spades to spare

The audio that was presented during the Time critique

I was pleasantly surprised when my fellow classmates laughed to certain parts of the audio that I recorded. I expressed during critique that I felt the visual component of my project wasn’t nearly as successful and the audio, and I think everyone agreed with me. The ideal situation would have been if I had a separate space to feed the cats that wasn’t near everyday human traffic, then the result I hoped for would have been more likely. But because I laid down the charcoal transfer right in front of my stove, it proved very difficult to not step on when cooking. I thought about possibilities in continuing a project like this, and my idea was to find other ritualistic things I do very commonly and record the audio over a span of time, and then compile all the audio together for one soundtrack. My idea for a potential next project is recording the audio of making my bed. I think the sound of fabric on fabric layered many times in audio could result in a very interesting sound outcome. 

This piece embodies the life sustaining ritual I need to follow through with everyday. I am the giver of life to three cats by providing food and water. The urgency and hunger is heard through the culmination of sound that is produced over time to reflect the need of food and the importance of ritual. 

The feedback I received during this critique was very insightful and inspiring. There was discussion pertaining to why I chose matte paper over semigloss, and what it could potentially look like without the bedsheet framing it. There was also discussion about how the photos took on a landscape quality minus the one on top. I feel that I could potentially continue this project by adding other elements to it. My original intent was to incorporate pictures from my childhood, and a picture from long ago with a specific bedsheet I have that was my mom’s. I was hoping to raise to the viewer the age of the sheet through the dated photo, however, I was unable to locate the photo I had intended to use. I feel this project could be continued on as a series of sorts, with another series of photographs that take on a landscape quality that represent perhaps different areas of a home, so perhaps pictures in a kitchen, surround by the fibers found with cooking(kitchen towels, tablecloths, rugs, etc). The unifying theme in this potential series is consideration of the fibers in home life. I chose the bed the encapsulate the home in total, because the fist place of comfort to turn to for me is the bed. 

Content: The exhibits reflect different elements of Indigenous art history and culture from the early nineteenth century to now and explore the evolution and status of Indigenous art within the context of contemporary world art. Central to the exhibition is the idea that Indigenous visual culture – the world’s longest continuing art tradition – is not a fossilised expression of an unchanging society but like the concept of the Dreaming is meta-temporal, that is, it incorporates the past, present and future into a complete and present reality. Moreover, Indigenous art is an aesthetic experience, a courier of visual culture, a seductive and eloquent articulation of identity, time and place.’

Content: “My work is about the relationship between place and identity,” says Miami-based artist Marina Gonella. “The place where we live conditions our acts, thoughts and way of life. Whatever surrounds us modifies our behavior; we change according to where we are and what we experience, adapting ourselves to the environment.” Once a connection is forged and a sense of place and belonging has been established, identity becomes more complex for any migrant, as two or more places, often with distinct identities of their own, either merge into or co-exist within a new and very personal identity construct. Home is often a very romantic notion of a place with a deep emotional connection. Maps can serve as personifications of said connection, and Gonella has started to work with maps, landmarks and road signage as part of her examinations, creating a continuous artistic dialogue. Gonella’s art works through contrast, whether in the individual parts of the narrative such as photos and maps or the final piece: old and new, industrial and nature, full and empty, black and white and color, collages and paint. The contrasts move the narrative within each work of art forward and show glimpses of layered meanings and conceptual construction as intricate and complex as identity itself.The other juxtaposition in Gonella’s art is the dichotomy between movement and exploration beyond the known versus the significance of landmarks to a sense of home and belonging. Says Gonella, “The significance of the landmark is important because I work with the idea of place and the space that surrounds me, and the signs give you its geographical reference. On the other hand, the signs tell you not only where you are but also where to go. Like in our own lives you might sometimes follow this signs or you can make your own path, your own experience, your own search.”

Content: By the 1990s, the area had a diverse social mix, with churches from three different denominations nearby. The local buildings comprised a mixture of Victorian terraces and villas, with high-rise blocks of flats from the 1960s and later, and the development at Canary Wharf was visible in the distance. The area was in the middle of an extensive redevelopment, and the local authorities decided to demolish the terrace to create a new park beside Roman Road and Grove Road. Sid Gale, the last residential occupier of 193 Grove Road, opposed its demolition, and continued to live in the house while the remainder of the terrace was demolished, leaving his house and the ones to either side, but he was eventually persuaded to move out.

