Medium Specificity

I noticed how painting is often used as a metaphor. For example, how familiar do these lines sound: “The stars were painted across the sky.” or “The words painted thoughts in her mind.” So how is it that painting, which is traditionally thought of as a specific medium, can be understood figuratively in such a way? With this in mind, I formed my understanding of painting that I would build my work off of. In Understanding Comics, the author is able to explore a medium by narrowly defining that medium. Instead, I found it to my advantage to broadly define my medium.

Painting: v. To apply a medium onto a surface.

My idea started as such: take a single image and put it under as many different forms of painting as I could, without ever using actual paint. For the subject, I decided to use a bit of cardboard that I have had for two years and used as a painting palette. It has years of mixed paint, doodles, and basically is the incubator for many of my own artwork I’ve created over the years. First, I took a photograph of the subject. (Medium: Surface :: Light: Sensor) Then, I uploaded the picture and digitally painted on it in the appropriately titled Microsoft Paint. (Medium: Surface :: Digital Paint: Digital Surface) I then printed the image (Medium:Surface :: Printer Ink: Printer Paper) and painted on it with fingernail polish. I chose fingernail polish since it’s a form of painting that is closer to the more traditional form of painting, but isn’t thought of as such. I then transfered the fingernail polish painting, which was inspired by and closely followed the printed image, onto a blank sheet of paper and drew on that. Finally, I weaved the two paintings together and scanned the final product onto a computer. The final three dimensions are: film, the color grading (I took out all the green midtones to “paint” the film a magenta color, which evokes a sense of creativity to me) and editing, and finally the sound.

The sound was a particularly interesting element for me because originally I was planning to compose a song with whatever my subject was, so basically the idea of using the subject as a tool of painting. Instead, I decided to use natural sound from the entire film process to compose an organic soundtrack which presents themes of artistic process, filmmaking, collaboration, and of course, my original definition of painting.  

What my work exhibits is the deep dimensions in which painting can explores, but also a process of painting in general. My final film is a painting of the process of painting. (With the added obstruction of not using any paint.) It pushes the boundaries of what “paint” is. Can painting be painting without a specific pigment? I’d say painting is maybe the only medium that has this kind of versatility and I wanted to explore that. And I could have gone beyond 12 dimensions. I painted with light, voices, props, and even my body. Many artists paint in a similar way-- using material other than paint to create a painting.

Olafur Eliasson is an Icelandic artist who frequently paints with light in his work as shown in the photograph below. His experiments with light and color influenced particular elements in my piece, including the use of magenta in editing and use of a disco ball to light the scene where I collage.

Historical Script

Artists' Statement 

In Satrapi’s The Veil, Satrapi is forced to wear a veil she is not used to as her country as her government seeks to establish a new order. For Satrapi, so much of her history – of her country’s Cultural Revolution – is of veils, of hiding behind things. Satrapi dons a veil and dons another figurative one as she pretends to want to be a doctor, not a prophet; her mother must disguise herself to avoid trouble.

Meike and Angela hide behind a variety of veils during their own revolution: the Iconoclastic Fury, or Beeldenstorm. Entoen.nu, a website developed by the Committee on Development of the Dutch Canon and managed by Hubert Slings of the Dutch Open Air Museum, speaks of the Netherlands’ own cultural revolution. “The Calvinists [a branch of Protestantism] believed the [Catholic] Church had to be purified of “papist superstitions”. By…smashing images of saints, they aimed to rid these Catholic symbols of their mystical value and make clear that Catholicism had been twisted into a sacrilegious puppet show of the true faith…the Calvinists believed they were restoring ties with the earlier, in their eyes more pure, Christians.”

            Meike and Angela’s involvement in Beeldenstorm forces them to hide under cover of night and hold secretive church services in their home. Even in Meike’s coffee shop, Angela first hides in a cloud of smoke. Like Satrapi’s mother and sometimes even Satrapi herself, Meike and Angela are liberal, independent women who fight for freedom. In Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most Liberal City, Russell Shorto defines liberalism: “Historically, then, liberalism involves a commitment to individual freedom and individual rights, and not just for oneself but for everyone, every human being who breathes the air.”

