07/12/2015-11/12/2015..
This week, I have been approaching the concluding stages of my Research Report. It has taken a different format and content than I had originally planned for, but I feel that it has moved me through this unit, and I feel that this unexpected outcome will push my creative practice through unit BA3b. I began this unit with an aim to work with collage, however, I have ended up experimenting with moving image and photography. I believe that these three mediums have resulted in unexpected, positive outcomes and I feel less restricted and a lot more confident in my themes and ideas after branching out and trusting my thematic, contextual and artists' research.
Below is the partially edited video of me re-creating a celebrity selfie from the descriptions my sister provided me with. I think that it needs some sound, or another element, such as the words my sister used to describe the celebrity who's selfie I am recreating in order to make the piece work as a piece of art. I'm going to focus on my research report, and consider new ways of using this collaborative exercise within my practice.
I had a visit to London planned for Wednesday this week for a separate reason, however, I was able to fit in time to go to the Tate Modern, where I was particularly intrigued by collections of images by Simryn Gill, as well as Lorna Simpson.
"A Small Town at the Turn of the Century is a series of 39 type C photographs that were taken by Simryn Gill in Port Dickson in Malaysia, the town where she grew up. Two of the photographs from this series were exhibited in Sharjah Biennial 9. As the title of the series suggests, the photographs were taken at a significant moment: the turn from the twentieth to the twenty-first century. The images capture local people in local places, however each scene takes on a surreal and humorous twist – the faces in these photographs are hidden by tropical fruit. Watermelons, bunches of bananas and pineapples become substitutes for heads.
In A Small Town at the Turn of the Century, Gill uses photography for a familiar and traditional purpose - to capture portraits of people at a significant moment in time. The work affectionately documents a personal history of her hometown. However, the work also throws into question our approach to marking moments and memories that are important to us: The personal details that may make each of these images unique are comically discredited. The faceless people become impersonal ciphers of memory; like classified fruit, each person becomes a ‘type’ of memory. Gill’s photographs recognise our struggle to preserve memories in their purest form and humorously demonstrate the shortcomings of our cultural traditions in this regard."
Lorna Simpson
Five Day Forecast 1991
5 photographs, gelatin silver print on paper, 15 engraved plaques
displayed: 622 x 2464 mm
"Five Day Forecast is typical of Simpson’s work of the mid-1980s, with its formal combination of image and text and examination of the processes through which meaning and understanding take place. In these early works Simpson often used the image of a black woman, photographed cropped, or from behind, against a stark background, and accompanied by text panels. Both text and image are deliberately austere in style. Five Day Forecast was first conceived in 1988, at which time Simpson made two versions of the work using Polaroid photographs; one of these was subsequently damaged. In 1991 she decided to remake the work in an edition with silver gelatin print photographs which she shot with a large format 5 x 4 camera. This later version exists in an edition of three plus one artist’s proof; this is the second in the edition."
- Taken from the Tate Website
Both of these artist's have looked at their cultural identity and the identity of others, in a similar way to what I have been doing in my Research Report. I am now feeling more interested in using photography, specifically Black-and-White photographs, within my creative practice. I have noticed that I am naturally gravitating towards images which are square-shaped, I believe this is because they are similar to those I see daily on Apps such as Instagram. I have noticed that repetition creates an active, moving piece and I'd like to experiment with this more as I move onto the final project and BA3b.
My new idea (for BA3b) comes from some research I was completing as part of my Research report. I am still focusing on re-creation and documenting dressing up as characters, however, I feel that my previous outcomes weren't as successful as I would have hoped.
This idea comes from Taylor Swifts' music video for 'Bad Blood'. The video itself is set within a form of training camp, with Swifts' squad (powerful characters played by independent, well-known women. Each woman has her own individual skill, which is no doubt metaphorical for the respect Swift has for each of her pals.
The video represents strong women, and contemporary 'fourth-wave' feminism. It has received lots of positive and negative media attention, with critic Camille Paglia calling Swift a 'Nazi Barbie', and suggesting she uses her friends as performance props.
