2/25/10 Word Post: Change

–verb (used without object)

1. to become different: Overnight the nation's mood changed.

2. to become altered or modified: Colors change if they are exposed to the sun.

3. to become transformed or converted (usually fol. by into): The toad changed into a prince again.

4. to pass gradually into (usually fol. by to or into): Summer changed to autumn.

5. to make a change or an exchange: If you want to sit next to the window, I'll change with you.

6. to transfer between trains or other conveyances: We can take the local and change to an express at the next stop.

7. to change one's clothes: She changed into jeans.

8. (of the moon) to pass from one phase to another.

9. (of the voice) to become deeper in tone; come to have a lower register: The boy's voice began to change when he was thirteen.

Over time everything is bound to change from the way people look to the way that they act. Some have held that change is a consistent process, and rendered so by the existence of time. Others have held that the only way to make sense of change is as an inconsistency. I am trying to show that these inconsistencies can be used to show how people change over time.

“Change is the constant, the signal for rebirth, the egg of the phoenix.”
Christina Baldwin

Mortensen, Chris, 1985, “The Limits of Change,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 63: 1-10.

2/22/10 Artist Post: Gillian Wearing

Gillian Wearing's series "the Album" is the series that intersts me the most.

“The Album photographs are a continuing series, begun in 1993, featuring Wearing posing as members of her family. Costumes, wigs and meticulously crafted silicone prosthetic masks go into recreating, in detail, the snapshots and portrait images on which her photographs are based. The results are spooky and raise questions around loss, the passage of time and disintegrating identity.”

“However, it's an expensive process (each mask costs more than £10,000 to produce, followed by up to 40 rolls of film to capture the perfect image of Wearing inside it). Until recently the series consisted only of parents and siblings, two self-images and an uncle. Now there are two new additions to the album: Wearing's maternal grandparents.”

Inevitably, the further Wearing extends Album to include previous generations, the more her own position seems like an end point; the final name at the bottom of the family tree. "That's true - how to take it forward? I don't have any children, but if I did, I probably would use their pictures in this series. It's made me think about how people in years to come will be lucky, because they'll have photographs that go back through generations and generations of their family."

That last quote is shows how her work relates to mine. The photographs that I am recreating are of important meaning (first day baby came home, first time going to pick a pumpkin for Halloween, first prom, etc.). These photographs are ones that will be passed from generation to generation and it has been an interesting adventure to go back through generation after generation and see the same types of photographs.

Website
N/A

Interview
http://www.mattlippiatt.co.uk/Gillian%20Wearing.htm

Website
http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/wearing_gillian.html

2/18/10 Word Post: Environment

–noun

1. the aggregate of surrounding things, conditions, or influences; surroundings; milieu.

2. Ecology. the air, water, minerals, organisms, and all other external factors surrounding and affecting a given organism at any time.

3. the social and cultural forces that shape the life of a person or a population.

4. Computers. the hardware or software configuration, or the mode of operation, of a computer system: In a time-sharing environment, transactions are processed as they occur.

5. an indoor or outdoor setting that is characterized by the presence of environmental art that is itself designed to be site-specific.

In general, environment refers to the surroundings of an object. The environment in these photographs have changed drastically over time. Although it is just shown in the background it is still an important part of the image. Where people choose to take a picture says something about both the people in the image and the people that took the image. Going back to these same environments to see how they have changed over time is another part of this project.

“You see, it's never the environment; it's never the events of our lives, but the meaning we attach to the events - how we interpret them - that shapes who we are today and who we'll become tomorrow.”
Tony Robbins

“We begin to see, therefore, the importance of selecting our environment with the greatest of care, because environment is the mental feeding ground out of which the food that goes into our minds is extracted.”
Napoleon Hill

Artist Lecture Spring #5: Apocalyptic Writings

Today I went to a lecture that was about apocalyptic writings. There were four questions that the lecturer wanted us to discuss. Why is the end of world such a popular topic in American literature? How might this relate to America’s sense of its own newness and its sense of providential destiny? What causes do these authors imagine might bring about the end of the world? Is the end of the world a welcome event for American authors?

The apocalypse is popular in American Literature for a couple of reasons. Most of these apocalyptic stories emerge during times of upheaval, hence the reason that they are so popular right now. In places such as England, there is already a call for the novel, a very popular notion that holds a tradition in places like that.

