Midterm Movie

As we approach midterms, I’ve been making a short film, if you could call 3 minutes of animating things a film. The putti became abstract shapes and tons of other things went into the little clips, including experiments with stop motion and found video. I just learned iMovie last week (thank you, online tutorial) so this has been a very exciting experiment! I’ve been struggling with knowing when to stop playing with it, and the last thing I need to resolve is the sound. Here’s a still from a stop-motion section.

Sooo this weekend is the weekend before midterms are due. I basically have mine put together for the most part. This is an image of it from far. It's pretty big. It's constructed with twigs and branches that run from the floor to up the wall. Attached are images I cut up of film noir scenes and other things portrayed human emotion. The project connects the human being with nature, intertwining the two into a crazy yet expressive conglomerate. Inside on a ledge, though hard to see here.., is a hand I constructed. Attached to it through the wrist are branches that extend upwards and have little images hanging down from them. This was my initial project before the whole thing exploded and climbed up the wall and then downwards.  I like the image of a hand reaching for things hence the imagery towards the top.

I'd write more, but ... it's midterm weekend.

text...

In the first few weeks i really enjoyed the exercises. They were fun and I easily let go of my need to plan everything out. However, as the projects get bigger and require more time I am constantly resisting the urge to make a diagram and a list of steps to help me finish. One thing that has been constant in most of my exercises is the inclusion of text. It is usually a small addition and for my midterm the challenge is to create everything out of newspapers and books. Often I find myself adding as many materials as possible to my projects but this limitation is becoming an interesting and still complex thing. The text isn't as much words as it is a design, but maybe that is because it is in italian...

(Picture of my wall space)

From the beginning...

So I kept forgetting to post but now I'm finally going to catch the blog up.

When I first came to Florence, I definitely had some vague ideas of how I would be approaching studio. I basically thought I'd be picking up where I left off and continue with my first love, painting. I quickly realized that it was time to think differently, at least I had to if I wanted to keep up with the class.

Fortunately, one particular collage during Theme Sequence led me on my track. The assignment was to create a collage with a specific site in mind. I started, thinking of a particular apartment, and eventually contrasted the memory of the site with the reality that it had been destroyed. This led me to ideas of absence and presence, dealing with the physicality of both in my work.

Anyway, I have started working with an installation in my studio space. I'm still playing with the idea of absence and presence, specifically referencing memories and visuals from my particular apartment, but also opening the idea up to other references to the same theme that exist in Florence. Here are a few images:

Week Six

As midterms approach, I find myself tightening up and reverting back to my over-analytical way of working....just because of the label "midterm."

This past week I have explored what capturing my ideas through video can offer...not only did I brush up on my video editing skills but I discovered the incredible narrative and depth that is possible with layering multiple videos on top of each other....now back to work.

early stages

Drawing from the beginning of February.

Light is reflecting off the ink---kind of an interesting effect but not what I was going for.

Some things I've been looking at recently:

http://www.maureenpaley.com/maureenpaley.php?color=yellow&element=42&id_cache=1-29

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETa7XW0PU1Y&feature=rec-fresh+div-r-5-HM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwMvXuSZ5Mw&feature=related

-Anna Hegarty

From the beginning...

Wall

Street

Yarn (Alpaca!)

Desk: beginning of February

I've been collecting and playing and thinking about art.

-Anna Hegarty

I am just playing my ass off--

To Rise

We thought our motives were ungrounded. We thought our actions would not approach any resolution. We separated that which has already been from that which is about to come forth. The space between what we have and what we hold became a space made empty, a point of division from which we thought we could never find our way.
But now we realize we have already met our course. That what we are doing and what we will do abides with what we have already done. Though we have made, we are making. Though we have spoken, we are speaking.

Pulling Things Together

This past week all of the exercises I’ve been doing in class have begun to shape themselves into some semblance of a midterm project plan. I’ve been able to look at the bulk of the work I’ve created in the past few weeks and tease out some of the recurring themes. It’s almost a relief to feel as if I’m now moving in a decided direction. I may not know exactly where my project is going to end up, but I think I have a little bit more information about what I want to create and what I’m working towards than I did when I started. It’s still a little rough around the edges, but hopefully I’ll figure it all out as time moves on.

