Gerry Schum

After a few misspellings of the name I finally found tons of information on the late artist Gerry Schum. (except for the wiki page, that was in Dutch or something). Schum's work was interesting for me to look at along the lines of 'film still's'. For any of you who might not know his work his aim was to use TV as a direct artistic medium, wanted the broadcasts to be works of art instead of art documentaries or reports etc. For that reason, he refused to comply with the requests for commentated broadcasts put to him by the TV stations after the initial transmission: 'During all the 38 minutes of the Land Art show there is no word spoken. No explanation. I think an art object realised in regard of the medium TV does not need a spoken explanation.' This conviction was one reason his hopes of establishing the broadcast on a permanent basis were not to be fulfilled.

I found that information at this link: http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/die-fernsehgalerie/

During the time of making the piece 'Land Art', Schum collaborated with other artists such as Barry Flanagan, Robert Smithson and , some of whom  continued to work with T.V. or video even after Schum's death.

Film Still? ..Cindy Sherman-esque

So after having a tutorial with my lecturers it was suggested to me that my images gave off the notion of being almost like a film still, having been photographed from the telly. I thought this was pretty interesting and had a look at some artists that were suggested to me that took photos of that nature.

The first was Cindy Sherman. Her photos are definitely interesting and gave off the idea of the 'film set', I loved how the photos had a vintage vibe and how it does feel like you as the viewer are somehow capturing this moment that has been previously captured. Here are some of the images from her site, linked here: http://www.cindysherman.com/art.shtml. The second last image is my favourite as it has that real wind swept film moment.

Collage it..

Here is the collage image I made using Photoshop by compiling my Macro face photos. (He was not at all impressed). I intend to print this out digitally in college and present it as a part of my finished project. The face section is made up of the 31 macro shots all combined and layered on top of one another, the background is made of duplications of the face all with the brightness lowered so as to not distract from the main image.

Sequences Project

The idea of this project is to shoot a roll of film and produce a contact sheet from the dark room that shows evidence of a sequence or sequential thinking. From that contact sheet I am to select and produce in the dark room six enlarged images. The limitation being that I am to use one roll of film only and must produce my work from the dark room.

Afraid to mess up my one roll of film I decided to practice taking my images first using my DSLR camera. One thing led to another and I was soon half ways through making my digital collage on Photoshop.

I began by using the Macro setting on my camera to zoom in extremely close to sections of my boyfriends face (whom might I add was not too happy at playing model again). I took a series of 6 images across his forehead and moved down to take 6 across his eyes and down again across his nose and eventually ended up with 31 images which when collaged on Photoshop would complete his face again. Below are examples of some of the photos I took. (These photos were not at all digitally edited or enhanced as I did not want to take away from the experience of using the SLR camera)

After capturing the images digitally I still had to some way get them on to film, so I hooked up my laptop to my television and set up a (kind of) tripod structure using my book case and several DVD boxes and (after much research) set my shutter speed to 1/60 of a second so as to not get the TV static or pixels on my images and one by one I re-snapped the photos on the SLR camera.

This project for my was definitely a sequential process in the way that without even realising, one thing led to another and soon as all of it tied together I had my images on film ready to develop.

Final Images Contd.

Final Pick of Images

I found myself continually photographing the fronts of buildings around the city, much like I had done for my previous 'Dark Room' project before the summer and I wanted to break away from this idea but not so much as to make the project more difficult for myself than it needed to be. I do find it very interesting to photograph buildings so I decided to do this but to just alter my angle! I found that this idea worked for the first few pics so I just kind of ran with it then. Here are the first four of my eight final images and keep in mind they are A4 size and kind of difficult to view each as an individual finished print on the computer screen.

Lewis Baltz

Lewis Baltz is a photographer, well known for his great series of work 'The New Industrial Parks' and his kind of minimalistic photographs that we see in the trilogy Ronde de Nuit, Docile Bodies, and Politics of Bacteria. I first came across Lewis Baltz during my studies last year and have admired is work since.

I love his ability to find beauty in negative, stark and basic spaces. His bold approach to photographing spaces straight on is interesting, I love to see what he has decided to leave in the frame and equally what he has decided to crop out. Here are some of the images of his that I looked at in relation to my own project and research.

Taking a walk...

In order to find a starting point I decided to take my own journey around limerick and see whaqt kind of images I could produce from that. Here are some examples of the kind of photos I began taking.

I thought it might be a cool idea to take an image like the last one and using Photoshop to extract the background and replace it with a completely out of the ordinary rural background and have a series of images kind of like this...

That seemed a tad more difficult than this project need be..

When I took a look through all my pictures I decided it wasn't entirely the direction I wanted to go in. So I read through the brief (again and again and again) and tried again.

Assignment Numero 1

The first assignment of the semester that we have received is based loosely around the Robert Smithson inspired walk that we took with Sean last week and also the slide show shown to us by Martin last Thursday on the 'Found and Constructed Images'.

The aim is to produce 8 finished images that engage in some way with the above. The photographs could be of anything I chose and I could also chose to either produced them in black and white in the darkroom or digitally using the colour printers in Clare street. After attending the demonstrations provided to us of each possibility I decided to produce my images digitally using the colour printer.

I chose to print the images digitally as I have had no prior experience of using this printer and I was hoping to involve a good deal of colour in my final images. I have had experience of working in the darkrooms due to an assignment I completed before the summer holidays.

Then all I had to do was find an idea I was happy to stick with and take some photographs!

Found and Constructed Images Slideshow

In class we viewed a slideshow put together by Martin on the ideas of found and constructed photography. We were shown examples of some really interesting photographers whose works played on these topics and there were names of some very interesting artists to research. One that stuck out to me on the topic of found images was Richard Wentworth and his series of 'Making Do and Getting By' where he photographed everyday objects that were being used for different purposes just for the sake of making do and getting by. Here are some examples of those:

 

 

We studied a lot of different artists and their works more of which I will get around to posting up here... but for now I think food is in order!

Robert Smithson

Reading Robert Smithson's very detailed essay entitled 'Monuments of Passaic' seemed challenging at first. Having never read a Smithson essay before it took me awhile to adjust to his kind of writing, phrasing and ideas. When I re-read the essay it proved to be witty, insightful and I enjoyed his way of seeing things, such as how he could turn immobile machinery into prehistoric dinosaurs trapped in the mud, and his theory on having a child run circles in a sandbox filled with white sand on one side and black on the other.

It's an interesting read and if you feel inclined here is the link to a PDF version.
http://gd1studio2011.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/smithson-monuments-of-passaic.pdf

Having discussed the essay in class it was decided we would take a Robert Smithson inspired walk around an area of Limerick (Charlotte's Quay) and following that have a project loosely based around the trip.

Below are some of Robert Smithson's own photographs taken while on his journey:
If you wish to see them all here is the link: http://www.robertsmithson.com/photoworks/monument-passaic_300.htm

Nottingham Contempoary - Aquatopia

Over the summer months we were set an assignment to visit a Contemporary Art Exhibition that included some elements of photography or lens based media. On arriving back in college in September we were to have assembled a 10 minute long PowerPoint presentation to deliver to our tutors and year group. The aim of the presentation was to outline my experience of the exhibition I chose to visit and provide a critical evaluation of it.  (also to be supported with good quality visual documentation.)

Lucky enough I was in the U.K at the time I received the brief and so I chose to visit Nottingham Contemporary Gallery as I had previously seen advertisements of an interesting looking exhibition taking place there. The exhibition entitled 'Aquatopia'.

Here are some of the slides from my presentation along with some scanned in images from the exhibition booklet.

 

PowerPoint Print Screen Images: