The MFA Experience of Kiera Reese: September 2014

Sunday, September 21, 2014

Flower cut

I am continuing to work with the abstract slicing technique I started at the beginning of last semester. Below is my most recent image and video created from it:

I tried to make the video smoother, with more frames. Photoshop can apparently only handle 72 frames per animation, so I had to make it in 4 segments and piece it together in iMovie. It was extremely time consuming, and I'm not entirely thrilled with it. I think flowers were not the best choice. I wanted an image with shallow depth of field, which would kind of snap together in the center at the flowers, but remain fairly abstract until that moment. The flowers sit on top too much though, I need to reconsider that technique, probably fragmenting the image differently. The flowers are too decorative I think as well. I am now working with images that are more snap shots of my life. I think it will make the work more personal, while avoiding misleading environmental reads of the work.

I attempted to salvage something usable from the above image, because I did find the lower half interesting. These are some crops. I think a triptych is potentially interesting as well.

I plan to attempt some physical experiments soon. (Waiting for some supplies to come in the mail!) I was looking at Wade Guyton. His work depends on on the conflict between the materials and the printer, often resulting in streaks and other imperfections. I have a couple ideas, but we'll see what happens. In the mean time, I've been researching some of David Hockey's polaroid images, when he'd create large scales collages. He commented in one interview that these collages compressed four hours of time in a single work, and I think including multiple images in my work could be interesting, if it portrays a passage of time.

Thursday, September 11, 2014

Mentor Meeting 1

I met with Cameron Martin, my mentor this semester, earlier this week and am very excited to be working with him. The meeting went very well. I came into it feeling rather scattered. I have many ideas and directions pulling me, and I found the our conversation grounding. I brought samples of most of my work from this program as well as my most recent experiments. (This may have been excessive. I've found sometimes there can be suggestions to do things I've already done and hoped this would move as past that.)

I had tried a new technique just before our visit that I'll call "opacity prints." I isolated elements digitally, lowered the image's opacity and then ran the physical paper through the printer multiple times.

10% Opacity, 13 passes through the printer total

My thought was the registration would be off and there would be a "ghost image" affect, but actually, the printer was better than I expected. If you look at the edges closely, there is a slight staggering, but the general affect is a dull, blurry, bad print.

Cameron suggested maybe moving the image digitally to get a stronger affect. We discussed what it means to do something physically versus digitally, and using different substrates (less traditional perhaps). This is something I'm interested in doing again. I miss the physical interaction with art and the experimental aspects that can entail.

He also responded well to the gifs of the abstract work, in a way that makes me consider them more seriously. He talked about how the gifs have this automatic time element, which is interesting to my content, but it could be equally interesting to achieve this time element in a static image. Cameron felt many of the images referenced digital technology, but not in an expected way. This brings the content to the foreground. He suggested to reference the digital, but not as the first thing. Also, if I pursue the more abstract direction, to not be accidentally decorative.

Cameron said to be aware of motive being distinct from content and meaning. I think it is helpful to think of art in this way. What motivates the work? What makes it successful for me? If it's abstract, what do I imagine the content to be? When considering scale, how does it affect the viewing distance or how the viewer can enter?

After our meeting, I visited several galleries in Chelsea that Cameron recommended. It was very worth while. There's a such a variety of work. The whole trip was extremely beneficial. I forget sometimes how isolating it can be artistically in my corner of New Hampshire. To see the complete list of the galleries I visited, look at the exhibition page.

This is some of the work I saw:

David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring. Pace Gallery. Large iPad prints.

David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring. Pace Gallery.

Also at Pace was a great video installation by David Hockney. Hockney used a grid of nine cameras to film a drive down a road and the result was an extremely vivid "nine point perspective." It was very memorizing. I appreciate his approach to understanding time and perspective.