Upcoming Midterm Project

For the Drawing midterm project, I started researching putti, or in English, cherubs, and their role throughout Renaissance art. Donatello virtually invented them, and the first sculpture is in the Bargello here in Florence! Since then, they've been synonymous with the "sculptor's goblins," helping hand out garlands and run errands, but are mainly used for comedic relief in churches, where the scenes from the Passion can get very depressing.
I wanted to explore this role and juxtapose images of these flying babies with war photography to show how unrealistic this goal is. The latter photograph is a collage of photocopy transfers in which the viewer is aware of the cherubs, but the photographs of the soldiers are much more abstract and fade into the background. However, this led to a more metaphorical plan to treat the putti as rests in sight and experiment with rhythm and motion. I am attempting to make a scroll this week that I can roll behind those 3 figures on the left, playing with motion and sound as patterning, much like my theme sequence experiments.

Bubble.

Suddenly, it’s midterm time, and we’ve been told to physically begin creating our projects from ideas we’ve been formulating since the beginning of the semester. This announcement caught me a little off guard—I’m used to assignments with a little more structure and restriction, and expect instructors to want to approve my idea before I begin. So in class on Tuesday, I felt lost, like nothing I was doing was leading me anywhere, and I didn’t feel ready at all to start something new. But then I realized that I had already come up with my project, a proposal I developed for an assignment for seminar course. At the time, I considered this idea to relate more to my work in theme sequence than the seminar’s focus on the “pocket,” but I had forgotten about those connections. So I’m actually only making one project for drawing, seminar, and theme sequence. (like they’ve told us, it really does all connect…)

My plan is to make a sphere I can fit inside of, its structure inspired by Brunelleschi’s dome. I will be enclosed in my “bubble,” able to see out of a few gaps and move around, and then will escape from it, through its destruction. This week I’ve been carefully considering my materials and have chosen insulation, bubble wrap, and saran wrap because these materials are meant to protect or enclose but are themselves insubstantial. I plan to cover the inside of my bubble with images that both emulate the inside of the frescoed dome and reference my personal history and artmaking—those things that make me stay in my bubble.

It seems a little strange to me that I came up with this idea a few weeks ago as something that I never seriously thought I could make, and now I’m already pretty invested in it. I’ve bought my materials. I started once and completely failed. (see picture of the mess of a green thing…) I started again, with new materials. I learned how to solder. I finished a mini sphere as a “sketch” of my project. Now I have to figure out how to make another one, four times bigger. But I can really envision the final result and I’m excited about the process I’ll be taking to get there.

Here’s my mini bubble, in process.

So this week was midterm project planning week. Since I've been working with sculptural models and things like depth, I carried that over into this box that I made.  It's still a work in progress. The exterior is done with gold special effects spray paint and the interior is me playing with curving landscapes, cutting images, and creating a weird sense of space. The sky is cut into descending pieces as it gets closer to the viewer while the tree in the front curves backwards to interrupt different planes of space. Then, the figure are slices into strips. The ones on the bottom disappear towards a vantage point in the landscapes while the ones from the trees pour down at an angle. I took film noir photos to slice up because I felt them to be very appropriate in portraying the varieties of emotion. The point of the piece is to combine displays of the human emotion with nature,  two topics I'm very interested in because I find both to be beautiful.  My midterm project is going to synthesize the two -- the human place inside such a beautiful world.

thinking thoughts

What I have gathered so far from the Theme Sequence course is that it is a course about keeping an open mind and treating the artistic process as an open-ended journey. This journey begins with experimentation, something we have been doing a lot during the first part of the semester. Some of the experimental exercises that we have done have included altering black and white photocopied images and altering postcards that we found. When first attempting these assignments, I tried to create stylized controlled images that for some reason I found compositionally interesting. With so many exercises all about altering images, this composition creating and sense of control got very tiring very quickly. After I couldn't stand making one more controlled composition, I just decided to give up my control and let the materials guide my compositions. For the photocopied image assignment, I kept ripping and gluing and re-ripping and re-gluing and re-re-ripping until the material developed a certain quality of complexity that I found appropriate. For the postcard assignment, I began experimenting with spraypaint and holding the spraypaint really close to postcard to see how the extremely compressed air would affect the paint. Over the course of these assignments, I tried using many different techniques, many of them stemming off of other techniques that had developed off of other techniques, and so on. Although I was very open with experimental techniques, I tried limiting myself to use only one technique that I found fitting for each postcard. I decided to work this way in order to create simplified emphasis on the qualities inherent to the individual postcards.

So far, I have really enjoyed my time in Theme Sequence. Throughout all the intense studio classes that I have taken at WashU, I have rarely had the opportunity to really sit, think, process and experiment. I have rarely had the time to think about my personal artistic process, something that is an integral part of discovering myself as an art student. This chance at artistic freedom has been an extremely refreshing change of pace, and I look forward to what the rest of the semester will bring.

