Research
Research and inspiration that went into the ideas supporting my final project Afterglow
Statement
In my final project for Time-Based Practice, I want to explore the relationship between time, space, and light. Further developing some of the ideas generated in the mini-projects, such as distortion, dystopia, and the human body, I plan to make use of these themes and motifs to explore my physical identity in my body.
I have been experiencing sickness within my body and it has had both a mental and physical toll on who I am as a person. I want to represent how I feel about this unwanted physical change in my life through the distortion of the subject. When a subject is distorted it changes form. It becomes something else even though it is the same object. When I am sick, I have these distortions within me that make me something I’m not. Whether I’m agonizing in aches, or throwing up at the dusk of dawn, my body is constantly changing and morphing into something so uncomfortable words can’t even be put to. I want to exhibit this alienation of my body and being through the use of distortion.
Distort: Pull or twist out of shape
I want to explore and experiment with digital media and still imagery. Digital media has become an evergrowing medium for contemporary artists, where many people have been growing, adapting, and creating works from new technologies such as data moshing, digital distortion, AI, moving imagery, and installation. I want to utilize these techniques in the production of my work to create this distorted version of my physical being.
Readings
Photography and Cinema
David Campany
Stillness (Chap 1)
Company discusses the relationships between moving image and narrative reading. He describes the bridge between photography and montage to have an effect on audience, the individual reading of a narrative and how the way a narrative is constructed to portray meaning. He explores the relationship between photography and cinema, focusing on the theme of stillness. Company reflects on how moving image cinematography has had an effect on culture and how our consumption of media has changed due to progressive technologies.
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We read this chapter apart of Moving Image and resonated a lot with my photographic/moving image integrated practice. I want to reflect on it again looking through a bit of a different lens. I had used the idea of still imagery in video as a media form, however, I want to look into what this practice holds in meaning.
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Art and the Film Still (Chap 4)
Campany explores the complex and evolving relationship between photography and cinema, focusing particularly on the role and significance of the film still in art, media, and visual culture. The essay examines how photography and cinema have influenced each other since cinema's inception. While cinema is moving and time-based, photography is static, yet the film still bridges this gap, offering a frozen moment from a moving sequence. Artists and photographers have repurposed film stills to explore themes of memory, time, and narrative. This practice reflects on how cinema shapes our visual and cultural imagination. Notable examples include works by Cindy Sherman and Douglas Gordon. The relationship between photography and cinema is not hierarchical but hybrid and reciprocal. Film stills stand as rich, interpretive spaces where photography meets narrative cinema and visual art.
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I read more into Campany’s work in Photography and Cinema and within this chapter, I discovered more ideas on still photography and its specific relation with video art. He talks about how video techniques and motifs have been used in photographic experiments as well as how photography is used in moving film. I want to instill the ideas of photography capturing and remembering a memory as well as the notion of creating narrative and time within moving artworks.
Artist Works
John Coplans
https://www.johncoplanstrust.org/interlocking-fingers
John Coplans is a British artist and curator who looks into the human body using extreme close-ups to focus in on detail and distort the human body. I was referred to Coplans work from my critique on the first assignment and was intrigued on how he perceives himself as a naked vessle to view the world. It is interesting to see this blank grey slate that is exhibited as there isn’t any sort of indication of positive or negative feelings towards Coplans own depiction of his body. I think this is quite powerful as he simply just documents his body in that specific time he lives in. I am inspired by this thought as it was what I want to achieve in myself, almost like my dystopia, whereas I want to communicate more of an uncomfortable being of time that I’m in currently.
"I photograph my body. I generalize it by beheading myself to make my body more like any other man's. Nakedness removes the body from the specificity of time: unclothed, it belongs to the past, present, and future. It is classless, without country, unencumbered by language, and free to wander across cultures at will.”
Roni Horn
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https://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/2790-roni-horn/#
Rodi Horn is a New York artist who explores the relationships with identity, nature and perception. Her uncertain and uncomfortable works examines the human body in space and time.
“The endless subtle shifts in the work’s appearance place it in an eternal state of mutability, as it refuses a fixed visual identity.”
“Notions of identity and mutability are also explored within Horn’s photography, which tends to consist of multiple pieces and installed as a surround which unfolds within the gallery space. Examples include her series ‘The Selected Gifts, (1974 - 2015),’ photographed with a deceptively affectless approach that belies sentimental value. Here, Horn’s collected treasures float against pristine white backdrops in the artist’s signature serial style, telling a story of the self as mediated through both objects and others—what the artist calls ‘a vicarious self-portrait.’ This series, alongside her other photographic projects, build upon her explorations into the effects of multiplicity on perception and memory, and the implications of repetition and doubling, which remain central to her work.”
David Noonan
https://www.mca.com.au/collection/artists/david-noonan/
David Noonan is a Ballarat Melbourne and London artist who works with found imagery and footage in his material artworks.
Mnemosyne (2021), the artwork on the left, is a 16mm film transferred to video, colour and sound with a runtime of 20:35 minutes. This work is exhibited at the Museum of Contemorary Art Australia and I was lucky to go see it apart of a group exhibition. Here he has used a roll of 16mm film that is slowly panning across 8 monitors. Ink drips down absorbing the film and obstructing and distorting its imagery. This piece reminded me a lot of my photogram process with cyanotypes as the water dispirts the ink and slowly morphs and shapes it. It is accompanied by a slow chime sound that creates a soothing atmosphere. This piece is exhibited on 8 monitors suspended in the air. It is interesting how each monitor isn’t calibrated so it almost separates each frame, and creates an individual art form, reminding viewers of its digital medium.
