Contextual Statement as of Year 2

“A human body grasping at its limit of potentiality is typically understood within the domain/dialectic of sport. To excel athletically, a body must suspend its tendency to be slippery, chaotic and imprecise. It is a technical challenge that sporting excellence is usually framed by both the amplification and the reduction of ways a body may move through space.” ¹

A passion for sport and fitness has merged its way into my multi-disciplined

art practice which - like sport - allows for play, experimentation and failure.

The body’s boundaries are pushed physically, through both sport, and within my art practice, by advancing on the limitations of my materials. This may equate to failure in myself or in the materials. Because of this, play becomes a very important way to create.

I am interested in investigating into material activation and tension, questioning how these concepts play into action.  An exploration into a potential for movement within stasis results in a provisional engagement with my materials.²

This provision adds to the conversations between the materials and the spaces I place them into. My practise also borders the boundaries of precision and temporality through the use of gravity and makeshift support structures.

Physical co-dependence is something that I create between objects, or between objects and body. I enjoy the honest relationship that occurs between elements. Without one, the other cannot be.

¹ http://www.laresakosloff.com/text.html#art1

² The possibility to create potential for movement within stasis. Stasis being defined as: A state of stability, in which all forces are equal and opposing, therefore they cancel out each other -  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasis

Link to ACCESS - an interactive art installation by Marie Sester

Just came across this video on youtube while thinking about how my final work (photos up soon) ended up becoming quite interactive... not what I intended but what can you do. I hadn't expected people to walk over my work, but when I got to the opening I saw footprints all over the piece of wood on the floor. And by standing on it, the whole work was falling down and breaking the painted clay weight. I heard that this happened over and over again during the opening and people then set it back up the best they could. I wish I could have witnessed someone doing it, would have been amusing. 
So final work wasn't something that I was that pleased with but ended up having funny interactions with some of its inquisitive or oblivious viewers.

In the clip linked above there is a comedic element to the voice and the effect it has on the people in the space. Some try to out run it, jump out of it or a pair danced in it.

Bruce Nauman - 'Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square' (1967-1968) and 'Art Make-up' (1967)

Watching some of Bruce Nauman's video works on youtube, I came across his 'Art Make-up' (1967) video and was able to sit and watch the whole ten minutes of it. 
It is an beautiful video to watch and it makes you so aware of his own body and its movements. It just allows you to watch him without feeling the need to look away, that it is ok to watch this even though it is semi personal.

Nauman's 'Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square' (1967-1968) was shown to me by Andy. I had been to scared to attempt any type of performance art because  in my mind it was done in front of an audience, the artist/performer made somewhat of a spectacle of themselves and above that there are so many contexts and so much history to performance art that I felt a little overwhelmed. Felt like to much to tackle. But the simplicity, the fact that 'Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square' (1967-1968) is made for the artist him self and is not trying to shout some sort of statement to it's viewers; made performance art a lot less scary!

Link to Bruce Nauman 'Art Make-up' (1967)

Link to Bruce Nauman 'Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square' (1967-1968)

Laresa Kosloff quote

"A human body grasping at its limit of potentiality is typically understood within the domain/dialectic of sport. To excel athletically, a body must suspend its tendency to be slippery, chaotic and imprecise. It is a technical challenge that sporting excellence is usually framed by both the amplification and the reduction of ways a body may move through space." 

(http://www.laresakosloff.com/text.html - Art #1, Wangaratta Exhibitions Gallery, Victoria 2010, Curated by Hannah Mathews , Catalogue essay: Olivia Barrett)

I like and connect with this quote in respect to my practice. It sums up the things that i'm interested in, both inside of my studio practice and in my job and life outside of uni. It connects with my job and training as a gym instructor, with my passion for sports - at the moment triathlon and the ways in which I like to interact with materials. 
I used this quote to start off my contextual statement as a way in to my own work.

Gabriel Kuri

Classical Symmetry, Historical Data, Subjective Judgement

01 March – 26 May 2012
4 New Burlington Place, W1

Whats happening in my studio about a week out from hand in...

With the addition of taking photos as a form of documentation rather than as works. Then having them printed out, and through a decision made by the printing guy - I have a new work. A photo printed twice. It has a sequential movement - more of an action than a still frame. With photos I feel there is so much that can be read into them and so much baggage surrounding them which I get nervous about. I talked to Monique about how a photo can start as documentation and then turn into a work that has the ability to sit by itself. 

The picture on the right is provisionally propped against the wall, the painted back to it creates the glow. I am not all that interested in the glow created off the back, but I think with the photograph propped up against the propped up wood - it turns into a set of instructions almost. The pictures are of me engaging with the wood. It shows the viewer what it's been used for and how they could engage with it. Which is an idea that I really like.

