Artist Lectures: SMP Presentations

Alyson Moore – Imprints

Alyson Moore’s work dealt with the idea of connecting strangers who normally pass each other without notice and breaking down social barriers. In one of her artworks, To Someone from Anyone, she had people write anonymous letters to anyone. The anonymity of both sender and receiver broke down social barriers for people who would otherwise be afraid to talk to someone they do not know. She found a common desire in people to associate with strangers.

When she worked with found objects, which was people’s trash, she realized that everyone shares daily activities without realizing that other people go through them also. An example is soda bottle caps. Each person who threw away a bottle cap had participated in buying, opening, drinking the soda and finally throwing away the bottle and cap. By bringing together these shared found objects in a work of art, she creates a new interaction between people. People had touched and interacted with the things they threw away, so when these things interact, it creates interaction between those who touched the objects.

One of my favorites out of her works were the portraits she made of the moment she met people. She went out into daily life and talked to strangers. Her portraits recreate the moment she met each person through image and text. They are expressions of her first impressions of these people. The artwork breaks out of the frame, representing her breaking of social barriers. When I looked at each portrait, it was like being in that moment inside of her head. The large scale of the work and its breaking of the frame surround the viewer in that moment.

Her final work was about places. Everyday we go to communal places and we are unaware of the people who are there before us. Each person’s visit to a communal place overlaps with another, just like the fingerprints we leave on things at these places. She created large images of fingerprints on clear backgrounds and they hung from the ceiling. Each fingerprint can be viewed on its own or as overlapping with multiple other fingerprints, just like the moments. Viewers can move through the space between the fingerprints without restriction on their movements or interactions. The fingerprints themselves create a new space for people to interact.

Courtney Teed – Photography

Courtney Teed photographs conventional objects she finds and makes them look unconventional and interesting. She goes out into the world to find things to photograph that most people would not take a second look at. When she finds something, she shares the physical space with the object to find a unique view. Some of her photographs look abstract because they are taken from unrecognizable angles. Her photographs are taken from viewpoints that most people would never see from. When I look at the photographs, I cannot always recognize what the object is and I will look at the photograph for several minutes to figure it out. ­­If I finally do realize what the object is, I am amazed that I have seen it from such a strange and new angle.

Her photographs are black and white because the world is in color. Black and white makes the image less connected to the real world and enhances its abstractness. The prints are big to give a more direct relationship between the image and the viewer. The photographs do not have titles, but are usually numbered. This leaves out the context of the objects so the viewer can see what they see, not what may actually be there.

Art SMP Presentations: Tara Hutton and Diana Abells

I found the SMP projects of both Tara Hutton and Diana Abells to be particularly interesting as both approached subjects that aren’t typically associated with visual arts. Diana’s blend of photography, drawing and video to describe physics equations and Cartesian planes was a fantastic mix of artistic mediums and science. I am familiar with the use of mathematics in origami, but I didn’t know how it could be applied to other art forms, so Diana’s drawings were both quite good and thought provoking. I have seen relatively straight forward illustrations of physics equations (like canon’s firing to demonstrate parabolic arcs) because physics is heavily tied to the tangible world, but seeing the geometry of three dimensional Cartesian planes in a drawing of a guy stretching his cheek and hiding under a blanket were pleasantly abstract. Tara’s cutouts had a unique way of addressing both gender and the way a viewer can actively interact with a piece (which has lots of interesting parallels to a photo book). Her work relied on non-passive viewers to create their works using androgynous cutout characters that could be fitted with a variety of clothing and placed in various scenes with a wide array of other character and objects. I found this interesting not only due to the subversion of gender identity and the undermining of gender roles, but because of the importance of the audience in creating the work; essentially she provides the viewer with the tools and they must use them to help build the work. The sense of communal art is something that is completely foreign to me, but endlessly fascinating. It made me think about the possibilities for more involved interaction in my future photo books and how that can help my picture branch out an attain a possibly higher meaning.

