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Art 425 Artist in Context

Samples of Critical Issues Writings

What follows are an assortment of writing taken from past semesters. While all are good, some are better than others. Some don’t far enough in defining the issue and instead hope that simply describing the work explains it. Some don’t manage to find a clear way to write about the issue. Some rely on big terms and don’t bother to define them.

· My work examines vulnerability. I am interested in how vulnerability, much like uncertainty, is essential to making art. I create a visual metaphor of vulnerability by dealing specifically with images that reveal and conceal (sometimes literally and other times implicitly). I became interested in the topic of vulnerability in the aftermath of a sexual assault. One of the methods I developed for dealing with my assault was to actively reject my own vulnerability. In the beginning, I saw my vulnerability as a weakness, and one that was responsible for my assault. As a result of this, I spent some time unable to form meaningful relationships with others because I would not allow myself to be vulnerable (specifically in terms of sharing my experience as a sexual assault survivor). My position of vulnerability was largely transformed after reading Art and Fear. The authors of this book discuss how uncertainty, and the fear it elicits, has a powerful influence on our ability to produce work, and the quality of that work. While reading this book, I saw many connections between my relationship with vulnerability and the way in which the authors discussed the process of making art. This connection made me want to create art that embraced my vulnerability.

· My interest in vulnerability is not limited to an exercise in catharsis. I am also concerned with how viewers might come to understand their own vulnerability by engaging with my work. In order to accomplish this I return to the idea of revealing and concealing, as a way of creating a specific tension in my work. This tension often results in images that are uncomfortable to look at, and I like this because I think that this element is essential for viewers to begin experiencing their own vulnerability.

· I use the issues of gender and sexuality as a way of making a larger statement about vulnerability; however, it is not my intention for these qualities to constitute the entire content of my work. Much like the sensation of disgust that is often used to characterize Jenny Saville’s paintings, I am interested in exploring how I can complicate the connotation of the word “vulnerability” through the aesthetics of my work. As such, I attempt to create other points of tension through the compositional choices I make. For example, in my painting Dinner, the figure is given a very forward and self confident pose, but her vulnerability is retained by her partial nudity, and less overtly, through the metaphor of a mirror.

· Process is almost more important to me than the actual art. This process involves collecting source material and looking at a wide variety of sources in order to create new ideas for artwork. I often collect numerous materials before starting a work. These materials can include taking tips from historical art sources, collecting images as sources, creating collages out of these sources, and create sketches of different compositions for the piece. For example in the Chair I took material from poems written by inmates on death row, created numerous small sketches of different types of electric chairs, and used an old chair and a belt as a study model for the chair. I use these sources as a way of brain storming and coming to new ideas that I didn’t think of before. It’s a thought process. I also rearrange compositions in a sketchpad before completing the look.

· Flatness and graphic repetition are also used to remind viewers that my artwork is an object. I force the viewer to confront my concept because they cannot get lost in illusion. I use repetition to visually bare the viewer from entering my artwork. The use of repetition is also a form of abstraction. I knowingly do not put a lot of illusionary depth into my work because my final goal is not to fool a viewer, but for them to consider my work as art fueled by thought. They cannot look at an image and only see one thing, but instead they need to look and interpret what they are seeing. The flattening of space and form is key to showing my translation of my observations as an artist.

· Observation is the most vital part of my work. I am connected to the world through my sight. It is not necessarily the texture, smell or sounds of an object, but the brilliance or dullness of what I am looking at. Shapes, form, color, line, all of these elements dominate my work and are arrived at through observation. All of my works are made from direct observation or a translation of my observation to become more abstract. I do not believe that abstract art develops out of nothing. Abstraction is visual and I develop it through what I see and remember seeing in the world. Even in my most abstract works, a visual source is still evident. I find abstraction to be a universal form of expression and understanding and even if my concept is lost or overlooked by the viewer, they can still relate to the work just through looking.

• The Figure: The most prominent issue in the body of work from my independent study is the use of the figure, and specifically, the figure as having a history or past. My work differs from most in that most of the self-portraits are life-scale or even a tiny bit larger than life-scale, whereas many artists attempt to present the whole figure, and must make it much smaller. The use of a life-sized scale makes us relate with the body more. It is not simply a small rendition of a body but is more of a real person. I played with this idea of reality by often presenting various views of myself at once, on the same sheet of paper, which is most prominent in my largest piece “Every Hour.” I do not know of any artists who have done this, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they had. This is how I attempted to break the reality of the space within the picture and present myself as existing through time and therefore having a history. The figure has been used to do this before, some through the use of depicting an old and decaying body, and others by using performance pieces to suggest the existence and change of the body through time (such as Marina Abromovic). The ideas of history and past are connected to death and impermanence, which are two ideas that I am very much trying to engage in my work more and more.
  