Content: Sari as a garment was also an essential part of me, which I continued to wear even when it was longer wear regularly by many. After leaving the country, I have virtually no opportunities to wear sari – beside weather and culture are also factor. I miss the nature and sari of Bangladesh, the long, flowing stitch-less span of fabric like river or flowing long hair. They are among the things lost form my life. I have always felt the extraordinary healing power in act of sewing. Movement of needle, nestled between thumb and index fingers through the fabric has a meditative effect. Mind lost in tiny yet focused labyrinth of threads. The needle moves along the fabric like someone swimming in a river, floating along the waves as the river flows from its origin to end. It is like the passage of life through time. Nothing stays at the same place. We also move along, change ourselves, and give birth to our new selves in different culture. In six yards fabric of sari carry the pattern of hair stitched like a wave on a river. The sari begins from the right. During wearing we wrap the right part of the sari around the waist, make five to six folds and tucked it behind the top edge of the petticoat. Rest of the sari flows along the body, over the chest and finally to rest on the left shoulder. For this reason at the left section of the sari we can see more densely patterned with design. The petticoat, as we call it, is like a long skirt, usually wear beneath the sari around the waist and below, and in the upper part over the chest we wear blouse, it all forms the part of the traditional clothe. The Petticoat and blouse are all stitched by hand with the hair from my head. The pattern of rose at back side of the blouse is a representation of common motif of rose, we see in many traditional embroidery. Facing all the deprivations and hardships, art survived like rose for me . Although white is the color of loss in our culture, but strangely it is also the color of hope, purity and a new beginning. We also wear white and red to celebrate 'Pohela Boishakh' - the Bengali New Year, which coincided with new harvest. We celebrate it in mid-April, it is the day to accept a new begging and forget the loss from past year. White It is also color of white paper and tiny lines of hair in white sari is also like an epic of life written on it. The black lines of my hair stitched on the sari give me the glimpse of the poems or words written on a white piece of paper. Just like the poem, the white sari is a river of my free soul, lost yet pure with hope for the new beginning. I have crossed oceans and continents - adopted different countries as my new homeland but my root is embedded deep into the loose alluvial soil of Bangladesh, a land of river - that is my identity. And that identity enables and empowered me to rewrite my destiny as an artist with a free soul who call this land her home.

Content: Over two years, López rode his Vespa scooter for 1,300 miles along train tacks in his native Colombia, through the cities of Bogotá, Cali, and Medellín. The railway system, once a symbol of the promise of industry, was never completed and now remains abandoned in a country still struggling with forces such as drug cartels and paramilitary groups.During his travels, López carefully captured the objects he encountered in detailed drawings. Travel without Movement (in Spanish Viaje sin movimiento) combines these renderings with physical objects he found along the way and objects reconstructed in paper. For the centerpiece of the installation, López—who trained as an architect—constructed a staircase that, he once explained, “I imagine coming from an old house in Bogotá. . . . This is a staircase to nowhere.”1

Place is all around, however, a place of comfort and vulnerability stems from the bedroom. This project takes a look at that space in a landscape approach. Just as place is our natural world, it is also our fibers. Additionally, this piece is framed to showcase the private vs. public dynamic that curtains contain. 

I plan to photograph and collect sheets that were important to me through my adolescence, young adulthood, and now adulthood. In doing so, I plan to cohesively connect fabric and photo print in a collage of sorts that emphasizes the place of rest. This will symbolize not only the importance of home, but also the progression of time and growth. I additionally will be using current photos as well as photos from my childhood of sheets. Lastly, in my current photos there will be an emotional quality displayed through the photographs to further symbolize the heart of a home, beginning in the bedroom. The room with a bed. 

I feel overall I elicited reactions that I intended for. However there were some emotional responses that didn’t align with my intent. I intended for a layered, quilt-like representation of my childhood that had a weird fun twist to it, too make it more interesting and bizarre. Though my childhood wasn’t bizarre, I felt that representing the images this way, I was able to erase the background and fill it in with the most important part of the photo; the cut-out portion of myself. Through filling the background with the image that I cut out, the viewer is able to get a sense of who I am in the setting of the photograph, however, they are unable to see it clearly as a normal photograph thus symbolizing the complexity of growing up. On the emotion sheets, there were some emotions circled like: Hurt, Sadness, Irritation, Disgust and others that I didn’t intend for the viewer to translate. On the other hand, the majority of the responses were what I was intending for such as: Loving, Proud, and Friendly among others. I feel that this piece was successful in representing my personal history of identity that has translated to present. Furthermore, I think I’m going to be submitting this piece for my foundations review as it is more easily viewed in a digital format. 

