Photos, prints, book, exhibit

This project was quite the process for me. For the Something is Happening photos project, I really did not have many ideas going into it, and I ended up taking photos of the whiteboards in my residence building and other buildings on campus. I like the concept I had in mind, because something quirky about Draheim is that the residence is kind of a ghost town - nobody really interacts with one another much, and few people live in the building compared to other residences on campus. The one place where people are constantly engaging with one another is on the whiteboards, particularly the one on the wall in the 2nd floor restroom. There's always a super funny mix of messages like "good luck on midterms! :)" or "believe in yourself <3" and then there's "SOMEBODY LEFT THEIR BLOODY TAMPON IN THE SHOWERS! FUCK YOU AND I HOPE YOU FAIL YOUR FINALS." I think it's pretty funny that that's the way we've all chosen to communicate. 

A particularly intense day for the whiteboard

The execution was not quite satisfactory for me, though. I didn't check out a camera in time before the weekend, so I used my iPhone 7 camera which isn't the best. There was glare in most of the pictures of whiteboards, because I couldn't get all the room lights to turn off since the switches are automatic. Overall, I wasn't very satisfied with the quality of the photos I showed the class, so for my Blurb book, I used my favorite photos of colorful mushrooms that I'd taken between two hikes in the past year or two. Nayla recommended that I use a grey background for the pages and I think that really worked out, and even though the book was expensive, I like that I'll always have this collection of my photography. I think I'll give it to my parents to keep because it's pretty high quality.

For the photo exhibit in Wriston, I took the advice of Johnie and a couple other classmates and went with the red mushroom photo. Composition-wise that was probably the best, even if I preferred the yellow mushrooms to the red ones. I came up with the title "Bitten" on the spot, because of all the bite marks in the mushroom. Honestly, when I was taking photos of the mushrooms, it sort of bothered me that so many of the mushrooms had holes or bite marks or slits in them, but I think that's part of the charm. I called the book "Sneaky Shrooms" because on one of the hikes, my brother described the mushrooms as "sneaky" because of how they blended in, and was impressed at how quick I was at spotting mushrooms from a distance. 

"Bitten"

Noisemakers

The doll noisemaker on the telephone - my personal favorite

I think the term “global village” speaks to the notion of interconnectedness. “Interconnectedness” resonates with me and the type of art I like to create, because I leave things around, and I do it because it makes me feel involved with the environment owing to the way the location I choose for leaving a piece of artwork influences how it is perceived. “The environment as a processor of information is propaganda” (McLuhan, 142). When Emmeth and I were considering ideas for this project, we liked the thought of leaving things around the school. We ended up making two quite aesthetically different noisemakers, and I took 89 photos and edited 20 in PhotoShop. At first I was focused on where would look most uncontrived for the noisemaker to appear, especially with Emmeth’s, because the colors she used were more subdued and natural-looking, so the choice of where to take the photo was based more heavily on the noisemaker. At one point, I went into the props storage room in the theater department, and started poking around there for places to put the doll. Towards the end, the photos I was taking of both noisemakers were based more on the ambience of the location, the lighting and other environmental aspects. I was especially trying to make the doll noisemaker look as creepy and haunted as I could with camera angles and shadows.

Flickr Link

Outtake of the green noisemaker

The green noisemaker on the stage in Stansbury Theatre

Reflection Blog Post No. 2 -- Terri Warpinski and David Graham

 Reflecting on Terri Warpinski's presentation, I thought it was noteworthy that she adopted the artist label at three years old, yet it took many years for her to develop an emotional connection to art -- she stated that art did not provide much meaning to her throughout college, as she focused more on skill-building in her work. Warpinski stated that, at one point, photography was never a medium she really took seriously, owing to the fact that taking photographs seemed less involved with physical craftsmanship by the artist. I think it's pretty astounding that she went from having those attitudes to doing such deep, nostalgic, and emotive work with photography and collages. The project Warpinski is still in progress with, "Death(s)trip", the one where she photographs the places where people passed away and includes a written section about their story, was striking to me. I think photography is a superior medium for this sort of project, because the photographs  capture the location objectively. There is something more potent about seeing these places of death when you know they were captured as-is with the camera, for some reason someone painting it or drawing it would remove some of the objective reality from it, I think. Warpinski's artist touch with editing and angles, supplemented by her writing, bring that location's beauty to life and honor the lives lost there. 

This was my favorite work of Warpinski's aesthetically. I think the composition is beautiful and I really like the old photo, paper-y, faraway feeling it gives.

