# 21

tate britain, final major project, man with a movie camera, sherlock jnr

just been introduced to the fmp - my social life is over.

the fmp stands for final major project. it's a self-initiated project with will run from the 21st of february to the end of the course. we have to write our own brief (proposal) for a project and a timeline that will last us over 6 weeks. it's quite exciting but daunting at the same time... we need to keep sketchbooks, and a reflective journal through out the entire period. for tuesday we have to come up with 2 ideas which we will present to small groups.

i crossed the road to tate britain to see susan hiller's exhibition. i had no idea it would be so big! the presentation of her work is said to be the largest yet. it ranged from bookworks to multimedia installations. i didn't realise it but i had already seen one of her works at the camden arts centre ("magic lantern" picture in the post below). i enjoyed how she recycled a lot of her work to create new pieces- "painting blocks" which were recycled paintings which had been sewn together to create sculptural blocks, and "hand grenades" which were made of ashes of her paintings.  she was also showing works based on dreams. she chose to investigate peoples dreams. i have always been interested in dreams, and think this could be a possible way to tackle my final major project. my favourite piece by her was an installation entitled "witness". the entire room was made up of 400 headphones, with each headphone transmitting a voice telling a story. it sent shivers down my spine. my video of the voices:

below our my final pieces for the "shorts" brief. the first picture illustrates "a flock of gulls wheeled down from the sky", the second; "a hundred arms pointed towards the sea" and the third; "a dozen ladders swung in the wind". our tutor seemed to be quite happy with my progress from the beginning of the specialization. i've been able to see it too! it was a good way to end the mini projects.

wednesday brought us our 5th movie session at leicester square. we were introduced to the quirky world of silent movies. the first movie we saw was "sherlock jnr" (45 minutes long) made in 1924. buster keaton (who plays the main character and is also the director of the movie) plays the part of a cinema projectionist who dreams of becoming a detective and through his dreams he projects himself onto a movie. whilst being projected into the movie he becomes "sherlock jnr", a detective who finds out who the baddies are, solves the case, and gets the girl of his dreams. i thought it was a charming movie! here is the closing clip to the movie:





the second silent movie we saw was "man with a movie camera" (1929). this was an artistic, experimental take on a documentary, presenting urban life in the soviet union (communist russia). the director, dziga vertov believed it was his responsibility as a filmmaker "to present life in its purest form - as it lives and breathed". and this is what he achieved in his approach of showing the day in the life of being in this city. here's the first 9 minutes:





i think i went a bit overboard with my tate visits this week. as i have a membership i thought it would be a good idea to visit gabriel orozco's exhibition at the tate modern. it was lovely! orozco is an artist who is "not inventing, just reinterpreting". he takes existing objects and alters and reconfigures them for the public. he enjoys playing with their new contexts and the wider associations that they hold. below are two photographs i chose to buy. the one on the left is entitled "my hands are my heart" (1991), in which orozco picked up a piece of clay and squeezed it in his hands, to give it the form of space between them. it is a rather humble piece. the second, i thought was quite humorous. and is called "cats and watermelons". what i enjoyed about this exhibition is that he played with so many simple ideas and turned them into something amazing. for example his piece "lintels" in which he took the lint out of washing machines in new york, and carefully hung these "works of art" on washing lines. for such everyday objects they looked absolutely stunning. another idea which i particularly enjoyed was his piece entitled "obituaries". he took obituaries from the new york times, removed the persons names, and just left the descriptions. for example: "a dreamer, "innovator in developing frozen juice", "sensational human cannonball", "british cheese crusader" ...! these were large scale pieces and the size of font of each phrase reflected that of the original cutting. this is something that i need to think about for my fmp- to play and explore scale.

