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.
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| 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:
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| David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring. Pace Gallery. Large iPad prints. |
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| 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.
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| Paul Graham: Does Yellow Run Forever? Pace Gallery. |
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| Tom Fruin: Color Studies. Mike Weiss Gallery |
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| Tom Fruin: Color Studies. Mike Weiss Gallery |
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| Nick Cave: Rescue. Jack Shainman Gallery |
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| Nick Cave: Rescue. Jack Shainman Gallery |
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| Nick Cave: Rescue. Jack Shainman Gallery |
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| Pavel Wolberg at Andrea Meislin |
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| Jacob Hashimoto: Sky Fortress. Mary Boone Gallery |
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| Works on Paper. Sikkema Jenkins & Co |
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| Detail |
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| Lilly van der Stokker: Huh. Koenig & Clinton |
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| Laura Letinsky: Yours, more pretty at Yancy Richardson Gallery. |
Sounds like you have an excellent mentor match this semester!
ReplyDeleteAlso, I'm finding the multiple-pass prints very compelling. They have a certain luminosity that standard prints lack. Plus, it's kind of a form of printmaking! So you're capturing that memory, or, trace of the original image file by building volume.
Definitely like printmaking, which was interesting to think about! I though about doing one where I separated the colors, but decided thy was more of a technique exploration than a concept and decided not to for now. I definitely like the idea of of the physically printing being relevant to the work.
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