Ripple Effect, Smythe and Bybee Lakes, 2002

I'll be honest, I do not remember as much about what David Graham said about his works, but I really loved the bright, saturated colors in his photographs and the juxtapositions he captured. Particularly I was drawn to the photo of the building and the truck with the landscape painted on it, as well as the photo with the school buses floating half-submerged in the water. It is called "High Water" and I can't save a photo of it on my computer so I won't include the picture in this post, but that one reminded me of crocodiles chilling in a swamp with their backs above the water and I really appreciate the element of humor in a lot of his photos, such as "Moby Duck".

Michel de Montaigne - Research Presentation

 

Illustration by Floc'H / The New Yorker

"Montaigne’s pursuit of the character he called Myself—“bashful, insolent; chaste, lustful; prating, silent; laborious, delicate; ingenious, heavy; melancholic, pleasant; lying, true; knowing, ignorant; liberal, covetous, and prodigal”—lasted for twenty years and produced more than a thousand pages of observation and revision that he called “essais,” taking that ordinary word and turning it into a literary occupation." (Article: Me, Myself, and I - What made Michel de Montaigne the first modern man? https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/09/07/me-myself-and-i)

It was very intriguing reading about Michel de Montaigne. He had a very unique upbringing; I find it fascinating that he was only spoken to in Latin for the first 5 years of his life, and that he was awakened by a musician every morning (his family was very wealthy). I had read the essay Of Cannibals in my French class last year, and it was that memory that spurred me to research more about him. I was not disappointed. He had this inscribed on the bookshelves in the tower in which he did his writing:

"In the year of Christ 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, his birthday, Michel de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments, while still entire, retired to the bosom of the learned virgins, where in calm and freedom from all cares he will spend what little remains of his life, now more than half run out. If the fates permit, he will complete this abode, this sweet ancestral retreat; and he has consecrated it to his freedom, tranquility, and leisure."

I know people of his time thought he was self-indulgent, but I think that inscription is really funny.

Michel de Montaigne - Presentation

Flickr Links

Traces

Sneaky Mushrooms

Microwaved chicken

I think this is one of my more nonsensical works. 

I had many ideas for this project, ranging from a swordfight using silverware to recording my sewing machine on all the different stitch settings.

I chose to record the hum of a microwave because it is ongoing, and the process of the microwave door opening and shutting, and the timer beeping, are familiar sounds that also provide us with a mental image that is easy to visualize.

I overlayed chicken sounds that progressed from the soft peeps of baby chicks to the sort of medium-deep clucks of pullets and then ended up with the agitated, loud whining of my oldest hen. Sort of going off the idea that something put in a microwave goes through a process of heating or cooking, a chemical change. What really happens when one microwaves a chicken? 

https://soundcloud.com/jean-lynn-kc/microwaved-chicken

Artist Talk: Carol Emmons

 Carol Emmons describes art “as places to physically explore and in which to compose personal reveries. In this way, the works also engage art itself, conceiving art as experience rather than object, and positing it as an ongoing collaboration between artist and viewer”. 

This is a line from Carol Emmons’ artist statement. I will say at the beginning of the talk, seeing Emmons’ work on the screen, it took me a little to realize that her art installations are life-sized for a viewer to experience by immersing themself in the exhibition physically; at first I thought she built smaller-scale environments and installed them. I was a big fan of the Egg Universe - Orphic Egg piece, “Cosmogony 2.0”, and particularly “Mneme XXIX: Tourism”. I found it interesting that many of her works involved the notion of time and the formation of the world, such as “Cosmogony 2.2” (2016), where she portrays the universe as if it was spun from a grandmother’s handiwork. Another thing I liked was how she chooses such cool light to create an interesting ambience in the installation. My favorite lighting was the one shown in “Miasma” (2022); that final picture on her website is really moody and a little surreal feeling because of the deep brown/orange cast on the walls and from the candles. She describes in “Mneme I: Kenilworth, Milwaukee” (1984) that Mneme comes from the Greek term for “memory” and how she creates artwork based on past environments she has experienced and subsequently evokes artistically, such as that piece inspired by the coffee table at her parents’ first house. I found many of her works to be nostalgic. In the last page of “The Medium is the Massage” by Marshall McLuhan, he states that “the environment man creates becomes his medium for defining his role in it” (82). One of the things Emmons spoke about was that research, site, and theme were most influential in facilitating strokes of artistic inspiration.  Particularly, since Emmons enters into a space and must decide how to transform that physical environment, the environment is both a medium for her to manipulate, and her artistic process is reciprocally influenced by that space.