Artist Talk - Gabriela Bulisova

Every time I have an opportunity to talk with Gabriella, it makes me feel worse about not taking her photo journalism class last spring. I found the work that she presented on displaced female refugees in Iraq and recent female parolees in D.C. to be extremely moving and visually fascinating. It is refreshing and very important to hear about how the lives of the citizens of Iraq have been devastated by the war; we hear very little about the war in Iraq, and what we do is usually about American casualties. This project helps to drive home the point that as tragic as American losses are in a war, occupied civilians pay a far larger price. It succeeded in making me very angry because between the people in this project and the financial crisis that the war is causing domestically, I can see that the war only serves the interest of a few wealthy individuals and is destroying the lives of hundreds of millions of people. One of the things I was most interested in during the talk and through speaking individually with her was the slideshow she presented on recently paroled women in D.C. We talked at length about the increasing demand in the photojournalism world for short videos to accompany a photo essay, brought about by the high quality video that new DSLR’s shoot. She seemed really eager for criticism on the slideshow, but I wasn’t comfortable giving any because I don’t know her well and I felt that the technical problems in the video were far outweighed by the power and the content of her project. I came to realize quite quickly that video, despite popular opinion and my own interest, isn’t really a substitution for photos. There are so many moments in her photographs that I feel would most likely be missed if she were trying to shoot a video, and there are many little moments that just probably wouldn’t have the same power in a several second long shot as they do in one photographic image. I think there is also something to be said about the fact that one can linger on a photo for as long as they like, which is not possible with a video.

Gabriela Bulisova's Lecture

I thoroughly enjoyed Gabriela’s lecture when she came as part of the Women in Warfare series. I had taken Gabriela’s photojournalism class and seen a lot of her work previously, but what was great about the lecture in addition to merely seeing new work was hearing Gabriela’s stories behind the projects. One part of this was the description of the projects in general, which included where she got the idea for the projects and the planning/logistics of it. It was interesting that several of her projects came out of work she had been doing with NGOs, which I hadn’t expected but seems like a good concept in terms of creating photographic work that works with and is potentially beneficial for the subjects. I was also fascinated by her talk of the “fixers,” her contacts in foreign countries like Syria who helped translate and helped her find willing subjects, a position in the photojournalistic process I hadn’t really thought about before.

However what I was most intrigued by was her very personal stories she related about the lives of those in her photographs. While on her own I think the photographs, especially when sequenced together, tell a narrative about her subjects, hearing the full extend of their stories really drew me in emotionally to what they had gone through. This made me think about the best way I could use this in my own photojournalistic work, perhaps in the way Gabriela used a kind of collective voice over in the sequence on Iraqi refugees in america or perhaps more extended voice over narratives telling the story of one subject.

Artist Talk - Gabriela Bulisova

Gabriela Bulisova’s art exhibition and lecture helped me to find an intimate connection to her photography, which was great after having taken a class with her and received so much of her input into our own photographic work. I appreciated being able to see so much of her work blown up on the walls and in her presentation, as I’d only seen three or four of her images in her class. I loved her use of primarily black and white images in the exhibition, with some color images included in just the right places. I also really liked the large multi-image prints on the two brick columns, with selected images expanded on the wall next to them, giving the impression of the darkroom developing and image selecting process, achieved through image enlargement.

In her lecture, Gabriela gave detailed and intimate accounts of her interactions with refugees and victims of warfare in Iraq while presenting her amazing portraits of them. She was very emotionally connected to her subjects and the experiences she had learning about their lives, and never rushed through an account, showing the audience the importance of their stories and how they can’t simply be condensed into a few minutes of explanation. They are stories most Americans usually ignore despite our country’s prevailing influence in the war. This was even more evident in her request to take more than the allotted time to discuss their stories, which the audience was obviously okay with and wanted to hear. Their lives and hardships were evident in her style of documentary photography, as she conveyed ruins, the conditions of poverty, and physical injuries while talking about the more psychological ones. I liked that Gabriela talked about the processes of documentary photographing, and how she was often limited in what she could photograph, but got around it if she could.

