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".