The MFA Experience of Kiera Reese

Saturday, November 8, 2014

Printed Surfaces

I've spent the last few weeks experimenting on different printing surfaces. I've focused mostly on fabrics because their flexible, thin materiality is ideal for going through the printer. There were some interesting discoveries, and I plan to continue this exploration.

These are some of the results I've gotten so far:

Unprimed* eyelet fabric

Detail of eyelet fabric print

Print on unprimed fabric with rubber dots.

Detail of rubber dot texture

Simultaneous print on unprimed white muslin and sheer gauze

Detail of simultaneous print of sheer gauze and muslin

Detail of print with sheer gauze pulled back

Simultaneous print on two pieces of fabric: unprimed plain white muslin with white netted fabric

Detail on simultaneous print with two fabrics

Detail of white muslin without netting layer

Additional detail of white muslin without netting layer

Dry-brush coat of primer on faux silk fabric

*Note: unprimed in this post means I did not coat the fabric with Golden Digital Ground, which I've used in the past. This product helps absorb ink to achieve more accurate colors. Since accuracy is not my primary motive, this step seems unnecessary at the moment.

I will get better photographs of this work once I've accumulated more, perhaps towards the end of the month.

Some of the things I found very exciting was how when printing on multiple pieces of fabric, the fabrics actually move at two different speeds because of how the runners are set up on the printer. The top piece moves much faster. In the details of the print with the netting, you can see how the pattern of the netting gets more and less distinct on the muslin. This is because the netting continued to move through the printer, but the muslin didn't so the printer head made multiple passes over the same spot. Something else I love, so much, is what happened with the fabric with the rubber dots. In the full length shot, you can see an additional 6 inches or so of fabric above where the images ends. The original digital image size is actually the full length of the fabric (with a small border) but the rubber dots caused the fabric to move through the printer slowly and therefore it didn't print the full length. I actually had to pull on the fabric while it move through the printer to prevent it from jamming and stop printing altogether. The dark bands in the print show where the print moved particularly slow, where my tension was less (I tried to only pull enough to keep the fabric moving, but not to stop the slowing down effect).

I am considering how to present this work, and currently think I'll stretch them like a canvas. I also am considering less traditional forms too, for example hung like a clothes line or pinned to a board.

Additionally, I currently plan moving into less concrete images. During our last conversation, Cameron mention the actual image seems less important to my process, and while I am choosing images that reference time and transitional spaces, I think there is truth to that statement.

I am making some digital pinhole images that might work nicely for this.

Monday, November 3, 2014

Mentor Meeting 2

I had my second meeting with Cameron Martin two weeks ago. At the end of our first meeting, I had decided to continue working with abstract imagery, and begin experimenting with materials. My last post with the sliced flower imagery was an extend of my abstract work. I continued this with another piece as well, but found neither of these pieces resonated with me or expanded my exploration of time and space. I decided to then do multiple pass prints, like I had done previously with the window and the door prints, but this time on fabric and with imagery showing a progression of time (through a series of movements).

This second, horizontal piece is harder to read. It was a time lapse of ice cubes melting and moving across the plate. In hindsight, the light color of the ice cubes makes this image difficult in multiple passes, where the white is not preserved. I also applied strips of tape, adding and removing stripes for each pass through the printer, as a way to the measure analogue time. Some stripes remained on the entire time, some just one pass and some multiple passes. Overall, these pieces are more interesting to me, and are beginning to speak to a collapse of time that happens in the digital world.

I also created a few time lapse movies, in which I jumbled up the frames so that the evidence of time passing is visible, but the progression is lost.

Cameron was particularly interested in this time-lapse piece:

The screen door behind the main door created a grid-like pattern that appear to be an almost digital technique that was not created digitally. The stagnant nature of the shot causes the viewer to question what's beyond the edge of the frame, and it can almost seem to be a set-up of just a door. Cameron pointed out with much of my work, the digital sits on the surface, but with this piece, the digital takes a more secondary place. Cameron encouraged me to continue experimenting with materials, without self-censoring and wondering if what I'm doing is "right"--something I've found myself constantly doing as I approach the final semesters of this program.

After our meeting, I went to the MoMA to see the Christopher Williams show. I'm glad Cameron had mentioned to look for the red pamphlet that accompanied the show. It was a great show to see, and also just good to see the rest of the MoMA's collection. I haven't been for a couple years, and it was fun to see work I have now written about.

Christopher Williams

Giacomo Bella

Marcel Duchamp

Eadweard Muybridge

Eileen Quinlan

Mariah Robertson

Walead Beshty

John Coplans

Robert Gober

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.