# 20

jonathan yeo, jan svankmejer, camden arts center

weirdest start to the week ever! i was the only student who posted my postcard (i think i misread the brief!) but wendy applauded me for my efforts and congratulated me on having good time management...! i was then encouraged to make a second postcard. a tutor, sam introduced me to the artist jonathan yeo (photograph below). he is a british painter who also works a lot with collage. his images are all taken from porn magazines... sam and i then went to the corner shop to buy a magazine which i could get images from. i chose "filthy wives" magazine. i can't believe i did it.

above is a scan from my second post card "greetings from suburbia!" i wanted my postcard to be appear a lot more subtle than that of yeo's.

wednesday's movie screening brought us 3 shorts films by the surrealist czech artists/animator/film maker jan svankmajer and "fellini satryicon" by federico fellini (who also directed the critically acclaimed film "la dolce vita"). i need to put it out there that this was the weirdest movie session yet. half of the students left during "fellini satryicon". we saw half of the movie (it is originally a 2 hour film) and the dubbed version (it was originally in italian) which wasn't ideal. i thought that even if it was left in it's original italian, the subtitles would've distracted the audience from all of the visuals. it's a very disorientating and disturbing piece of film. "fellini satryicon" is a loose adaption of a book called "satyricon" written approximately 60AD in rome by petronius, emperor nero's personal advisor. the book, like the film has no form or shape... here is the trailer:

i much preferred the films of svankmajer. i had been introduced to his films at the beginning of the year, during the rotation period. we saw "the flat", "dimensions of a dialogue" and "food". he works a lot with stop-motion animation, and uses conventional, familiar objects in the most unfamiliar ways. here is the first part of "food":

our new project to be completed for next friday is entitled "shorts" (for short stories!) we have been given 3 short stories by the author j.g. ballard and we must choose one of them to then produce a series of images for. we have been told that we are not illustrating the story, but interpreting sections or sentences that we particularly like. i chose to focus on "the drowned giant". some of my favourite sentences from the text were "a hundred arms pointed towards the sea", "a dozen ladders swung in the wind" and "a flock of gulls wheeled down from the sky". i have chosen to start illustrating these ones. here are some of my ideas to work on for a final piece.

an interesting little article - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12308952

i also trekked all the way to camden arts centre. i don't know whether it was because it was raining, or the fact that it was hard to find, but i was quite disappointed. i think i need to give it a second chance another day. the exhibit that they were displaying was "never the same river (possible futures, possible pasts) which was made up of 30 artists and designers, who had previously exhibited that over the past 50 years. what i found interesting was that the pieces were reinstalled in the position they previously occupied. they were all sharing time as their common theme. some of the biggest names exhibited were francis alÿs, francis bacon, henry moore and christian boltanski.

it was also the vip art fair. it ran exclusively online from the 22nd of january to the 30th. im not too sure whether i was actually meant to be on it, but i registered because i was intrigued!  i understand that it was an oppurtunity for art collectors to access artworks by critically acclaimed  contemporary artists, and to have contact with galleries, but i used it to find out about galleries i haven't heard of yet.  just under 2000 works were exhibited by 140 galleries. the galleries were organized by their location, and then into "emerging" (limoncello, wallspace), "focus", "premier medium" and "premier large" (gagosian, hauser & wirth, miro). with a mass amount of people trying to log in over the first few days, the website temporarily shut down. one online critic labelled renamed vip as "very inactive page". even so, it's reported that on the 28th of january the site had been view 6.2 million times! i thought it was a very interesting, innovative way of trying to display works- almost as if you were visited an actual art fair, but from the comforts of your living room!

# 19

une femme est une femme, katie brookes, v&a, orange dot gallery  

 

this has been such a good start to the week. i actually feel as though i've done something productive in the studios... from our 3 days of drawing, we have to unfold and reveal a simple story. we need to create a visual narrative, with a clear developed chain of connected events. it must have at least 6 images to tell that tale. i experimented a lot with developing my drawings (see above .. photocopying, changing its colour/scale, doing monoprints, using tracing paper, multiples, block colour, carbon paper and different weighted materials). it was so much fun! after focusing mainly on my drawings of mice, i made the connection that i'd like to retell the story of the 3 blind mice. paula rego's "the complete graphic work" and "nursery rhymes" were the first books i grabbed from the library.