Spent in total about 15 hours going through photos and organizing them. Afterwards, I scanned them to my computer and put them in photo albums. Work from 10/20 and 10/28

Chapter 3 focuses on art pertaining to place. It starts off with mixing the roots of identity with place: ‘where you hail from and where you now reside are two of the most significant facts about anyone.’ Art that incorporates or is inspired from place is capturing an appearance or feeling of places that are remembered. Place Have Meanings expand on containing metaphorical or symbolic meanings that go deeper than the surface appearance of a standard landscape. Cultures in turn transform places and memories, histories, and symbolic significances are ingrained through time. Place can even be infused with a particular spirit of the things it stands for. Meanings to place are either public or private, depending on one’s intimacy with the place. Place is intersected with time, because it is involved with memory and history, and change in inevitable when it comes to place over time. ‘Contemporary artists are investigating the political, social, cultural, philosophical, poetic, and psychological implications of place. And are drawn on insights, information, and theories from all disciplines to better help understand the theme of place. Our mundane world is saturated with ideas of space, as questions like “Where are we? Who belongs here? And whose place is this? Are raised in order to navigate places. Places Have Value involves the literal value that is found in natural resources, but also symbolic value that reflect an accumulation of psychic meanings. Space is thought of the social and psychological attributes of a place, with some places triggering physical or emotional responses. Contemporary artists are exploring how changes in geographic location may impact how people value the social landscape. History’s Influence talks about how art history has shaped our conceptions of landscape today, in addition to how artists are incorporating traditions and ideas that would be recognizable to earlier generations. (Most) Places Exist in Space explores the different approaches to representing or manipulating space. Space is also represented to adapting techniques, concepts, and images from cartography. ‘Mappy allows for the layering of information and for documenting a place without committing to a single unchanging vantage point. Spatial treatment of space is additionally explored with three dimensional media. The Work of Art Exist in a Place raises the dissolving link between art and its original location. Transportable art was more accessible and become more popular, while also involving a mental/cognitive shift. Additionally, installation art is often site-specific, and has remained significant throughout the contemporary period, even as its definition and practice continue to evolve. Looking at Places discusses artworks that embody the physical and emotional particularities of specific locales. Artistic treatment of physical setting owes as much to the viewers’ mental outlook as to the texture of materials found there. Contemporary artists are more interested in built places rather than natural, and not only how urban environments look, but how they feel, sound, smell, and impact residents and visitors. Topics addressed include: crowdedness, vulnerability, the economic disparity between the rich and poor, as well as sensory impressions. Lastly, organizes of visual art exhibitions are increasingly including work by artists who explore the aural dimensions of places. Looking Out for Places: bringing sacred significance to natural places, and connection between origin of one’s culture to natural sites. Throughout the last three decades, artists have expressed the alarm felt by many people over the increasingly imperiled ecology of the earth.Other approaches to protecting inhabited places examine the appearance and meaning of streets, buildings, parks and other structures that make up the fabric of cities. Constructing (and Deconstructing) Artificial Places incorporated representations of synthetic environments and fantasy environments; blending the fictional and real. ‘Art about artificial places may axamin the artificiality of real places that exist. Dioramas, additionally are another type of synthetic environments that have inspired a subset of artists. Lastly, the exploration of invented environments can included those that exist only in the shared imaginations of theaudience. In the section titled Placeless Spaces, the topic of non-physical places that are around us in day-to-day life, such as the internet, cell phones, electronic banking, and surveillance cameras. As a response to the digitization of information, artists are investigating places that are only virtual spaces. Liquid architecture, refers to structures that mutate or expand into multiple, that is seen often in cyberspace and a new conception of structure. What’s Public? What’s Private talks about how real and artificial is blurring and how public and private is now become debated in the political arenas, schools, churches, and household. ‘Artists have explored the feeling of losing a sense of control over one’s living space, the practice of voyeurism, and the fear of a political power watching over one’s actions. Life in contemporary society has created even greater anonymity as well as more opportunities for voyeurism, as there are many more people now and people are more mobile.’ Additionally, artists that deal with issues of surveillance work with camera-based technologies. ‘Some artists making art about institutional places are concerned with the dynamics of how the private world inside an institution contrasts with the public world. In-between Places involves ideas of placelessness, dislocation, homelessness and journeying. ‘More profound than the temporary dislocations of tourists and business travelers are the experiences of those whose understanding of place is fragmented as a result of moving far away from their homeland. Contemporary artists continue to explore travel, tourism, migration, nomadism, homelessness, an dislocation.

