Art at AIB

This was the work I brought to my residency. Better representational photographs can be found on my website, but this shows the space, and how I display the work generally, using a thin shelf.

Photography is so interesting. My work is strongly photo based, yet the photographs of it barely convey the presence the work possesses. A photo can never take the place of an actual experience. I think that's an idea I want to explore more. I just watched Hugo today. It's more of a children's film in some ways, but with very rich imagery. It was recommended to me during the residency, and I found it quite interesting. It shows some early film techniques, before the days of computers, and some of the ways illusions were created. It was interesting to me that the idea of cinema came up a few times in discussions of my work. It's something to consider.

I also just read an article on Jeff Wall published in the New York Times a few years ago. It was extremely interesting to learn about his approach, recreating events he sees in real life. He constructs his images in the way a painter would, and indeed, mimics the compositions and subjects of historcially important paintings. He was origanlly recomemended for me to look at because of his light box displays, something I might be interested in working with. Upon reading this article, I found many of his ideas resonating with my own. What I find most appealing about his work, however, is how it's accessable on several levels. A passerby can appreciate his work at face value, while an art historian could see the deeper nuances in the composition and subject matter. Photography in general has democratized art, and perhaps that's why it was inticially scorned in the art world. Because of this, photography has work harder to be sophisticated as art. The following quote by Wall shows his understanding of this:“Believing in the specialness of what you are photographing is a disaster,” he said. “Then you think the photograph will be good because of what is in it. Cézanne taught me that that is not true. An apple is not very interesting. He expunged any attachment to the subject matter, except what he brought to it. In the painting he would bring it back to life. Only by believing that his painting it is what would enliven it could he make it happen.”