Voice

As mentioned, one of our prompts was to translate words that resonated from our own writing into a visual piece.  Here is one result:

I won't include the word that triggered this page because after looking at it on my wall for nearly a month, the visual has taken on a different role in my vocabulary.  This ink drawing started, or was symptom of, a habitual repetitive mark, usually vertical, that recurred in other sketches for this class.  

By "habitual," I don't mean inadvertent, just not calculated.  The first month or so of exercises gave me a nice way to work: without editing before I had even begun.

                                               

The process of starting with language and then departing from it is important to me.  Usually my thoughts are more clearly articulated when I'm working in studio than when I'm speaking aloud.  Language should not be my final medium.  I had no say in the making of its connotations and structures.  

A New Way of Thinking...

I have never worked in the way that we've been working here in Florence before. I'm used to being given a concrete assignment or a specific task. In the past, I've always known what I wanted the final outcome of my projects to look like before I even began to work. I'm used to creating comps, sketches, and plans. I've never had to express a "personal narrative" in my artwork, so the Theme Sequence class is definitely going to be a different experience than I'm used to. I guess, for me, the "tradition" is my somewhat one-dimensional way of thinking of my own art and how I like to work. In the past I may have boxed myself in to a way of thinking and producing art that doesn't allow for personal experimentation or interruption. Some may think that’s a bad thing, but I knew (or thought I knew) what kind of art I liked to make and how I liked to make it. I worked with familiar mediums and themes; I became comfortable with myself and how I create artworks. Here, I’ve been told that a “true artist” isn’t afraid to play with unfamiliar and untried mediums, themes, subjects, but why can’t an artist know what he likes and stick with it? I’m a Communication Design major, so much of my art-making is based off of selling/communicating an idea, product, or information. Knowing what you want to communicate and committing to it before you start is all part of the process. In fact, it’s the most important part of the process. If you screw up that first step, you screw up the whole thing. So, in terms of this class, I’m a little out of my comfort zone, and the “revolution” is an entirely new way of thinking about and creating art.

Diving In

In the first few weeks we were confronted with the new. We were asked to make something from a mismatched pile of images. To bridge gaps and make connections through imagery. There was a lot of thinking, a lot of pondering a lot of blind action and spontaneous "making". Personally, I found this at once exciting and frustrating. What was I supposed to...do exactly? After some sitting and pondering I thought, oh well, i'll just see where it takes me. After all, with no instruction, who can really judge the outcome? With little concrete direction I dove right in and saw what could come of dripping some paint on a picture of a vase of flowers, of ripping, cutting, stretching and mark making. It just got crazier from there. Working in a truly uninhibited fashion is far more challenging then I could ever have anticipated.

From beginning to now

We started by working with ink blobs the first day of class- we looked at slides and drew them, trying to see images abstractly and a little more freely. Then we did story boards in ink of past memories. My favorite of mine was basically a blob that looked like my sister's bean bag chair because I was remembering how much I used to love to sit in it and watch her do her homework when I was in middle school. The blob was really simple but I liked the pattern it made. Then we wrote down our memories that we had illustrated and picked specific words from the story to illustrate. This was hard for me. Since then we've been altering photocopied images and postcards. I have found in most of mine that I make situations ambiguous by covering up specific spots and leaving other spots untouched so that the narrative in the image is unclear. This may turn into a theme in my midterm...

The work has been a lot more free-form and self exploratory than at WashU. It kind of threw me off in the beginning and I didn't know how to think about it, but I'm getting used to the structure.

I'm kind of at a block right now... but here are the things on my wall.
check this out! photoshop cookies

Beginnings

As several others have said below me, we’ve spent the past few weeks experimenting with mark-making on “found images”. The last three pieces were the results of images given to us in (I got kind of excited when the Jungfraujoch was one of the pictures). The first piece was made from a postcard purchased in Florence.

“Tell us a story from your day!” Each evening my roommates and I receive this prompt from our home stay family to start off dinner discussion. However, just as consistent as their inquiry is my desire and inability to tell them about Theme Sequence. How do I adequately explain, in Italian, our exercises of using marks to recreate traditions or altering found images and postcards? I just can't seem to find the right way to explain them. These exercises have been both frustrating and intriguing to me. Frustrating because until now, thinking has been the foundation of my projects. Intriguing because the exercises have forced me to do the opposite. To work without an end in mind, without consciously knowing what will happen. Through these exercises I have discovered instinctive patterns in my work that have caused me to consider the ideas of masking and layering in my work.

