originally shown) was really far more appropriate and moving. Unlike so many documentary photographers, Goldin didn't go somewhere and appropriate another culture, another identity, someone else's pain. The photographs in Ballad are of her life, her friends, her joy and, often, her pain. The resulting collection is an emotional narrative about a time (the '70s and '80s) and a place (NYC, for the most part) that's hard to put into words.
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Guerilla Girls can do no wrong in my book. I love their witty take on the culture world--from galleries in NYC to the Oscars, they're always reminding us of what's not seen. It's a valuable service, and it was thinking of them that inspired this woman-centric post.
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Photomontages by Hannah Höch. Höch's appropriation of images from adverts and the earliest women's magazines make for powerful, inventive collages. I particularly love the way she takes images made to play on women's fears of inadequacy or self-consciousness to make bold statements about gender and women's roles. Her work always seems before it's time to me.
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Cut Piece by Yoko Ono. A woman sits on a stage. Nearby, a pair of scissors. Members of the audience are invited up to come to the stage and snip off pieces of the woman's clothing.
Like some of my favorite works by Félix González-Torres, this work offers something to its viewers; a gift is extended. In fact, Ono herself suggests this and stated she often wore her favorite dress when performing this piece. Her work, however, also has a darker side, an edge of violence and vulnerability that differentiates it from González-Torres' gifts of candy. While obviously simple in its execution, this work brings to mind a variety of issues relating to women's bodies, what control women have over their bodies, how reactions to nudity vary depending on circumstances, and what the role of the audience is. Are the people cutting apart Ono's dress collaborators or symbols? -
Ceci n'est pas un bong. by Elaine Reichek. Among other things, Reichek makes witty recreations of famous works of art in needlepoint. While I like her work in general, I definitely get a specific pleasure from how these recreations tickle different parts of my brain, engaging in a surprisingly fun comparison of art and craft. Reichek's pieces aren't dogmatic on this often contentious subject--it's fun to see what a Chuck Close painting has in common with crosssttich or how it would look if Andy Warhol had skipped the paint and really made a Pollock out of yarn.
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The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems by Martha Rosler. Like Caroline Broadhead, I was first introduced to Rosler whilst studying in England; I caught her retrospective "Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life World" at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham. I liked most of her work; it combined feminism, documentary efforts, mixed/new media and even humor. In her Bowery series, Rosler combines photography and text to document the area of Manhattan known as The Bowery, basically a skid row. Rosler has said other photographers at the time were focusing specifically on the areas drunks, taking pictures of their beat-up faces or as they lie wasted in doorways and alleys, and that the resulting photos took advantage of their misfortune. Rosler's photographs are completely void of any human elements, instead focusing on boarded up windows or doorways covered in graffitti. The photos are arranged in a minimalist grid with notecards featuring typed words that could be used to describe the alcoholics and addicts who generally could be found in The Bowery. The result is a unique portrait not of a place or a group of people, but larger social issues like addiction and homelessness, as well as the overly simplistic ways we often attempt to label or solve those problems.
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Creation of Birds by Remedios Varo. Beautiful, fanciful, mystical, I love being transported by Varo's paintings. I'm unable to quite explain why, but she is my favorite Surrealist. Something in her dreamy images just rings true for me. (I guess I must have used up all my good words talking about Martha Rosler, eh?)
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House by Rachel Whiteread. A work I love in concept and form, and a scale I'm glad Whiteread had the opportunity to explore. I love the idea of the artist drawing our attention to something, usually something we don't notice (like O'Keeffe's reasoning that she painted her flowers large in order to force others to see them). In the instance of House, Whiteread has cast the inside space of the house in concrete--making it not only visible, but also a very strong form. So you don't see the walls of this particular structure, but she has made the space between the walls physical. Though the work has since been demolished, it was pretty obsessively documented both in process and response in a 1995 book published by Phaidon.