            Meike and Angela, then, are two liberal women in a world slowly changing, a world of idols and smashing them. They come to live forever by saving the painting of the Virgin Mary, an act symbolic of true liberalism and representative of the colliding chaos of their time. In the present day, they remain the same kind of women. Meike owns a coffee shop named Gedogen, a Dutch term which translates to “technically illegal but officially tolerated”. The painting of Mary hangs on the wall, remembering a different side of the past, next to the landscapes that represent the sea of change that came out of Beeldenstorm.

            In the script, art heavily affects ideology, but in the writing of the script, ideology heavily influenced art. Reading Shorto’s book is what inspired the script in the first place, and it was important that Meike and Angela embraced the liberalism that so characterizes their city. The sources helped us understand the importance of art, and so we applied that to the script to symbolize the complexities of the two situations and times. The result is art that hopes to convey not just a story, but a time, a city, and an idea.

Process Piece

Future Library

The beauty of a process piece is the focus on creation, and at our core that is what sets humans apart from other living creatures on earth. What’s so wonderful about documenting a creation process, whether it is through the medium of film or through sound alone, is a compound effect. One creative piece inspires another and the potency of that creative process is given room to grow, much like a tree in the forest. This idea is evident in the short documentary, “The Smokehouse”. With each appropriately composed shot of the wood as he carved, we were watching a communication between two artistic works. The first being that of the woodwork and the second being the medium of film. This collaboration of artistic mediums illustrates a macro-process, similar to our audio documentation of “Future Library,” in which two processes compound and communicate. As art begins to communicate with art, it has a better chance to influence the people who come in contact with it and in doing so it has a better chance to stand the test of time. This idea of artistic communication and time is something that we wanted to portray as we started on this work.

The idea of Future Library is timeless, growing like tree roots into the past, rooted in the future, and growing upwards towards the future. The link between a tree and a book and man is as old as the written word itself, leading up to the moment where we are always faithfully writing books for a near-future audience, but now we are looking further into the future. Future Library will contain books that will not be read for a century, and authors such as Margaret Atwood and David Mitchell who are contributing to the project must faithfully write for an audience that may not even exist.

Rachel first stumbled upon the idea of “Future Library” as she was scouring a artistic journal publication for ideas. The idea stood out to her because it seemed like a simple time capsule, but it was actually complex: filled with questions and implications about the future of humanity, libraries, forests, and books. The artist, Katie Paterson, believes that these things are interconnected. She got the idea for Future Library when she thoughtfully compared tree rings to chapters of a book. We particularly liked the idea of trees growing as a book was growing, since their fate is interconnected. We wanted to reflect that in our process piece by juxtaposing the forest sounds with typewriting. We also decided that since the idea behind this process holds equal weight to the process itself, we wanted to avoid following a strictly linear path. We introduce the process piece with a quote from Fahrenheit 451, a book all too appropriate for this project. This introduces our theme, then we introduce our forest, a steady presence throughout the piece. The forest is the only component of this process that will be present in an interactable way in our lifetime, so we kept it throughout. We also thought forests and libraries to be very similar, so we juxtaposed them in the beginning with the audio of turning pages and stacking books.

Finally, we wanted to end the project with the theme of the unknown future. We included a clip of a news reel with no real news to introduce the idea of a century where anything could happen. Then, we end with a quote from T.S. Eliot: “The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man.”

Round Robin

A viking found a talent for fashion design and never killed again after blood stained his best shirt. -Rachel Lawyer

His new clothing line, Bloody Valhalla, proved an international success. It even prompted the Viking régime to gravitate towards commerce. -Emily McNey

Unfortunately, the Viking feminist community was not impressed with their selection of leather brassieres, so they initiated a vicious raid. -Addy Hunsaker

The feminist vikings invaded all the hills and valleys, until they found a village of leather brassiere craftsmen. -Morgan Jones

After the noodle incident, interpretive dancing with animals was forever banned in the United States. -Nathanael King 

ARTISTS' STATEMENT

This assignment really put the idea of creativity into perspective. Creative writing classes often teach that nothing is truly ever “original,” because inspiration is gleaned from all over to help produce new ideas. It was fun to write small stories back and forth within our group, as we were eager to see what the next person was going to come up with. None of us could imagine our pieces turning out the way that they did, yet we were all very impressed with the short stories that were “telephoned” off of our initial ideas.