Kept in suspension

For the past month, we've been exercising the actions that we have always carried out. We've been elaborating upon the tendencies that we've always had. Even though these actions and tendencies are our own, we are sometimes unaware. We have to isolate them in order to realize the capacity of our own activity. We make a mark so that we know where that mark can go, what that mark can do, and how that mark can function. We alter in order integrate what is already there with what we are able to bring forth. This is what we are doing now, and really, this is what we've already been doing so far. Whether or not we were aware of it, in the classes we took back in the States, we employed these actions and tendencies the whole time. We mark, we alter, we operate, we integrate, we interrupt, and we move. We do all of this, all the time. Simply because we have isolated these actions here does not mean we have separated ourselves from them. As we move from one action to another, we try to make the connections--to bring the parts back to the whole, to bring what has been brought forth back to its source. I admit it: sometimes it feels as if we're being kept in suspension, poised at the outer edge of resolution. We're not quite ready to step forward because we haven't made a commitment. But then again, do we have to make a commitment? All I know is, the weight on our shoulders has grown heavy, and we do not have the means to carry it. Okay, I'm starting to speak in figures of speech. This is my cue to stop.

For the last four weeks we have been looking at altering things, specifically through postcards and photocopied pictures. Our first assignment to photograph things generated my favorite photo of botanical growth around stone and pipes. This theme of growth carried over into my mark-making, where I was attracted to little specks of things that move across the format. I am especially interested in the acetate and am excited to destroy more photos. These little marks making up a larger pattern has led me to experiment with wallpaper; I plan to create patterns to destroy because I like the aesthetic of something uniform broken up by a more evidently human, and therefore more organic, mark.

Painting?

For the most part, I’ve really enjoyed the class exercises so far, especially the alterations of postcards and photocopied images. It was exciting and liberating to be taking action on an image however I felt compelled to at a particular moment, just creating. I found the process somewhat mindless—in the sense that my actions were automatic and instinctive— but also exhilarating and completely absorbing. I am excited to continue exploring, but am a little concerned that what I’m doing is somehow too easy. Don’t I need to be thinking a little more? And didn’t the Abstract Expressionists already fully investigate this sort of markmaking? What could I possibly have to offer? I came to Florence expecting to really leave my comfort zone and be forced to experiment with new media, since I’ve been told that much of the work that comes out of the program is “non-traditional,” whatever that means. I love to paint, but was basically prepared to not pick up my brushes this semester. The exact opposite has turned out to be true. I’ve painted in all the exercises, and this week I’ll be making a few of these abstract paintings from scratch, something I’ve never done before. I’m excited to give it a try, and it’ll be interesting to see if I can transfer what I’ve done with found images to an image I have to create in its entirety.

Here are some close-ups of my wall...

http://www.zimoun.ch/

I think everyone should check this artist out. I tend to struggle with visual representation. I spend a lot of time thinking and writing, and for some reason it is difficult to translate those thoughts visually. I spend a lot of time coming up with complex visual narratives and, in the end,I  feel like the work is too thought out/overworked. I have learned to appreciate the power of simplicity, and I think Zimoun's work, although kinetically complex, is alluring because of the simple motions and sounds. 

This is my wall in my corner in the tiny back room. The first week we made blobs, the second week we took pictures on things in the street that have changed over time and then altered our own images. The third week we continued altering images, but in the form of post cards. I found a jar of almost dried gold paint and used it on almost all of the post cards. I also worked with collage and tearing paper to give the post card more of a structural body.

Week 3 Postcards

So for this week (3rd), we worked with altering postcard images. The course so far has been a progression of altering images where we've been free to cut them up, glue them down, and decorate/draw/paint on top of them.  For some reason, I personally have been drawn to creating 3D sculptural creations because I like creating context for the figures within the postcards. Here's one that I did thats 2D but involves overlap.  The Pieta is beneath the image on top. I'm trying to work with the concept of concealing vs revealing so the image of the Pieta is mostly concealed except for Mary's face, which is still discernible. Then I added leaves on a branch in the top left and string in an X on the right to create more direction and veiling. Eh Yup.

"Skhizein"

http://www.vimeo.com/6913172

I thought this little video was both clever and thoughtful.

I found this on a random website:
"Skhizein is a humorously strange animated short film by the French filmmaker Jérémy Clapin. The film has earned several awards, including The Cannes’ Kodak Prize for Best Animated Short and Animafest’s Best Film; it was a 2008 Oscar nominated animated short film."

Enjoyez s'il vous plait