wednesdays movie screening was jean-luc godard's "une femme est une femme" (1961). it was charming! anna karina plays angela, a parisian stripper who is desperate to have a baby. her boyfriend isn't up for it, so she moves onto his best friend. there are many references to american musicals from the 1950's, with the characters moving around the set almost choreographically, and the music building up to a song but then dramatically pauses. this scene made me laugh so much:






thursday night- i went to the opening evening of (a friend of mine) katie brookes' first debut solo exhibition at the art work space. having recently graduated from camberwell, i was really impressed by her first show. everything was really professionally done. she plays with the themes of heaven and hell, death and life, through the mediums of pen and ink. 9 of her drawings were put on display and they were all for sale. well done katie!

i also finally got round to the v&a's "shadow catchers: cameraless photography" exhibition. it was presenting the work of 5 artists: floris neusüss, pierre cordier, susan derges, adam fuss and garry fabian miller, who all make photographs but without a camera. their images are created through various processes and techniques (chemigram, digital c-print, dye destruction print, gelatin-silver print, lumino gram, photogram) in which they play with shadows, lighting and different chemical treatments on photographic paper. they also had a moving playing. i loved this specific quote that degas said of nadar "toi tu n'es qu'un faux-artiste, un faux-paintre, et un faux-tographe". i particularly liked these works: the first, a photogram by floris neussüss entitled "be right back", and the second by susan derges "arch 4 (summer)" which was a digital c-print from dye destruction print photograms.

my class was also given a short project to do over the weekend. its based on postcards, and we have to physically send one to our tutor by tuesday. our brief is to "create your own postcard for an unexpected location". i chose to do mine on "rio's naturist club" in kentish town! hence the naked body parts (my postcard below)...

i also went to the orange dot gallery. they were showing a selection (157!) of photographs taken on the hipstamatic app for the iphone, that were uploaded to the "hipstermatics blog" (http://www.hipstamatics.com/). the blog was created in 2010 and receives hundreds of photographs daily.  i thought it was really lovely. you could also order prints. the simplicity to the exhibition was charming. i think that the location/gallery was perfect. i enjoyed the minimalist way that they hung the photographs (with miniature wooden clothes pegs). here are a few of my favourites. i regret not asking for them to be reprinted for me!

# 18

chelsea book sale, hunterian museum, the long goodbye, sir john soane museum, wellcome collection, borough market

 

  
today was our book sale at chelsea. we first set out all of the books in the vis com studio for a pre selection/buying for the librarys collection. in the end, i used letraset letters to print out each word. it did take a while, but it looked better than if it would have been simply printed out on the computer. . i linked ballad/love song lyrics together to make a long song. i emphasized on how long each word was sung by playing with the addition of extra letters, capitals and lowercase, and its placement. the books were all placed in the cafeteria to be sold. both of my books sold, and one to a woman who was writing for a japanese magazine, and was asked to purchase things over her journey in london. fun!

the whole vis com class have been given a "5 minutes a day" sketchbook/visual journal to complete every day over the next 6 weeks. heres my first page:

my illustration group have been given a 2 week drawing project. i have never been happier! i am so glad that we've finally been given the opportunity to do pure drawing! for this week, we've been given 3 locations to go to, where we'll spend the whole day drawing and observing, aiming to fill a sketchbook a day. i managed to do that today, spent at the hunterian museum at the royal college of surgeons. the museum has a huge collection of over 4 centuries of human and animal anatomy, surgical and dental instruments, as well as paintings, drawings and sculpture. it was assembled by the 18th century surgeon john hunter. its absolutely fascinating. some of my drawings:

wednesday brought us the second session of our film screenings. this time we saw robert altman's  film noir adaptation of "the long goodbye" (1973). it was based on phillip marlowe, a fictional character created by the novelist raymond chandler. unlike the novel, based in the 50's, altman decided to place it in the 1970's los angeles. the film was poorly received in the usa, despite the new york times having listed the long goodbye in its "10 best list" of that year. as many high established actors  (humphrey bogart, dick powell, robert mitchum) played the role of phillip marlowe prior to elliot gould, most critics were shocked as to how altman appeared to be "mocking a level of achievement" through his laid back and easy-going version of marlowe. 

also thought it would be a good idea to hit up a few exhibitions. i went back to lincoln's inn fields to see sir john soanes museum. i had never been before, but heard it was a "gem" and a must see. sir john soane (1753-1837) was an architect and designed his house specifically to live in, but also to store all of his collections and works of art. an old man greeted me outside to make sure i understood not to touch anything inside. there were 3 floors open for exploration, but there still remained a few that were closed. i really enjoyed looking at everything inside, however i think there could have been more information given on all of the artifacts. the one that intrigued me the most was the sarcophagus of seti i (c.1370 BC) and the bust of a roman lady (c.60 AD).

