Final Crit

Beginning of exposure test. 

Final quilt top ready to expose. final size is 36x44. 

Anthotype getting additional exposure at night.

Anticipating the anthotype will be complete in 2-3 more weeks.

final test results from spinach.

final results from turmeric.

final results from pokeberry.

All three are a months worth of exposure

These are new quilt squares for the thesis quilt. That are from family heirloom quilts. 

I also have started the layout of the book for the thesis. It will be 24 pages that are 8.5x11 each. I recently ordered paper samples from a few printers to determine cost, and quality of the final product.

Anthotype Exploration

This project is an extension of my alternative process work. Anthotype is an early photographic process, which uses natural dyes and extended sun exposure to create photographic images. My present body of work includes other mediums by combining anthotype onto textiles. Anthotype is historically considered a “craft” form of photography, but with this series I hope to change that perception by using multiple “craft” forms to create a work of art.

Within the work I’m exploring our human, and specifically female, connection to landscape and nature. My personal connection to nature and place has strong visual representation in the work through the dyes used and image sources. With the entirety of this work I’m hoping to explore connections between natural dyes and nature, quilting and female identity, and feminine knowledge transfer through shared techniques and traditions. The female lineage of quilting will form the roots of this body of work, and should be illustrative of the knowledge transferred through women over time, both through craft and as a tangible object. This work will also challenge the basic photographic principles of light and time since anthotype is both created and destroyed by light.

All of these processes are deeply seeded at the core of who I am. Quilting has a rich history within my family lineage. The history of natural dyes, photography, and quilting are vast and deep with significant artistic, gender, and cultural importance. As I continue to explore all of them it creates a new way of viewing each separately. The process of creating this work is also extremely time consuming. The fabric is solar dyed which takes at least a week and the Anthotype can take anywhere from 3 days, in the summer to months in the winter. Through this process I am learning patience in art rather than discipline, which is a new principle within art for me.

Other ideas I want to explore:
-Having my daughter was what gave me the courage to come back to school, and in a way I'm creating something lasting that chronicles my time here. It will be a tangible object of what she gave me.
-Fitting the family heirloom squares into the piece and what that means

Hito Steyearl, In Defense of The Poor Image

Hito Steyearl
In Defense of The Poor Image
2009


"The poor image is an illicit fifth-generation bastard of an original image." - pg1

"The contemporary hierarchy of images, however, is not only based on sharpness,but also and primarily on resolution." - pg.3

"Poor images are poor bequest they are not assigned any value within the class society of images - their status as illicit or degraded grants them exemption from its criteria." - pg.6

"While it enables the users' active participation in the creation and distribution of content, it also drafts them into production. Users become the editors, critics, translators, and (co-)authors of poor images." - pg.6

"The poor image thus constructs anonymous global networks just as it creates a shared history." - pg.8


The information that Min shared about the history of the jpg was extremely interesting and directly related to the content of the article.

I also feel that as time progresses the "quality" of poor images will increase. As storage grows and the cloud lets us take more and more photos there are more digital images around. The resolution of images also continues to increase, but not the technical skill or "quality". how many selfies and food pictures does the world need people?!?

Thomas Ruff, jpeg nt01

"What I find interesting is the specific ways in which this format affects what we see, and how a set of arbitrary decisions made by the group have governed all visual representations using this format." 

-Some Thoughts on the Poor Image by Robert Carter

Allan Kaprow, The Education of the Un-Artist, Part I-III

Allan Kaprow
The Education of the Un-Artist, Part I-III, from Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life
1993

Min asked us what of our work would fit into these three categories so I have thought about it more and chosen to write about this.

non art
-playing my daughter
-cleaning the chicken coop
-taking a nap


anti-art
-my compost project as originally planned.


art art
-art that people buy and gets accepted to shows





I've included a good quote from Art Monthly that talks about the Kaprow article. It includes one of my quotes I highlighted when reading so I thought I would include it here. 

Allan Kaprow was inclined to state the obvious to good effect. In one engaging denunciation of the conventionalised Avant Garde, Kaprow lifts the veil, declaring ‘artists cannot profitably worship what is moribund; nor can they war against such bowing and scraping when only moments later they enshrine their destructions and acts as cult objects in the same institution they were bent on destroying’. According to Kaprow, an alternative to this situation of stupefying professional self-regard would be to treat the entire enterprise of art as a form of ‘low comedy’ wherein all its participants would merrily ‘give up all references to being artists of any kind whatever’. Such playful misdirection is at the heart of Kaprow’s concept of the ‘un-artist’ and builds on his earlier framing of Happenings (Reviews AM355).

Corris, Michael. "The Un-artist." Art Monthly 357 (June 2012). 
    http://www.artmonthly.co.uk/magazine/site/article/the-un-artist-by-michael-corris-june-2012.

In further reading I found that he was deeply influenced by Jackson Pollack and the playful nature by which his work was created. I appreciate his drive to create art from everyday life and everyday objects, I believe I'm there on a small level, by creating work that can actually be used. 

Just for fun here is a photo of the "Jam Car". 

Under Our Skin

Verónica Peña and Hector Canonge
Under Our Skin
PAO Gallery
10/12/16

Prior to the performance the artists gave us a introduction to their body of work. Based on all they have accomplished it feels great that I got to experience a performance. They have a rich history of performance art. 

The performance was great. They began by slowly and deliberately walking around the square of plastic. Then they took out the objects they had been carrying with them. The most striking part of this was when Hector began chewing and spitting out the flowers over Peña. I couldn't help but think about how humans have chewed up nature and spit it back at mother earth. 

This was such a great experience that I hope Purdue would continue to do more of.

Image from the Exponent

Charles Gick: Dirt and Flowers

Charles Gick

Dirt and Flowers: and other things we eat and breathe...

