Monday, January 24, 2011

Exhibition Photographs

For part of my exhibition I used an analogue television and put some datamoshed videos I had made onto it. The TV was interactive because people could touch the sliders pushing up the volume, making it black and white or colour and also changing how bright the screen was.
I also had a series of prints. The prints and the video on the television are related in the same theme of combining the body with architecture.




For my third year photography class we had to organise a class exhibition. For my work I was looking at the relationship between the human being and the physical space they inhabit. I was looking at the structural aspects of architecture and the organic forms of the body and trying to familiarise the relationship that they have with one another. I found that photomontage and collage was an excellent way of doing this. I am becoming increasingly interested in Art, Science and Technology and how to combine all of these.

I became increasingly interested in duplicating images on Photoshop. I find the duplication of images creates a fake sort of imaginary image as well as this it changes the form of the image and creates something new something that is unknown. I enjoy the aesthetic of duplicating and mirroring images because the original image often becomes unrecognizable as its original form creating something new and abstract. An angular shape or a pattern is often the result.


THE BODY AND ARCHITECTURE This is the first Image that I combined the body with architecture in. I like to make photomontages that kind of tell stories. If I made my film about the two girls on the rooftop this would be the poster. The scale and the perspective of this image is all wrong which creates optical confusion. On the other side

THE BODY IN SPACE Parallel universes are first created in space. They are formed when there is a collision of rocks and when this collision happens molecules and particles are swapped between each rock and new life forms are formed (totally dumbed down version). This image is my body duplicated 4 times and pasted on top of the constellation of LEO. I’m inspired by space and it’s mysteries.

I find these two images are very contrasting. The harsh angular architectural image entraps the body whereas in space it is free to move around endlessly. Space truly is amazing.

THE BODY AS A MACHINE

"Historical fact: people stopped being human in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joysticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds. But in 1922 it was still a new thing to be a machine... Every fourteen seconds Wierzbicki reams a bearing and Stephanides grinds a bearing and O'Malley attaches a bearing to a camshaft..."
Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

If human beings work together and duplicate their power they can work as efficiently as one machine. After all we did create the machine. I like this idea that the duplication of the human form will make it stronger If human beings work together and duplicate their power they can work as efficiently as one machine. After all we did create the machine. I like this idea that the duplication of the human form will make it stronger.

The duplication and mirroring of images makes things very symmetrical, this is something that is applied in architecture. Apparently beauty is measured on how symmetrical something or somebody is. I took some photographs of the trees in the snow and when I duplicated them I found similarities in it to the first parallel photograph I made of the reflection of the derelict building in the puddle. The way the images came together in the middle and the collision of the patterns. I find this fascinating and also beautiful. This got me thinking about concrete symmetry and natural symmetry and how they are parallels to each other. I combined an image of my body with an image of the trees. This image to me is aesthetically pleasing.

There is mystery in what I see. It is very open for an imaginative insight from the viewer. For me I see this image and the other smaller ones I have made to be a molecule. It is a very small fraction of what is actually there. Something that combined with another thing is making something else: something all of its own. A new universe? A new species? This tiny molecule could be floating through space about to collide with an atom to create a whole new universe. That is how I like to look at it. It could be stuck to the bottom of your shoe or to the side of a building. It is infinite and there are thousands of them.

The human body is often so swamped by architectural structures that it becomes smaller than it is. It is easy to feel so small and dominated by such a massive structure like a skyscraper or a high rise flat. I had to think about scale when I was combing body and architecture because the two are quite obviously very different in proportion. This gave me another aspect of perception to play around with. Scale the body massive and the architecture small and vise versa. I opted to make the strange organic forms smaller, almost molecular like particles.

I took inspiration from modernist/brutalist architecture. I like the many textures and acute angular geometries. When I was in Holland I studied Urban Architecture and was often having to find interesting ways to photographs mundane buildings. I find that putting your camera against the surface of the building and shooting up at the sky makes for a very interesting aesthetic. In this case it created strange landscapes. Landscapes similar to those you would find in a dreamscape. Playing again with perspective I placed myself into that landscape, in the distance. By doing this I created a feeling of depth but also confusion, as the viewer does not quite know what/where they are looking at. It creates an over all surreal feeling as well as mystery. With second image I felt that the absence of a figure said more than the presence of one and I didn’t want to over do it.


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