Some of us were nervous to see what people would think about our work, what would be added on, and if someone would go in a completely different direction than what was originally imagined. DJ Spooky states that “the remix, as always, is what you make of it. Juxtapose, fragment, flip the script—anything else, simply put, would be boring” (DJ Spooky). Collaborating with others fuels our creativity and pushes us to think outside of the box. It was really amazing how you could see the different personalities of the creators in each installment. A lot of the story remained cohesive within the series, but then some would take a wild turn and change the narrative in a surprising way.

When the first story was conceived, there was an infinite combination of elements that could create the next installment, and the path that was created by each artist is the perfect mixture of choice and chance. Each story went through a different order of people in the group. If the order had been any different, we would have gotten another collection. This project was the anti-auteur as we weren’t the only authors of these stories. Chance, order, what time of day we chose to write, what we had for breakfast, our interactions that day—these were all collaborators on a set of seemingly unaffecting stories that ended up representing all of everything.

Having a 20-word limit per story served as a kind of mediator for the project. Because of our restriction in this assignment, each word had to be carefully considered, and anything superfluous was cut. This allowed us to really focus on the plotlines and help us channel our creativity in that direction.

This assignment had us step out of our comfort zones - our short stories were inevitably put together with our own personal thoughts and feelings, and we had to watch that story change on a fundamental level. This was a good thing because, after all, the nature of film lies in collaboration, and requires a filmmaker to do what we did in this assignment—let go of our personal biases and desires for our creative output, and revise and reimagine each other’s work to create something unique and special.

Music Mosaic

Song: 363N63 by King Krule
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgL2q2t1KEA

Artist's Statement

I’m excited to be inspired by the talent of the young King Krule, who adapts different styles and creative influences into unique, nuanced music. So in my visual adaptation of his instrumental piece “363N63” while I visually adapted some formal elements, I decided to use my own individual authorship to take the sensual and cerebral response I had while listening and create an accompanying piece. In creating this work, I found myself thinking about a particular part from Annie Dillard’s essay “Seeing,” in which she says “Seeing of course is very much a matter of verbalization. Unless I call my attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won’t see it.” I was worried that I wouldn’t know enough about music to be able to express what it is that I was hearing, and how I could translate that to visual art. I noticed an “echo-y” quality about the song and I identified that as reverb. Once I was able to verbalize that, I could understand it formally and how it contributed to make the song's narrative exploration of the innovative minds of youth. Finally, being able to verbalize how the reverb contributed to the tone, allowed me to make a visual piece that accompanies both that form and its effect.

Formally, my work is divided up into two parts. My double exposed pieces, which I double exposed within my camera and have otherwise not been manipulated. The idea of the double exposure came from a formal element in the song. The song consists of this bright, youthful guitar riff which we are introduced to, and then blended with a lower cerebral bass that is cohesive musically, yet a variation which completes the sound. Visually, I represented this by double exposing an image: sometimes a variation of the same image, sometimes a completely different image that completes the picture. Plus, the initial guitar is reverbed, evoking a sense of auditory multiple exposure.Then there is the second part, which are the unaltered single exposed photos. These photos visually represent the stiller moments of the song as well as the the contemplative bass which remains steady throughout the song as everything else reverbs, weaves, waxes, and wains. The pictures are also mostly underexposed, which gives the collection a darker tone that matches the lower bass, yet the subjects (the two making art, the girl in the snow suit, and the girl on the laundry machine) represent the youthful, creative voice of the layers of reverb, guitars, and drum pad. I have ordered them from lightest to darker photos to accompany the progression of the light guitar reducing eventually to the lone dark bass. The realism of photography and the dark, underexposure of the photos matches the raw, gritty recording style of 363N63 as well.

There is a young artist from New Zealand who does drawings and paintings of people, but she adds a flare to the drawings which make them more than just portraits. Sometimes she adds clouds or distorts the drawings so there is repetition in features. (http://henriettaharris.com/paintings-gallery/) She is one of my favorite contemporary artists and there are qualities in her work that complement 363N63 as well as my collection. There is a common theme between her work and my mosaic of the innovation and celebration of youth. She does head portraits of young people, suggesting through the alterations that there is something outside the box and expressive about their minds. I wanted to provoke a similar idea instead through the medium of photography.