These objects I see as physical representations of a gesture. They hold a softness even though they are solid. The middle one was the first and I painted it to look like a giant blob of blue-tack. These started out because I had blobs of clay that had semi dried - so I let them dry and painted them up.

This hanging wood is the result of a failed test. I was trying to get the wood to sit balanced horizontally out from the wall using the tension on the string. It didn't work, but this work had a nice twisting movement when it was trying to find its point of balance - I like that a point of balance was found by the object itself, instead of me balancing it.

After talking to Ian, he noticed that the nail that I have used in this work is semi curved. Something that came about because of my bad hammering skills. But Ian saw the curve and saw the curve of the propped up wood sheet and saw a connection. We started talking about how a small subtle gesture preformed just once can go un-noticed or thought of as a mistake. But a small gesture preformed over and over a few times will attract attention. 

Joan Jonas

I have been reading an interview between Joan Jonas and Karin Schneider that is an interesting conversation about Jonas's work - talking about her drawing/video relationships that she creates and the function of the mirror to her.

To Jonas using video creates a kind of double space, creating two different time experiences for the viewer.

The word Gestalt was used throughout the interview and not knowing what it meant, I googled it: refers to a 'wholeness'; a perceptual pattern or structure possessing qualities as a wholethat cannot be described merely as a sum of its parts. These pictures make that last statement make sense visually. 

Happening (event, performance, action)

The happening is an evolving action carried out within a defined environment. Notwithstanding a general direction established in advance, there remains a large margin for improvisation while it is in progress, and the reactions of the spectators may in turn influence the action under way. 

In the course of the twentieth century, painting and sculpture gradually went beyond their respective two- and three-dimensional limits to gradually take the form of assemblages. These in turn were to evolve into environments and then, with the introduction of live participants, into happenings. Indeed, these events grew out of the search for more direct relations between artist and public, or between art and life, and the rejection of the power of the market over art.

(Taken from http://www.newmedia-art.info/cgi-bin/show-oeu.asp?ID=ML000002&lg=GBR) 

Play Project #2

After showing Andy my last photos we discussed ways to present them. The idea that I jelled with was a projection of stills of either a chronological sequence from a movement or stills from a recording that I pick out. Only problem is a lack of projectors at the moment... We also talked about painting the wood that I was engaging with. To bring it back into painting. So I chose to paint it a fluro yellow that is the same as the builders string that I used in my work in the year 2 show. Then today I used the wood and re shot some of the pictures from the first shoot plus some new ones.
Below are a few of my favorites from today:

Play Project #28, 2/10/12, Ply wood, paint. Level 5 foyer            

 

 Play Project #40, 2/10/12, Ply wood, paint. Level 5 foyer         Play Project #34, 2/10/12, Ply wood, paint. Level 5 foyer

 

Play Project #35, 2/10/12, Ply wood, paint. Level 5 foyer             Play Project #39, 2/10/12, Ply wood, paint. Level 5 foyer

 

Play Project #37, 2/10/12, Ply wood, paint. Level 5 foyer             Play Project #38, 2/10/12, Ply wood, paint. Level 5 foyer

 

Little video work

I had been playing around with rubber bands at my desk when reading. Pulling them around through my fingers, then I thought I might try to video it. 
It took a few attempts to take this video - first time around I couldn't upload it to the computer. In this first video I started filming it with no thought taken into how I was going to finish it/decide when to finish it. But after about four minutes the rubber band flung off my fingers and out of the video screen. And so that was the end. This time around when I got sick of lying on the ground I just left it. 

*Play with low or no sound - has talking in background*

Rubber Band, 2/10/12, 3mins 14sec

Play Project: Thinking about Alicia Frankovich, Laresa Kosloff and Joan Jonas

After a chat with Andy a few days ago and talking through some other artists that I could be looking at, which included Joan Jonas and Bruce Nauman. After watching a few of their video works on Youtube, it kind of gave me the courage to pick up a camera and start to play. The simplicity of some of the works allowed me to purely play because I had seen that it need not be complicated. I also realise that I need to talk to other lectures who have different practices so that I can gather other perspectives on directions I could explore.

I started out shooting a video of my hands playing with a rubber band. Then I moved out to the foyer space with a camera and three pieces of ply wood. After showing the photos to Tarryn, she came and took photos for me so that my body could be in the shots and have a relationship to the materials I was playing with. This I had a lot more fun with and liked having someone to bounce ideas off. Having Tarryn taking the photos also meant that I didn't have a control over the photos which would end up as the works themselves as documentation of my actions and experiments. This type of freedom is similar to Alicia Frankovich's way of using audience members of untrained performers in many of her performance works - so that they never holds an exact and predetermined outcome.