We looked at artists such as Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire “Destruction,” 1836. It was the last of four in a series. He believed that the American Empire would be destroyed as the Roman Empire had years before. Another one I really enjoyed was “The Last American” by John James Mitchell. By 1902 we had started to get other reasons as to why the world was going to end.

Apocalypse is a good way to show class, gender, etc. through a text. On a literary stand point the fast burn apocalypse works better then the soft apocalypse. The fast ones are more hopeful and the slow ones are more depressing and more like a cautionary tale. The fast endings tend to critique society, leaving to recover and start over. It is defiantly more exciting then the slow apocalypse where people tend to die and a lot of the times it is because of some type of sickness. In the 1950’s it was considered irresponsible for a person to think of any other ending of the world besides a nuclear war. It is scarier now because we don’t know where the threat is coming from. Apocalypses work very well in film.

Artist Lecture Spring #4: Hank Willis Thomas

Today I attended a lecture for Hank Willis Thomas. I must say that I enjoyed his work a lot. In his series Pitch Blackness he was dealing with the loss from his cousin being murdered. He learned to be himself without his shadow. The next series that he showed us was Sometimes I See Myself in You. It was three images on a black background. One of him, one of his mother, and one where he had photoshopped their faces together. While viewing a lot of his images you start to see that family is very important to him.

My favorite series that he showed was when he figured out that he tended to use a lot of frames throughout his images. The ones where he had people posing with the frames in a studio setting were not that interesting. However, the ones where he gets volunteers to hold the frame over something else. The one that caught my eye the most was the one where two people were holding the frame between them and it caught another couple in the frame. That wasn’t the interesting part though. The best part was the people off to the side that are more interested in what was going on with the photographer and the models then with the other people in their own group.

The other project of Thomas’s that I really enjoyed was his series Along the Way. His friend mentioned to him that a lot of Thomas’s work was a bit depressing because he was still trying to deal with his cousin’s death. So he decided to make a project where he had people stand in front of the camera for 30 seconds and they can do whatever they want. I absolutely fell in love with this project! As a whole it is intriguing and when you see the videos up-close they are hilarious. A lot of the people danced around or did other things which being recorded but there was also some that just stood there awkwardly. I appreciate that he didn’t exclude these videos.

“Always consider meaning when it comes to photography. So much interaction in a split second.” -Hank Willis Thomas

Website
http://hankwillisthomas.com/splash.html

Artist Lecture Spring #3: Paul Pfeiffer

Today I went to a lecture by Paul Pfeiffer. Pfeiffer messes with videos of celebrities and famous athletes to achieve what he is trying to show. Pfeiffer said that he “enjoyed the openness in the way you approach a painting and thought he could achieve the same effect with video.” We were told that many of his acclaimed videos were shown on screens that would be miniature in size and adequately sized for a dollhouse. The screens being this small made what was being shown very intimate.

One of the specific things he is thinking about a lot right now is what he thinks about identity as in race or sexual identity because its one of the things he is forced to rethink as times and sensibilities have changed. He new wants to change the context throughout his images.

One piece that I rather enjoyed was “24 Landscapes.” It was 24 images of the beach that had originally had Marilyn Monroe in them, which Pfeiffer had photo-shopped out. Pfeiffer has the idea that both the origin of the image is important but not important all at the same time, which he considered counterintuitive.

Another piece that I was very interested in was the one about the chicks and their lifespan. Pfeiffer made a video of chicks being born and then raised into chickens. He ran surveillance on them for 24 hours a day for 75 days. Then showed it in the PATH on the way to the world trade center. Started showing video on Easter Sunday 2001. It is about human behavior and how it is related to animal behavior, it is a slight reflection on yourself.

“Art making is not just abut making picture or objects but has a real psychological meaning to it. Any object that an artist plays with, consciously or not, impacts the viewer. “ -Paul Pfeiffer

Gallery
http://www.gagosian.com/artists/paul-pfeiffer/
http://www.thomasdane.com/artist.php?artist_id=12

2/15/10 Artist Post: Duane Michals

Duane Michals (born February 18, 1932) is an American photographer. Largely self-taught, his work is noted for its innovation and artistry. Michals' style often features photo-sequences and the incorporation of text to examine emotion and philosophy, resulting in a unique body of work. Duane Michals emphatically defines himself by what he is not, saying first and foremost that he is not a photographer. “I am an expressionist and by that I mean I’m not a photographer or a writer or a painter or a tap dancer, but rather someone who expresses himself according to his needs.” Michals never learned traditional photographic methods, and that lack of education has contributed, he believes, to his success. In his own words, he never had to “unlearn” anything and was therefore always free to be different.