The process of making this piece was quite taxing. Although it may lack physical layering, upon closer inspection it is revealed that there are photos on top of photos in this collage. I started this project with a rather different intent, through the process of creating my original plan, I accidentally stumbled upon a feature in photoshop that fills the canvas ‘content-aware’ when it is deleted from the selected cut out–in this case, I was digitally cutting out myself in all the photos and was planning to collage them into a daisy, with the each petal representing a different theme occurring throughout my childhood such as holidays, first day of school and birthdays. I then decided to leave the photo with this new ‘content-aware’ background and a cut-out shape of where I should be in the original photo. Through doing this, I discovered that often ‘content-aware’ would fill the background with the fabric of what I was wearing in the photo, such as a jacket or a costume, or it would fill the background with my facial features. I like the ones filled with my facial features more, because there’s a slightly uncanny and unsettling effect to them. Through this art making process however, not only was there high reflection of what my childhood was to me and how it constructed my current identity, but the final piece reflects how there are many layers to who I am. So many forgotten memories resurfaced through organizing photos and in reflection of my childhood, I purposely take out me in the photo and leave the background content-aware to symbolize how I am not who I was in those photos, only a ghostly rendition of me appears in the background, and funnily enough the name of ‘content-aware’ couldn’t ring truer in this project, as I am now highly aware of this history of myself, which is something that I was slowly starting to forget. I think one’s identity stems from childhood, so in going back to my roots, I looked for reflection of my life to present. The arrangement of the pieces additionally resemble something akin to a quilt. This to me is significant, because I have 2 special blankets that were gifted to me when I was very small, and there’s a homely-ness and comfort that is brought about through this presentation.

Some constructive criticism for my project that I received was to perhaps have the images in a unifying manner such as majority in black and white. If I were to do this there’d be a clearer connection between the majority of the pictures and the one vibrant color print. Another critique I received is how the arrangement of images fit together as a whole on the wall. Because my wall space was limited, I was not able to arrange the images in the way I originally planned. The point was raised during critique that whenever hanging artwork in a gallery, planning of unexpected space is important, because the arrangement of artwork may not always be in the way the artist originally intended such as was my case. Through my improvised layout, one fellow student commented that ‘the wall space seemed to fit my project well’ without knowing I had wanted to arrange it differently initially. Sometimes perhaps a better arrangement comes about through improvising as well? Some skills that were strengthened during this project was my expanded knowledge of using photoshop. I was able to give the images a neat color affect through using different kind of overlaying transparencies in layers. Another way to unify the images further and is something I want to edit digitally, is unifying the colors more. If I were to keep them in color, there are a few that I’d want to adjust the color of to make the whole piece more cohesive, to translate to a chronology of sorts. I can see myself continuing this kind of project in different ways. In this particular series of images, I wanted to convey grief, anxiety, and sorrow. In another line I could highlight other emotions such as happiness, elation and joy, in another could be anger, frustration, confusion. I could in part make this a series of emotions displayed through body and color language. Overall I think this project came out pretty successful. One more thing I think I might consider in future sets, is displaying a language of system in the orientation of images. Perhaps even creating abstract shapes with the arrangement of images. 

This project is split into three sections, all of which are color coded. The first section which is mean to represent November, was a time when my worry and anxiety was very high. Shades of red represent the shades of stress that I endured. The next section has a focal piece. The bright red vertical image is meant to be seen as a jarring color choice. The surrounding images are placed so that darkness is immediately surrounding the red image. Additionally, through the movement of the direction of the fingers, there’s a outward movement that is meant to symbolize the moment of passing. The last three images are in cold tones, and are meant to represent the aftermath, there is no warmth left, hence the blue. The final image too is a representation of the state I was left in-- a fog/daze/surreal. Through coding the subtitles, this reflects the defense and protection that I emotionally constructed when I went through this immensely hard time. The title of this work is ‘Mother’s Day’ to highlight the vastly different meaning this holiday has to me now than it did a few years ago. I considered naming it ‘Christmas Eve’ as that was the day she passed, or ‘In memory of: Elaine’ to make it clear to the viewer that these images were about the passing of someone dear to me. I chose to ripe the edges of the subtitles as well to enhance the feeling of distress. The focal point, the red image, I thought about crumpling up and then smoothing it out to make it appear distressed as well. I additionally thought about ripping, or perhaps burning the edges of the images to contribute to feelings of distress, but choose to keep the sharp clean cut. I initially intended on using a nail to fasten these images to the wall to make the viewer think of the harshness of nails, and how they’re historically thought of as reminding one of the crucifixion, or death of Christ. Finally, the placement of these images was meant to start high, then end low to represent my mental state throughout.