Below are couple of images that Tarryn and I took yesterday. Click on the tab at the top called "Work" for more of the photos.

Push Back, 2/10/12, Ply wood. In foyer of level 4

Play Project #2, 2/10/12, Ply wood. In foyer of level 4

Play Project #1, 2/10/12, Ply wood. In stairwell between level 5 and 4

Play Project #3, 2/10/12, Ply wood. In foyer of level 4

Play Project #4, 2/10/12, Ply wood. In foyer of level 4

Play Project #5, 2/10/12, Ply wood. In foyer of level 4

Play Project #6, 2/10/12, Ply wood. In foyer of level 4

Play Project #7, 2/10/12, Ply wood. In doorway, foyer of level 4

Curate and Curate

For Curate and Curtique I found artist Hannah Valentine and loved this little blurb about her work that I found on the Gow Langsford Gallery website. (http://www.gowlangsfordgallery.co.nz/exhibitions/pastexhibitions/2012/windowgallery/hannahvalentine.asp).

I used Hannah Valentine's work Haptic Prospect #3 in my Curate and Critique assignment because I love the simplicity of it, the fact that there is nothing that complicates any of the elements, everything is as it is, the elements are as they are in everyday life and in its simplicity it speaks of an action, it activates.

"Hannah Valentine’s practice is based around the body, movement and participation. She approaches the performative body in terms of physicality and exercise in relation to our urban environment. Her interest is in the potential of repetitive motion to translate into knowledge as well as the influence the vertical landscape has upon our alignment in space. Her work takes form primarily in object, performance and documentary style film. The body and lived experience are primary as digital media threatens to blur society's conceptions of reality."

Haptic Prospect #3

2011

Steel, wood, bolts, Gym Mats

3000 x 4000 x 1500 mm (approx)

Situations

2011

Teetering Stabilities

2011

Installation view, Auckland's BIG Little City Late Night Art

Snake Pit

The Beautiful Life: Potential, Denial, Grace

2011

Installation view, Elam Graduation Show

Photos from Gow Langsford Gallery (www.gowlangsfordgallery.co.nz)

My sisters friends brother has just been traveling overseas and took these shots. It's an empty building that artists now come to (apparently drink, smoke and paint) paint on the walls and floors over and over again.

Nadia Myre: THE SCAR PROJECT

Link to Nadia Myre's website

I saw this work in a post from the Sydney Biennale 2012 and thought it was a pretty amazing project. The very different ways that people had gone about stitching and representing their scars. And I thought about the conversations creating have the potential to bring about.

In 2005 Nadia Myre initiated the ongoing Scar Project, an open lab experience where people sew, with various fibres and threads, a canvas representation of a physical, emotional, psychological, or spiritual scar they may have, and write out the accompanying narrative.   Over the last 6 years, in workshops with youth groups, cultural centres, seniors centres, prison circles, and schools, She have accumulated a collection of over 800 scars and stories which have been exhibited in galleries and museums in Canada and the US.

Scar Project, Kendall College of Art, Grand Rapids (2010)

# 376

The Scar Project

The Scar Project, Urban Shaman, MB (2007)

 Photos taken from http://www.nadiamyre.com/Nadia_Myre/portfolio/Pages/The_Scar_Project.html#4

Walters Prize artist talk: Alicia Frankovich

Link to Walters Prize 2012 write up on Eyecontact

Coming in with no idea of what to expect at Alicia Frankovich's artist talk (and my dad even less so) and also no time before the talk to have a look and experience for myself her work, I sat, listened and took notes:
Upon walking in... faced with a very noisy video work, displayed very commonly (projected onto whole of large wall in a dark space. And then you round the corner (still hearing the commotion happening in the video in previous space) and see multiple things happening - a performative looking space with upside down music stands with music books and upright standing chairs. There is also a kinetic sculpture, a large painting hung away from but facing the wall, two old TV sets facing one another, playing footage of a performance.

Alicia and a lady come in and lay on the ground. The lady asks Alicia questions, and alicia answers them. It sounds informal but planed, but not rehearsed so much that Alicia can't deviate from original question. Throughout the talk Alicia and the lady move around the space laid out with music stands and chairs. The doesn't seem to be a clear formula as to when they move, but they do it without any disruption to what they are saying. Their bodies activated the space and at times got very close to us who were listening. The movements, to me, were similar to that of a warm up or a cool down - with the time taken in every position and the transitions between laying, sitting and standing close together (sometimes side by side or back to back) or other times at opposite corners of the square area.  
*The lady mentioned above was Caterina Riva*

Image: Alicia Frankovich, Floor Resistance, 2011 at Hebbel Am Ufer, HAU 3. Photograph by Conor Clarke

Alicia Frankovich, Jumping Man

From: http://leafletleaflet.blogspot.co.nz/2012/08/short-sharp-change-finger-snap.html

Picture of Alicia Frankovich and Caterina Riva during artist talk at Auckland Art Gallery

NOTES: 

• Binary - strength - gender - personal contact.
• Didactic - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didacticism

Didacticism is a philosophy that emphasizes instructional and informative qualities in literature and other types of art. The term has its origin in the Ancient Greek word διδακτικός (didaktikos), "related toeducation/teaching," and signified learning in a fascinating and intriguing manner.