Duane Michals “The House I Once Called Home” is a series in which Michals traveled back to his the home he lived in when he first started to get into photography. When he arrived there he soon learned that it was going to be torn down because it was completely decrepit. We are both revisiting places from earlier years. His work is comparing how it used to be just like I am. However, mine is holding something else because I am rephotographing the people as well to show how they have changed.

Website
N/A

Interview
http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~karlpeter/zeugma/inters/michals.htm

Gallery
http://www.pacemacgill.com/duanemichals-4-1.html

Artist Lecture Spring #2: Michael Kimmel

Michael Kimmel is the author of the book Guyland. Guyland is about a perilous world where boys become men. It presents a disturbing wake-up call for anybody that is a boy, loves boys, or is raising boys. It is about a new stage of development for all young people. It used to be that you finish your education, get a job, move out of your parent’s house, get married and have children and then you would be considered an adult. On average this used to be completed by the age or 21 or 22. Now the average age for all of these mile markers is 28 or 29.

Kimmel explained by he believes that this is happening in four basic stages. The first one is because people are now starting to live longer then previous generations. The second reason is because of economic transformation. Most people will not have the same type of careers that people before did. It used to be that you followed the family business, if you father was a plumber you were to become a plumber. If he was a lawyer, you were to become a lawyer. Now people are starting to follow their own dreams. You also have to keep in mind that corporations are no longer as loyal to their employees as they used to be. Where our grandparents would have worked at the same place their entire career we will now be switching places of employment a bunch of times throughout our working career. Another reason that these developments are changing is because the parenting style has changed. Now parents raise children in a style, as Kimmel stated, known as “helicopter parents.” It is the over involvement of parents in their children’s lives. For example, those parents that fights for their children about being on a sports team when in reality the child didn’t make the team because they were not good enough, not because the coach “had it in for them.”

Kimmel stated that part of the motivation for this work comes from two contradictory ideas. “Oh my God, they are growing up so fast!” and “Will they ever grow up?” The first one is because children now are more technologically and media savvy then they used to be. The second one has to do with the failure to launch syndrome like living at home until the “child” is 35 years old. Both of these ideas are true in their own way and I can think of people that I know that can fit into both categories.

I must say that I had not ever heard of Michael Kimmel before seeing this lecture. However, he has intrigued me enough by talking about his writing and his ideas that I have already ordered Guyland so that I can read it too.

2/11/10 Word Post: Memory

The storage in sensory memory and short-term memory generally have a strictly limited capacity and duration, which means that information is available only for a certain period of time, but is not retained indefinitely. By contrast, long-term memory can store much larger quantities of information for potentially unlimited duration (sometimes a whole life span). The capacity can also approach infinity (unlimited).

‘Memory’ labels a diverse set of cognitive capacities by which we retain information and reconstruct past experiences, usually for present purposes. Memory is one of the most important ways by which our histories animate our current actions and experiences. Most notably, the human ability to conjure up long-gone but specific episodes of our lives is both familiar and puzzling, and is a key aspect of personal identity. Memory seems to be a source of knowledge. We remember experiences and events which are not happening now, so memory differs from perception. We remember events which really happened, so memory is unlike pure imagination. Yet, in practice, there can be close interactions between remembering, perceiving, and imagining. Some memories are shaped by language, others by imagery. Much of our moral and social life depends on the peculiar ways in which we are embedded in time.

“(Memories) are necessarily memories of particular events or situations, namely of episodes in the subject's autobiography”
Christoph Hoerl

Costa-Mattioli, M; et al. (2007). "eIF2α Phosphorylation Bidirectionally Regulates the Switch from Short- to Long-Term Synaptic Plasticity and Memory". Cell 129: 195–206. doi:10.1016/j.cell.2007.01.050. PMID 17418795

Hoerl, Christoph and McCormack, Teresa (2005), ‘Joint Reminiscing as Joint Attention to the Past’, in N. Eilan, C. Hoerl, T. McCormack, and J. Roessler (eds), Joint Attention: communication and other minds (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 260–286.