  
• The issue of history and past lead to the issue of narrative: In all of my works, I have been trying to tell a story in some way, though this comes out most directly in Every Hour, and Time Was, which engage the issue of time, and also the Shapeshifter books, which very much tell a specific story through the use of a poem that emphasizes a narrative. Again I come back to Marina Abromovic’s work here to think about how she was interested in the process of disappearance, especially related to one’s body, as well as the storing and editing of memory. This is very much a theme in my work as I am trying to get at the change of the body and the self through time, but also trying to capture moments in time and set them down to look back on later, sort of a documentation of history. Many artists have engaged the issue of how we set down cultural history, such as Mark Tansey, who painted imagined histories related to art, but this was by inventing stories that were not true. I am more so trying to emphasize capturing a moment that is happening right now and then letting it become the past and a record of that past than create alternative pasts for myself.
  
  
• The book: The narrative is very much bound up in the form of the book, and I know that with my book piece that I engage this issue very directly. Ever since we were little we found that books contain stories, something that continues into adulthood with reading novels. The act of turning pages is a temporal thing, and so the reader is necessarily engaged in a temporal act, and also understanding a temporal story in their head at the same time. Pages and specifically the turning of pages emphasize the issue of time and narrative within the book. The artist’s book, however, can simply engage a visual progression of things through time, not telling a conventional story, but just a sequence of images. The story I told are not completely conventional—they are not strict narratives—because they are in the form of poetry. In my two books, I was trying to get at the same story in two different ways, partly by breaking out of the conventional codex binding in the first book and instead using an accordion structure.
  
  
• Autobiography: The issue of autobiography is obviously an important one in my work as most of this body of work is self-portraiture. I am very influenced by Janine Antoni by her use of autobiography, specifically in the ways that she creates her “self” and then breaks that down, either through a process of wearing away (as in her chocolate and soap busts) or by making connections to others (as in her rope piece). It is less about the self and more about the self as existing through time and also as being in context with others. In my work, I am emphasizing the self as it exists through time, and also the inability to get at the source of the self.
  
  
• Source of identity/identification/meaning—Something that is most prominent in Every Hour is my fascination with not being able to pin down the self because we exist through time, which is similar to an idea engaged by Joseph Kosuth in One and Three Chairs. His work dealt more with the finding of meaning between words, images, and objects, but it is that same between-ness that I am trying to get at by presenting multiple images of myself at once, as he presented multiple “chairs” at once.Portraiture: In my portrait photography I am often trying to convey things about personalities through a solely visual rhetoric. Questions I often pose to myself about this issue are: how I can attempt to achieve this, how possible is it to actually convey personality and life through that which is not only visual but is also a still image. I tend not to lean toward using narrative elements in my portraits so focus on formal elements. A main focus of my portrait work is how I can manipulate lighting, focus, vantage point, and pose/gaze in order to convey a message about the person I am photographing. This concentration on formal qualities often brings me to the studio to photograph which leads to the issue of distorted reality due to an increased awareness of the camera and being photographed. In order to address this issue I have worked with my models in different ways. I sometimes ask them to sit casually and just let their minds wander. I have instructed the model to act how they want to be pictured. I often engage in conversation with the model as I am moving about, changing lighting, adjusting apertures and shutters, and snapping photos. I find this tactic most successful because in engaging in conversation with the model I am often able to unconsciously bring out whichever quality it is that I want to emphasize in the portrait.
  
  

· Alternative Vantage Point and Select Focus: My photographic process often uses alternative view points and selective focus as a way to urge the viewers (and my self) to “look closer” at the image and what is actually being shown in the image. My utmost hope is that this theme of looking closer not only occurs when looking at the photograph but carries over to the way the viewer views the world around them. I am also very interested in how this issue manipulates time as it calls people to slow down to look at the photograph more than a straightforward vantage point and higher level of focus, thus slowing down their personal time line.

· The issue of preserving time and memory is one of the main concepts that I consider with my photographs. From photographing people in their environments, an interest of mine because of a curiosity of what lays behind their eyes, questions about where they have been and where they hope to go.  This leads my photography to evoke the passage of time.  It is also as if a great friendship is formed with the inspiration within as well as the processing that guided me there. I like the idea of comparing the usage of my camera to Alice’s rabbit hole, to open an unexplored world, a place of curious self-expression, but also a world of new relationships, new chances new beginnings and most importantly new stories.

· Slowing down and taking the time to reexamine our environment and everyday life. Usually we lead hectic lives with no time to stop and consider our surroundings. We have an infinite amount of stimuli coming at us from multiple sources at all times. It is easier to ignore all of that stimuli than to thoughtfully consider it all. But I like to filter that stimuli and pay attention to certain aspects of my surroundings. Maybe just park benches for a day, or maybe just graffiti, or maybe just the news stories coming from a specific source. When we take the time to pay attention and critically examine a small piece of our environment, we can come across surprising revelations about a culture as a whole. This is the major idea behind most of my photography and video projects and for me, there are two results of this process.

· Finding the absurd in our preconceived notions of the world and the structures we take for granted in our society. Girls Gone Wild is a perfect example. Something that I have found most college girls have never given a second thought, but as soon as they do, are outraged at the very idea. Or the absurdity behind modern politics. Or the number of pharmaceutical commercials on television. Even the amount of time we spend behind the wheel of a car. All of these are factors of our everyday life that we tune out. But when future generations look back at us, will they consider us just as absurd as we consider our great-grandparents era? Slowing down, taking a step back from the life we live on a day-to-day basis, and considering it objectively sometimes reveals greater truths about ourselves.

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