Charissa Menken : New Media

This set of images was created in the flux of a worldwide pandemic, the work is a representation of events that happened during quarantine and how young students and artists have been disconnected from the world around them. I wanted to pick something highly symbolic for the representation of events we’ve survived or completely missed through this last year. Each element being earth, fire, water, and air are shown with items I could find in the comfort of my bathroom. I chose objects that could represent the elements like a mud mask, matches, my shower, and a blow dryer. All these were house-hold items and far extractions from the natural world. In comparison to these props, I researched images based on texture or world events that took place over the year 2020. Floral images and waterfalls were used for the earth and water showing new growth. Fire and singe marks were added to represent the west coast fires that ravaged the coastline. Lastly, signs and graffiti representing COVID-19 were used to signify the change of the air around us.

I chose Laura Plageman as my artist to research, she is a modern artist and someone I wanted to look at as an inspiration as how I could be working someday in the future. Her work is mainly based in landscapes and relates to new media in the way that she physically alters the image in post processing.  Her work is unique and covers themes of fantasy, voyeurism, surfaces, and moments in time.

I want to explore some studio work of different elements, I really enjoy staged narratives and surrealism so I’ll be exploring work in natural light and in studio if I have time to book one. My body of work will be addressing natural beauty and our connection to the earth for instance air, water, fire, and earth.

I think ill develop ideas based on who reaches out through my model call on Instagram. Based on who locks in a booking with me I will construct what element will be best and choose a location from there.

Roughly thinking, I’ll probably use the lake by my house for water. There’s also some fields along the trail near my house I can use on a windy day for air, and the other two fire and earth will be thought out later. I’d like to use lots of foreground and natural background elements to shape my shots. I’ll mess around a little bit with leading lines but most my work is subject based so if I can keep simple styling and natural locations to shoot I should have that consistency.

Joan Jonas:

             Joan Jonas is an artist that studied art history, but eventually turned her focus to film in the 1970’s when she got her first Porter Peck video camera. She describes her fascination with life and the unknown which is something I greatly relate to. In her performance Vertical Roll I see a film strip moving horizontally but it’s not film it’s a video according to her interview, it’s actually video. I scrubbed through it to see if I could make any sense of what I was seeing and hearing. I think between the loud rhythmic banging it gives me the sense of seeking to understand something but not being able to ever fully focus and see the whole picture. In modern times it could be related to the endless scrolling on social media never truly seeing people or events in full picture.

 Bill Viola:

             What struck me the most was when he talked about representing emotional passions that involved losing control and losing sense of self. I enjoyed the passion series as it’s use of extreme slow motion, it changes the way you watch a video. One of the viewers states how there really isn’t a narrative line in these performances and it makes you see these actions in a different light and understand film time is not the same as our time, which I’d never really thought of before. Bill Viola also draws much inspiration from Italian renaissance paintings which looks at the different plains of existence and simultaneity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imlIA8x-B6Q

So my intent with this video was to show the passage of time using food. Originally I wanted to do some stop motion video of food rotting or moving around but I decided to just throw a baking video together and not over think the assignment. 

Blog Prompt: PASSAGE

Mid Term Final Picks:

How did Fluxus inspire glitch art?

I believe Fluxus inspired the mix between media and real life where they embrace the imperfection and happy accidents within the art. With glitch art you are challenging the intervention of chaos into media. The interruption of real world mistakes and “accidents”.

How are these photographers or artists questioning the visual language of photographs? 

These artists are using techniques to push a device to the point of failure for this look. Therefore, it’s not a properly focused beautifully composed image. It’s creating art based in destruction of certain pixels. 

How do they examine  the expectations of what a photo is or provides the viewer?

The pictures that I originally took for the montage assignment were done as a projector photoshoot, a friend of mine displayed patterns or landscapes over my body and I posed. I wanted to marry the idea between what other people see in me and how I project that into the world around me, many times being lost in between. I then did two self portraits in two different outfits where I lean toward either my feminine or masculine traits. I see myself balancing my identity with different friends or relationships of my past; but in the end all that matters is me being my authentic self, despite gender roles, fashion trends, or what other photographers see in me as “beautiful”. What I want a viewer to get out of my montage is that true identity comes from within and not other people’s perceptions of you.

For my identity montage I wanted to create something that portrays how I feel when others see me. Often times, I work with other photographers who have an image or a concept in their mind that I can portray; but it’s never truly who I am. I worked with a friend of mine and we used a projector to put different wallpapers and images onto my body to show the overlay. I wanted to touch on the idea that perception of certain people and faces can be an illusion. 

@Harisnukem

@michal_chelbin