2/8/10 Artist Post: Angie Buckley

Angie Buckley Artist Statement:

“Our opinions are continuously shaped through associations with people in our immediate environment and our culture. Habits, stories and traditions from various groups are passed from one generation to the next and most of these things transform over time through a subtle metamorphosis. One of the results is a magnitude of assumption made about others based on a pre-constructed interpretation. My artwork is driven by a fascination with the invisibility of such transmutations and its affect on our society as a whole.”

“The dreamy quality of the pinhole camera distorts the sense of scale of the landscape and the dioramas. Likewise, the primitive quality of the camera contrasts a current obsession with technical advancement. Cutting out various shapes of figures or objects and placing them in front of the photograph from which they came makes it seem as if they have stepped out of time to confront the viewer. The duplication of characters is similar to the retelling of the stories and the open silhouette holes are analogous to the vacant cultural histories of the displaced. Subsequent generations, such as my own, find themselves in-between imagination and the real world in order to put pieces together to build understanding of oneself and the culture around them.”

Buckley is showing the ghost of person that used to be there and put them there by using the original photograph in the image of photoshopping the original person into the scene. She would also shoot through a cut out of a person so that there is an empty space where they used to be.
I relate to Buckley because we are both trying to reconstruct feelings from old photographs. I love the way that her images look so dreamy and I wish that the photographs that I am recreating had this type of quality to them so that I can learn

Website
http://www.angiebuckley.com/

Interview
n/a

Gallery
http://artslide.fa.asu.edu/mfaslide/buckley/index.htm

2/4/10 Word Post: Milestone

While looking through old family photo albums I began to realize that there are certain moments that it seems that everybody has wanted to catch. Things like the first day a baby has come home from the hospital, first time staying away from home, first prom, etc. I was able to catch a consistency throughout different people’s photo albums. I have decided to only use photographs that are of importance like this.

There are always firsts going on around us. Some major like first steps, and some not as major, but still momentous like starting a new job. I started thinking about all of the smaller milestones that occur in life, that seem to go unnoticed. We all know what a big deal a major life milestone can be. Some milestones are met with great fanfare and celebration, while others come and go quietly. Either way, keeping track of them is a large part of what family members seem to do.
“There are always firsts going on around us, even as adults. And it’s nice to be able to stop and celebrate them. Milestones are not limited to just childhood either. Many milestones occur in the lives of adults –a trip you saved for, the first meal you cooked for a holiday party, etc.”

2/1/10 Artist Post: Taryn Simon

Taryn Simon lives and works in New York. The Innocents has been exhibited in 2003 at PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York and at Kunstwerke, Berlin. Simon was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Photography. The Innocents, Simon`s first book, was published in the spring of 2003 by Umbrage Editions and will be an accompanying element of the exhibition at Nikolaj, Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center. Her photography and writing has been featured in numerous publications and broadcasts, including The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Frontline, CNN and BBC.

Taryn Simon’s series “The Innocents” is images of people that had been arrested, went to jail, and then years later because of DNA testing they were proven innocent and released. She would then have the subjects return to the scene of the crime that they were accused of being at years ago and pose for her. At issue is the question of photography's function as a credible eyewitness and arbiter of justice. “The primary cause of wrongful conviction is mistaken identification. A victim or eyewitness identifies a suspected perpetrator through law enforcement’s use of photographs and lineups. This procedure relies on the assumption of precise visual memory. But, through exposure to composite sketches, mugshots, Polaroids, and lineups, eyewitness memory can change. In the history of these cases, photography offered the criminal justice system a tool that transformed innocent citizens into criminals. Photographs assisted officers in obtaining eyewitness identifications and aided prosecutors in securing convictions.” The photographs are accompanied by the Innocence Project's case profiles and Simon's interviews, collected during her cross-country journey. While mugshots and photo arrays are used to condemn and imprison innocent people, Simon has turned the camera around to document the victims of misidentification and perverted justice.

Our artwork relates because we are both having people return to an area that they “should” remember. Her subjects may or may not have ever actually been at this area and mine have been there but might not necessarily remember that exact moment that the snapshot was taken at. They are both bringing people back to a certain time.

Website
http://www.tarynsimon.com/

Interview
http://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/taryn-simon/

Gallery
http://cds.aas.duke.edu/exhibits/innocentspast.html
http://www.mocp.org/exhibitions/2005/08/taryn_simon_the.php