Didactic art was meant both to entertain and to instruct. Didactic plays, for instance, were intended to convey a moral theme or other rich truth to the audience.

• Breaking down the different way in which we experience art. The black box - live, picture, kinetic sculpture.
• Organising bodies in space.
• Spontaneity - how people react. People act themselves. No hierarchy. Vulnerability of encounter of viewers.
• Described the function of space.
• Several bodily experiences  in one, peoples movement to view work - whole body experience.    

  

Hernan Ardila

Link to Hernan Ardila's website

Debbie pointed me in the direction of Hernan Ardila (and only awesome people are called Hernan - the amazing Hernan) 
Ardila practice ranges from installations and assemblages to drawn, digital and video works. 

The objective; to adhere to the union and disposition of lines, forms, fields of colour and fragments of wood, plastic of metal. The unitary character of the work is evident through the use of computer within it's development. The digitalisation of materials, whether by means of photography or digitally stimulated form, allowing the artist to pre visualize the relations among the elements. 

Ardila's work consists of a deep and sensitive investigation, whilst remaining light, sensible and specific in regard to meaning and feeling. For this reason the search of precision within the relations goes hand in hand with a lack of certainty that not only demands the absence of significance but also a determined disposition of the elements, making legibility difficult. 

Matter and instability - could summarise his art work. What really interests Ardila is the possibility to manipulate a form and alter it in multiple ways. In this sense he is always trying to work from a point where the things still haven't acquired their direction. His work is fulfilled by intervened forms and elements in crisis that are placed in relation to the order of things which maintains them on their limits, unbalanced; on the verge of being put into movement, to stop being, and that which is the same, to become something else. (from http://www.hernan-ardila.com/about.html)

The paragraph above, I think has a lot of links to how I think about my own practice. The material and an instability, static movement and weight, and placing things out of their own order, creating something other then they were.

Link to some more works

   

 

WRITINGS: Jessica Stockholder

Jessica Stockholder writings/essays

Of Standing Float Roots in Thin Air
Putting words down on paper and reading them aloud has a formality to it that matches the stasis of visual work. These words don’t run into the fluid and fleeting words of conversation. They stay on the page where they can be revisited. In the same way my collections of unimportant things, variously configured around us, in many different places, are here fixed for a while, or slowed down. They are and aren’t part of the flowing, or perhaps it’s more accurate to write, gushing stream of objects being hurtled around everywhere we go.The space one doesn’t want to go into. Perched up here, looking down enjoying feeling detached from, and a little above the turmoil. Standing on top of the hill. Power and safety infuse vision.Down there, gravity working against you as you climb back out in your imagination. Clambering over big grey rocks, in a hurry to get away from the vague worry behind the back.The problem of never being able to see your back, of being stuck inside your own eyes. The vulnerability of the shell, the flesh, bones, and skin we’re in and the plywood. The tree cut down, machined and glued together in the shape of a rough flat scale that is loosely glued to our hides.Dream Whip Jell-O layered like a landscape. Layers of different colors to eat. The Jell-O, like, plastic, is and isn’t the thing I want. Eating inside our white shell. My poor white body hidden (shielded) from the sun while we, scurry like ants around this edifice we are building while we live in it.

And, the red, green, and yellow glow.

(http://www.jessicastockholder.info/albums/of-standing-float-roots-in-thin-air)

I can't put words to why I enjoyed this little text so much - but I did. But I think I like how it is a little poetic and is hard to make sense of because it describes things with words and things we know but you still can't make sense of what she is talking about. I also like the bodily descriptions with words like feeling detached, standing on top of the hill,gravity works against you, the problem of never being able to see your back, the flesh, the bones, and the skin....
I also like the simple words that I can understand singularly but when put together like this, creates a confusion that I enjoy trying to make sense of.
This text written by Stockholder is in relation to this work of hers:

Of Standing Float Roots in Thin Air

Year:2006Sited at:PS1 MoMA, New York, USACollection of:Vancouver Art GalleryReviews:http://newyork.timeout.com/arts-culture/art/1923/jessica-stockholder-of-standing-float-roots-in-thin-air