Assignment # 2 -Social Commentary

  Social Commentary, Critique, Parody

So many ideas.... not sure which way to go.

 Possible options.

1. Mom, there's nothing to eat in this house (taken from my everyday experience)

Giant fridge loaded with food, just either too "healthy" or needing to be prepared in some way.

Compared together with some very impoverished setting with child truly starving.

2. The White Picket Fence (American Dream)

reality of what lies behind the closed doors of our homes and the way we would be shocked

 to know the real story.

3. Woman running on Treadmill while smoking

4. School Bullying

Very passionate about this subject 

5. Vacation Paradise

Throngs of rich people sunning themselves in a decadent tropical setting juxtaposed with

very impoverished natives waiting on them. 

I am artistically attracted to the work of Andy Warhol and other Pop Artists also, so I would 

 like to come up with something along that line, really.

My plan is to just surf around and start pulling ideas together and hope the flow will start 

to take flight. 

In addressing the copyright law question, I envision probably manipulating borrowed

material in such a way that it won't recognizable to it's original form. 

  

Fair Use -Manny Garcia and the A.P. vs Shepard Fairy

The question raised is:
 Should Artist Shepard Fairy have been able to use the likeness of photographer Manny Garcia's photo of President Barack Obama to create his own piece of work titled "HOPE". Mr. Fairy's lawyers argued that this fell under the copyright laws section entitled "fair use".

Being a photographer myself , my first reaction to the photo vs artist print was to say "Heck yeah , that is not fair, this is obviously too close to   the photographers copyrighted picture. However , after reading the actual Stanford article I must conclude that it falls under the Commentary and Criticism category the laws speaks of a requirement is to transform the work with the extent of enlightenment.
This could be argued successfully with the fact that the artist used the word HOPE on the piece as a way to enlighten the public with this image.

Materializing New Space

While I was unfortunately unable to attend the Artists Reception and Lecture on opening day of this exhibit "Materializing New Space" by artists Jaime Kennedy and Kelly Urquhart, I recently toured the gallery and viewed these works on my own. The art exhibited was a collaboration by the artists using drawings, sculpture, digital film photography, and in some instances hand crafted ink.

Upon first glance the collection did nothing to spark any feeling of real interest in me other than, honestly, the need to somehow gather information to use in my class assigned critique. I rarely have found myself this ambivalent toward the artwork that I have seen hung here in the Pearl Conard Gallery. While I am usually quite drawn to the simple starkness and contrast of black and white
art, this collection took some time to "grow on me".

I guess I was mostly drawn to the "Hung, Drawn and Quartered Series", and in particular the "Nesting" series. These images were very interesting visually, and I appreciated them for their artistic value.

In the Artist Statement I found some very useful information that helped me to look beyond my original
confusion and to appreciate the great thought and idea process that went into this work. Not to mention the fact that so many steps had been used in completing each of these composites where I had quickly
assumed they were probably created mostly in Photoshop. This made me stop and really view the pieces in a more enlightened frame of mind . Suddenly they came to life and I started to understand
some of what I think the artists were trying to provoke in thought. Very interesting that the artists were
hoping to show "the dichotomy that exists between the natural systems that function within the world against the human systems, which attempt to modify, control , and improve upon these natural systems of order.

Perhaps my favorite of the collection was #17, "Steal a March". Being the largest print in the exhibit, I think it anchored it quite nicely. It had a rather "dark" vibe to it like a Grimes Fairy Tale, or something of the such from my childhood. Many things caught the eye as one tried to put the "story" together. The most surreal being the bird in the giant flying apparatus. This , I think, gave the piece it's overall ominous tone.

All in all , I believe with all of the very tedious work these two artists put into these pieces that they
have succeeded in their quest. The work in the end pulled me in long enough to examine their idea.

Assignment 1- Psychological Self-Portrait

Assignment 1- Psychological Self-Portrait

Well, project 1 is completed.. for now. I would loved to have

created a piece that portrayed all the ideas and images that have

danced through my head as I imagined this work in progress.

Unfortunately, my technical skills are just beginning.

I chose the basic mood of the piece as being an urban setting

that I feel most alive and invigorated in. The photograph was 

taken in NYC. I love the way the the tall buildings are accentuated

by the curve of the fish-eye lens. The clock in the scene is what I 

feel the eye is most drawn to and so I feel this also greatly represents

my current state of mind , TIME, and the utter amazement of how fast 

it moves in life! There's just never enough of it!

After using a quick selection mask, inverted, I cut out the plain looking 

skyline and hoped to fill it in with possibly a very "contrast-y" scan.

I played around with many different background (skyline) effects to try

 and highlight the overall mood and had a hard time choosing, but selected

 as the final one a gradient black and white that I manipulated on the

layer until it was placed in the most appealing way.

While I feel over-all this is a piece that may represent my personality

in some way and I do like the way it looks for now, I can't help but

wish I could have created more.

 Staying optimistic and working on the basics until that can be achieved!

  

Assignment 1 work in progress

This is not actually a work in progress yet, just a picture to represent the beginning plan.

OptimissmPessimism

Christiane Paul Digital Art, Chapter 1

In  my review of the first chapter of Christiane Paul's book "Digital Art", I was struck by  a few notions of my own in relation to her writing.

 I think the first thing that came to mind was that maybe we sometimes forget that long before the inception of digital imaging, or "Photoshop" , as it is now referred,  most art could arguably have been altered in some way to represent what the artist themselves wanted the viewer to see, and not necessarily what was the original scene,  true image or object as it existed. Also, I was reminded that until now I had not really considered how vast the influence of the "Digital Age" had on such a broad scale. With photography being my main artistic concentration, it has been of little interest to me in the past to take much time in consideration of other art forms beyond their initial impact visually. 

For example, I was immediately drawn to and interested in the work of Nancy Burson titled "Beauty Composites" from 1982. In her morphing several images of older day film stars faces in comparison to the same with several more (then) modern day stars it was interesting in a few ways. First, how upon looking at the two composites side by side, one could immediately identify the time period from which  either had taken place in regards to the evolution of modern day facial features. Also, very interesting to me is the fact that while every one of the women's faces were very unique and also familiar in my mind, together neither one of the composites resembled strongly any of the faces the artist used.

Another artist, Lillian Schwartz, in her 1987 work, Mona/Leo, merged the image of the MonaLisa's face with the face of it's original artist, Leonardo DaVinci's. Instantly it was clear to me how very similar these two subjects were in appearance. Before glimpsing this work, I am quite sure I would have not made that connection.

The work of the group called KIDing , titled" I love Calpe 5", from 1999, satirizes the idea that in our modern day advertising ventures many times the true point of interest  is "blurred" out or overshadowed by the larger than life images of it's advertisers or sponsors. The expression of the sponsors identity itself then almost becomes more of the accent than the actual thing they were, in fact, supporting.

Lastly, artist Charles Cohen in his use of abstraction through erasure, takes pornographic scenes and shows us only the solid whited out images of the person(s) outline leaving much more to our imagination and thus, in my opinion, making the images more apt to be examined and pondered over than what the graphic "true" image would have provoked.