9/12/2016-10/10/2016

This was a great show, and a great collection of Charles's work. I enjoyed attending this show, but I also really liked going to a solo show for a professor. It helps me understand the instructor better by seeing their work. 

The spoons and the coat are my two favorite pieces. I enjoy the simplicity of the spoons, and how much the circular display resembles a clock, time, and the cyclical nature of earth. The coat is my favorite. It has so many layers to explore and the final display above the cracked earth is stunning. I like that over time the contents of the bags will naturally change and decay, and continue to change the color of the piece. 

Alysha Kupferer: Unsustainable Systems

Alysha Kupferer

Unsustainable Systems

Fountain Gallery Lafayette, IN

I really enjoyed Alysha's show. The piece on the right of the previous image is my favorite. Her previous series, Visible Manufacture, inspired this series. I find the previous work even more interesting. She talked about how it inspired this show during the gallery talk that Molly and I attended.

In Visible Manufacture she worked in the IU Museum as a factory worker that constructs shirts and then secondly as a retail worker who sold these shirts in the gift shop. She is bringing to light the amount of work that goes into an item as simple as a white t-shirt. I appreciate that she can do this in such a interesting and poignant way.

While talking to her I also realized that she attended Purdue for undergrad and that I also knew her brother while I was in undergrad.

Here are a few images from her website of the previous work.

Film : The Lobster

The Lobster
2015
Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Starring: Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz

This movie is interesting. 

It has some great moments visually and makes you say WTF pretty much the whole time. It has such a pessimistic view of love and relationships that I don't think I'll ever watch it again or recommend it to anyone. 

I do appreciate Rachel Weisz as the narrator. It builds in a sense of anticipation as you wait to meet her character. But I also generally love TV, movies, musicals with narrators. 

On the website for the movie you can take a 10 question quiz to determine the animal you should be. hahaha. Here are their suggestions for me.

Response to Camera Lucida

Roland Barthes
Camera Lucida
1980

Roland Barthes is a literary theorist and philosopher. He published this book partly as a eulogy to his late mother. The book is broken down into two parts each with short thoughts about photography. He develops two terms to talk about the different realms a photograph can exist in.

studium: cultural, linguistic and political interpretation

punctum: personal detail, relationship it has to the object or person that was photographed

Quotes:
"What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repairs what could never be repeated existentially." - pg.4

"The fatality (no photograph without something or someone) involves Photography in the vast disorder of objects-of all the objects in the world: why choose (why photograph) this object, this moment, rather than some other." - pg.6

"For the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity." - pg.12

"It seems that in Latin 'photograph' would be said 'imago lucid opera expressa'; which is to say: image revealed, 'extracted', 'mounted', 'expressed' (like the juice of a lemon) by the action of light." - pg.81

I like this book and it was nice to come back to it. I read it in undergraduate and re-reading it again gives me a new perspective. I also enjoy a lot of his commentary on photography vs. cinema, although that wasn't in the assigned sections.

Crit #2

So this is an installation I did at the West Lafayette Public Library. It will be up until the end of the month. I will document it over the course of time and then collect all the cards at the end. These are a few photos of the day of. I have a stop motion video from the night of and will compile that soon.

First coating of Anthotypes

New Cyanotype

Quilt 1 

I prefer the quilt with-out the maple leaf. I have some leaf skeletons that I would like to use for the remaining space in an s curve shape. I am going to have Sun look over the pattern with me, because she has a stronger design eye, especially since this is textile based. 

Towards a Philosophy of Photography

Key Quotes:

"It is a mistake to decipher images as if they were "frozen events." On the contrary they are translations of events into; situations; they substitute scenes for events."- 2

"The function of technical images is to emancipate their receivers from the need to think conceptually". - 6

"Technical images thus suck all of his-tory into their surfaces, and they come to constitute and eternally rotating memory of society." - 7

Research: 

"For Flusser, photography is not only a reproductive imaging technology, it is a dominant cultural technique through which reality is constituted and understood". - Taken from wikipedia which is quoting Becker, Claudia, "Image/Thinking", POP, 2 (2), p. 251

"The photographer’s gesture as the search for a viewpoint onto a scene takes place within the possibilities offered by the apparatus. The photographer moves within specific categories of space and time regarding the scene: proximity and distance, bird- and worm’s-eye views, frontal- and side-views, short or long exposures, etc. The Gestalt of space–time surrounding the scene is prefigured for the photographer by the categories of his camera. These categories are an a priori for him. He must ‘decide’ within them: he must press the trigger." - Flusser (Taken from Wikipedia)

My thoughts/Notes:
Oral History (Magical)> 
Linear Texts (non- Magical)> 
Traditional Images (Magical) > 
Technical Images (Non-Magical) 

    Yields the desire to create Magical Texts


This abundance of photos/videos leads to a "mass civilization" that has a core bank of similar reference points. For example I can meet anyone my age and we know exactly what was happening to us and remember the video footage from 9/11. But all of us might not have read the same texts.


I think that the magical oral history still exists as a part of family history. You can hear stories about ancestors where a photograph for that event didn't exist; will this still happen in the future? 

Critique 8/24

Here is a list of the artists that were mentioned last night:

Duane Michaels

Thomas Struth

Vivian Maier

Mariko Mori

Carmen Freudenthal and Elle Verhagen

For those of you looking to learn some video techniques, Fabain created a series of videos that shows all of the skills we learned last semester. They are on the right hand column of this website.

http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~fwinkler/AD61600_S16/

Work I'm loving this Summer

thomas mailaender

Francesca Woodman Notebook

Seasonal Color Wheel

Christine Elfman 

German Silk quilt from 1774

Various early 1900s quilts