Dream House: Using Context and Form to Create a Narrative

Any film crafted by even the most accomplished of filmmakers takes several frames in order to tell a comprehensive story. Photographer Gregory Crewdson creates tableau narratives in a single frame. In 2002 he released an exhibit called Dream House, which featured reputable actors and actresses in surrealist suburban scenes. The overall tone of this exhibit is a darker one, expressively depicting the anxieties of suburban life and exploring characters in relation to each other as well as their settings. This exhibit reflects a series of other media which came out in the late-nineties to early 2000s which deal with the idea of suburban life-- going as far as to perhaps feature visual quotes and inspiration from films such as Fargo (1996) and American Beauty (1999). However, what sets apart Crewdson’s work besides its fixed nature, is its formal and contextual ability to create an entire world outside of itself that explores the synthetic and the natural in suburban life.

 The photograph that introduces us to the world of Dream House is a photograph of a house. The picture is horizontally composed and follows the rule of thirds to create a frame in which the green suburban lawn and the grey ethereal sky is separated by a nineteen fifties style house. While the sky takes up the upper third of the frame, the main light source doesn’t come from natural sunlight, but rather the artificial tungsten light that emanates from the the windows of the home. Horizontal compositions between ground and sky like this usually allude to the idea of heaven and earth, with a subject in the middle separating the two. However, the artificial light being the primary light in this picture takes the power from the heaven and gives it to the home, while outside is overcast and in the darkness of evening.

 Through the rest of the exhibit Crewdson uses primarily artificial, cinematic lighting and has the scenes take place in evening or twilight. This is an important formal element which identifies the motif of syntheticism versus naturalism. It also enhances the cinematic look which allows Crewdson to create a complete narrative that exists outside of the one photograph. One particular photo features Philip Seymour-Hoffman, centered in frame in isolation inside his car, with scores of flowers in his trunk and on the road. The vibrant palette of the flowers combined with the bizarreness of the scene turns a realist scene into a surrealist one. It naturally prompts questions as to the origin of the scene which is what ultimately creates an understood beginning and end to the story depicted.

 The flowers in this scene also seem to serve as a visual quote to Sam Mendes’ American Beauty, released 3 years before the premiere of this exhibit. In fact, a frame from American Beauty would pair well with Crewdson’s exhibit. It similarly is a realist/surrealist commentary on suburban life. Another possible visual quote is the use of actor William Macy in another photograph. In this scene, he kneels in a garage surrounded by garden tools and strange synthetic grass. He stares off, looking as if he has just committed a heinous crime like his character in Fargo. Fargo is another piece that complements Dream House and American Beauty. It centers around the stillest of suburban life in the northern United States, interrupted by extreme events that contrast the simple lives of the characters.

 So there seems to be a concern with the negativities of suburban life during this turn-of-the-century time period. Crewdson is aware of this in his work and uses this societal context to his advantage. While he is able to relate an easily discernable tale through formal elements in his work, it is the context which makes the narrative and its themes so comprehensive. In one photograph, a mother lies on a couch next to a pill bottle starring hauntingly at a TV screen while her son lays on the floor surrounded by his coloring. Her husband stands outside a glass door, surrounded by the same flowers featured in the Hoffman photograph and holding a lantern. Again, synthetic elements (the pill bottle, the lantern, the markers, the flowers) are at play here to set up the narrative, but it’s the association and familiarity with the scene which completes the story. The pill-popping suburban mom and absent dad are archetypes which are familiar to any 20th century American. In fact, these issues originated the rise of suburbia in the 1950s right before the birth of Gregory Crewdson, no doubt influencing his life and his work.

 It is clear that Crewdson wanted to create pieces that felt as though they were a single frame taken from a film. He used film actors, cinematic lighting, and a greater theme that exists outside the work of any artist and exists in the common anxiety of society to create an uncontained narrative realm. Crewdson uses this to say something unique about the nature of suburban life and juxtaposes synthetic and natural elements to say it. The overarching story told in Dream House is that the American suburban dream is in fact synthetic itself and a myth that holds destructive potential.