after that i went to see the "high society" exhibition at the wellcome collection. it explored the use of drugs in history and culture. i felt that the curators of this exhibition weren't sure as to how much they could actually show on the effects of drugs (especially in present days society) without causing controversy. it felt quite constrained as an exhibition.

on thursday i went to the 2nd drawing location- borough market (just by london bridge tube). i had never been before. it was buzzing! even though i managed to finish a sketchbook, i only really like 2 of the drawings i did. i found it quite difficult to focus (there was so much movement!) and felt a bit embarrassed as people were peering over my shoulder to see what i was doing...therefore my drawings were quite rushed. i need to learn how to blank out everyone and draw with confidence.

+TBC=friday drawing location 3

# 17

slacker, victoria miro gallery, gagosian, somerset house, ica

on the first day back from christmas break we were asked to display all of our books that we had made. i was quite impressed with how professional everyones books looked. we were given over an hour to look at the individual books and then we were told that we'd have to do get into smaller groups in the after noon and decide which one of the 3 books we would like to improve on. the 'improved' version of the book would then have to be reproduced 3 times, in order to be sold at our pop up book shop the following week. i chose to focus on a "book" under the title "a book of beginnings" which i wrote the beginnings of songs onto sheet music. the problem with it was that people knew the songs, but it didn't necessarily work as a book! it has been suggested that i still stick with using lyrics from songs, but turn them into the story (each line flows onto the next, as if someone is speaking it).

we have also been given the opportunity of having our wednesday contextual studies sessions at the odeon in leicester square! for the next 7 weeks we will meet their and watch films. the first movie was today and it was richard linklaters "slacker" (1991). he had been working on the script for 7 years whilst working in an oil rig, where he based the script on the people he saw in his home town austin, texas. it embraces living, and the expression of thoughts and dreams. there wasn't much of a plot to it, but it wasn't really necessary. the camera flew around, following 97 individuals, a few of them for a couple of minutes. linklater stated "i wanted to capture the way you walk around for a day and have these brief encounters with people you kind of know". i think he did this flawlessly.

after this i ventured down to the miro gallery in old street. it was so hard to find, but it was definitely worth it! the work that was being exhibited was that of francesca woodman. there were over 100 black and white photographs taken from the artists career that comprised of an archive of around 800 photographs taken between the early 1970's to 1981. a few rare colour prints and unseen photographs were also shown. woodman started taking photographs from the age of 13, and from the beginning used her body as the main subject of her work. her work shows her body playing with her own shadows, spookily hanging from doors and windows, and is often placed in empty and little furnished environments.

the gagosian gallery held a special "pop-up" shop on davies street, where you could buy books, editions, posters, prints and designs for affordable prices. i don't know whether i got their too late (it opened december 2) ..  but i was interested in possibly buying the flower cushions (one side showing a smiling flower face, the other a sleeping one) designed by takashi murakami but they only had the larger ones left for 300 pounds each! one of the oddest pieces that was for sale was the series of skateboard decks decorated with images of andy warhol on them...

i also went to somerset house to see the "dior illustrated: rené gruau and the line of beauty" exhibition. it was a brilliant celebration of the artists work who created some of the most iconic fashion images of the 20th century. it not only including original illustrations, but vintage perfume bottles, sketches and magazines, and haute couture dresses. john galliano said of his drawings "his illustrations are timeless, ever youthful, ever  faithful to the moment he saw; they capture the energy, the sophistication and daring of dior,.." during the 1960's photography was becoming more and more apparent in advertising, but dior remained loyal to rené gruaus illustrations.






also had a quick visit to the ica to see the bloomberg new contemporaries exhibition. definitely worthwile. it featured 49 emerging artists working in a variety of different medium- film, sculpture, painting, animation, performance and photography. this annual event is offered to art students and recent graduates, and they are selected by a panel. i particularly liked the work of keren dee and rowena hughes.