The film at the end of the lecture of the audio clips from women in the United States who have emerged from the prison system was also incredibly potent. It was really awesome that she showed us a “work in progress,” and even asked our input regarding it at the end of the lecture. This seems like it is going to develop into a very socially important project, considering the hostility of a large part of our nation, especially in aspects such as the job market, towards previously incarcerated individuals. Gabriela’s work conveys some very valuable social messages using the medium of striking photographs. I think that for the purpose of documentary photography, her color images create more of a connection with their audience, because they are more directly tied to reality. Her black and white images in the exhibition tended to be more abstract, while the color images in her projection were often more directly portraiture and life story-focused.

Although this isn’t related to Gabriela’s recent visit, her lecture reminded me of when I was taking her class and we went on a field trip to see Edward Burtynsky’s images of the drilling and manufacturing damage by the oil industry. During this field trip to see a documentary-style exhibition, we also got to see a presentation by several of the members of Metro Collective, the group of photographers in the DC area of which Gabriela is a part. All of the photographers whose work we saw involved documentary photography and social problems throughout the world. It was really great to see their different aesthetic styles for conveying the stories of these people and places, and to hear about all of the challenges of documentary photography. We didn’t see much of Gabriela’s work during this visit, and heard mostly from the other photographers, so finally seeing and hearing her talk about her work was a great experience.

Artist Talk - Mary Early

Mary Early’s sculptural work using beeswax and wood are fascinating, in that they entail the use of individual, similar-but-not-identical parts to support and buttress one another into a larger whole. It would take a close-up examination to observe the minor differences in the hand-made individual elements, but from a distance the work appears perfectly even and balanced. I appreciated the intricacy and time-intensiveness of her methods, and her deep thought on the characteristics of her materials. The beeswax has its own distinctive, natural smell and color, bringing elements from the external world of plant and animal life into the internal, otherwise-austere realm of the gallery space.

The simplicity of the translucent yellow against the white or black walls and floors draws the viewer into an intimate consideration of an un-enhanced natural beauty – this is also supported by the simplicity of form. Her works usually involve circular structures, whether composed of thick blocks arranged in cylindrical layers, or thinner, stick-like components propped against one another. In both cases, the work conveys the unity of elements that are largely similar but not identical. For me, this conveys the concept of DNA and the great genotypic similarity of humans, and even different species, who exist (at an ideal) in unity despite greater phenotypic variation.

Mary Early also discussed her efforts to convey a large volume with a minimal volume of materials, achieved through the materials’ engineered crutching of one another. She uses the negative space in between parts to create the imaginative space of this bulk in dimension. My favorite piece that she showed was the large cylindrical piece made of long, open-ended, semi-rectangular blocks. This was placed in the middle of a room with black walls and floors, and intentionally altered the course of the audience’s path through the room. It was an art piece you had to work around, that you had to observe – in both senses of the word. This reminded me of an artist Courtney mentioned in her SMP presentation, who created works that intentionally altered people’s passage through the space.

I liked that Mary showed her sketches of brainstorming and project planning, to demonstrate how the ideas that are collapsed onto a two-dimensional space then materialize into three-dimensional reality. This also brought back some of my thoughts on project 1, where we were asked to think of the book, generally deemed two-dimensional for the flat space of the individual page, as a three-dimensional, manipulatable object. Her work makes me want to experiment with carving the book into a boldly three-dimensional sculpture, like many of the artists people have posted on the blog. I thought that this presentation was incredibly inspiring. It’s always interesting for me to hear about sculptural work and the processes behind it, as I am quite unfamiliar with them, but they have such spatial presence and weight in reality.