Eunice's ADAD 1001...

Assessment 3 Final Piece of work.

Experiment 3: This series of self portraits are based on my food consumption in the past several days. It has been very interesting to see myself through completely different ways. I think that what someone eats shows a lot about them. I am still trying to collect some more interesting ways of documenting myself.

Experiment 1:

This is my first experiment based on the topic of vagueness, based on portraiture.

I wanted to take something very representation and vague it in to something un- recognisable.

Crutch Dance- Justene Williams

This week’s topic is repetition. We have chosen to chat about how this work represents repetition and uses repetition. 

Justene Williams creates still and moving imagery in her ‘lens-based’ practice. She interrogated the camera as ‘a machine for making images’ in her earlier works, which blurred the objects under the camera’s gaze, exploring different ‘marginal’ or suburban archetypes, and now, more recently, creates works that play across the boundaries between performance, portraiture and fashion.

Crutch Dance is part of a recent cycle of work that pushes lens-based imagery into painterly and sculptural realms. This work relates closely to a group of moving image works that the artist has undertaken where she creates overwhelming environments constructed from detritus, photographs and suburban props, and in the case of Crutch Dance, Williams has used a treadmill. Using similar props, she then creates costumes in which she wears for the camera.

The bizarre environments that the artist makes become the stage for increasingly odd actions built around repetitive, collaged movements – running, dancing, ducking and weaving like a punch drunk 3-dimensional painting. The figure, camouflaged against the backdrop, disappears in and out of vision accompanied by jerky movements akin to a Futurist or Cubist dance.

The work itself has a sculptural presence – it is displayed on teetering accumulations of television monitors, placed on top of hastily painted wooden pallets. The monitors remind us of their own obsolescence – they are big, bulky, black boxes that are disappearing fast – as opposed to stylish, thin plasma screens.

For this assignment, our group has chosen the topic vagueness. Within in this topic we have selected the artwork “Gehry’s Sketch of the Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain”. We chose this work because we were intrigued by the way that Gehry’s sketch was actually transformed in to a physical structure, despite the vagueness and lack of detail/specifics.

The concept behind our final artwork was the reversal of Gehry’s process. Instead of starting with a vague concept, we chose to turn our experience of a traditional and very structured building in to sound clips and a video that were vague, and left our audience room to perceive the meaning in different ways. We chose the iconic Queen Victoria Building in the heart of the city. It is an interesting building to make vague of as the design is so traditional, “Victorian”, and “old world”.

The process to make a vague sound piece from this building involved composing questions that we could ask people passing by in the QVB as well as using the background noise of chatter and walking. We composed questions that we hoped would allude to vague descriptions of both the aesthetics and their personal experience of the building. When editing our final video, we repeated some of the more interesting responses to intrigue the audience and to further vague the work.

The concept behind our final artwork was the reversal of Gehry’s process. Instead of starting with a vague concept, we chose to turn our experience of a traditional and very structured building in to sound clips and a video that were vague, and left our audience room to perceive the meaning in different ways.

The way in which we did this was by asking people in the QVB an array of different questions, but only including their answers in the sound clips.

Here are the questions that we asked: 

Can you describe the shape of this building?

Whats your favourite aesthetic about this building?

How would you describe this building?

How long do you think it took to sketch this building?

If you could estimate the dimensions of this building, what would you say?

What kind of people do you see in this building?

Would you live in this building?

What would you do to make this building more liveable?

Can you describe this building in 3 words?

Work that we are basing our assessment on.

Sketch of the Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain, by Frank Gehry.