Artist Blog - Kent Klich

Artist Website:

http://www.kentklich.com/

Interview:

http://www.foto8.com/new/online/blog/1134-gaza-photo-album

Gallery:

Quotes:

"The pictures of empty home interiors scarred by the then-recent attacks of “Cast Lead” are beautifully photographed, perfectly lit and and seem eerily deserted. Gaza’s cinder block houses look so gray from the outside that the color of many photographs becomes quite striking, too. People led normal, happy lives in these rooms, the yellows and purples - as well as the everyday objects in the rooms - seem to say. But now that these homes appear to be abandoned, and time has stopped in a moment of horror, we find ourselves searching for clues. Who lived here? How did they spend their time in these rooms? Were they in the house when the attacks took place? Did people die here?"

(Baumann, H. "Kent Klich." The New Inquiry. 5 May 2010. Web. 30 Sept. 2010. .)

"In this series I was struck by the peaceful and sad spaces I found when I entered the houses and mosques; the furniture left behind witnessed of the stories of people who once lived there… I felt I knew those people; I knew their taste in furniture, colours, fabric, clothes that covered the ground etc. You imagine stories of how they lived, how they used to gather at night all together, how they laughed, argued etc… How they hid from the bombs and how they fled the war, if they ever managed to flee the war… Their spaces and lives were completely violated and I related to that, I wanted to document that. The war had turned their private spaces into public in few seconds and it was very disturbing."

(Baumann, H. "Dalia Khamissy." The New Inquiry. 18 June 2010. Web. 30 Sept. 2010. .)

The first quote says it all. This is what I have been thinking and the questions that I have been trying to invoke in others who look at my photographs. I love the way Klich has photographed the rooms. I am trying to photograph the rooms of the houses that I visit the same way. However, I also want to take photographs of objects up close to accompany the ones of the over all rooms.

Idea Blog - Immensity

Immensity:

1 :the quality or state of being immense

2

:something immense

(immense: marked by greatness especially in size or degree;especially : transcending ordinary means of measurement; : supremely good : excellent)

I have chosen the word immensity because this is what I strive for in my work. I also chose this word because it is what describes my "daydreams" of the houses that I photograph. I strive for people and myself to use this term when talking about my work and to have immense daydreams when looking at my photographs.

"In analyzing images of immensity, we should realize within ourselves the pure being of pure imagination. It then becomes clear that works of art are the by-product of this existentialism of the imaging being."

(Bachelard, Gaston, Maria Jolas, and John R. Stilgoe. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon, 1994. Print. pp. 184)

"Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts when we are alone."

(Bachelard, Gaston, Maria Jolas, and John R. Stilgoe. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon, 1994. Print. pp. 184)

Bibliography:

Bachelard, Gaston, Maria Jolas, and John R. Stilgoe. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon, 1994. Print.

Artist Lecture - Miguel Palma

I don't have much to say about this lecture because Palma was not using the microphone so it was really hard to hear him. He never once changed his facial expression so when he made a joke it was just that much funnier. Unfortunately the videos that he showed the sound was not working and the tech could not get it to work. This being the case Palma just explained what his pieces were about and not much on why he made the piece or where his inspiration came from. The main thing he said was: "I just want to be myself." Not only did I not get much from Palma himself but it was very hard to find images and videos of his work online. So for this I am just going to use what little description he gave about some of the pieces he showed and speculate on what I think he is trying to say. The head of sculpture stated that Palma's work has a lot to do with technology and how we interact with and how it interacts with us. For the first image Palma said that he built this car which he then drove. I think what he was trying to do was show that we are the masters of the cars and that they are not our masters. Also that there is a sense of freedom and accomplishment when building something and then using it. I am not sure what the second image is supposed to mean. All that Palma said about the piece was that the bigger drill was better. The first video "HearSaab" Palma attached medical monitors to register his heart rate, breathing, and tension levels. Once the medical monitors were attached to him he drove the car and as the car goes faster and louder there is a direct correlation to the medical monitors. Even though a car is an inanimate object they can still effect us in a way that we are most likely not aware of. All Palma said about the second video, "In Image We Trust", was that the camera moves very slowly towards the objects. I didn't know what to think about his video until I watched it myself. The video has a barbie wearing a superman costume holding missiles. At first you can clearly see the barbie and the superman costume, which signify strength, beauty, and verity. As the camera moves ever so slowly towards the barbie you eventually notice that she is holding missiles which contradicts barbie herself and the superman costume she is wearing. I think what Palma was trying to say here is that what you see isn't always what you get. There was a another image and video that I wanted to post but could not find. The image is of a chair where the wood is being eaten by worms, the title is "Value". What Palma said was the the chair was loosing value. Everything eventually looses value. The video was of him taking a huge oriental vase and smashing it. He then proceeded to take the pieces and put the vase back together. He said that once the vase was all put back together that it was much more interesting than it had originally been. When you see the vase by itself without knowing the story behind it it poses questions and makes you look. You can clearly see that it was at one point broken but is now fixed.

Artist Blog - Felipe Dupouy

Artist Website:

http://www.felipedupouy.com/

Interview:

http://uclaextensionvisarts.blogspot.com/2009/04/instructor-interview-felipe-dupouy.html

Quotes:

"My surroundings have a deep effect on me. My art is inspired by a genuine curiosity

about the world in which I live, and more specifically, the city I inhabit. For me there is a
sense of urgency to visually record the rapidly changing landscape. My work is as much
about my personal exploration of Los Angeles as it is about the final prints. The process
is intuitive, and the resulting photographs are the product of the unique interchange that I
experience between the city and myself. The emotional quality of my images is a
reflection of the depth of my own personal attachment to our past and future. Portrait Los
Angeles is a record of the historic architecture in Downtown, an attempt to preserve the
details for posterity."

(?. "The Icon: Photographic Imaging." Counterintuity - Creative Marketing Made Fresh. Web. 28 Sept. 2010. .)

Biography:

Dupouy born in Santiago, Chile and now in Los Angeles is a graduate from Art Center of Design in Pasadena. Felipe Dupouy has shot for “Los Angeles Times”, Los Angeles Magazine”, etc. Dupouy teaches at UCLA Extension, teaching classes such as, “Photographing Places” and “Environmental Portraiture”.

(http://www.felipedupouy.com/index.php#mi=1&pt=0&pi=2&s=0&p=0&a=0&at=0)

I was so happy when I found Dupouy's work. His images of the insides of buildings around Los Angeles are at the caliber that I want my own work to be at. When I read the quote that he made about how his surroundings affect him I felt as though he was able to put into words what I have not been able to.

Artist Entry- Steven B. Smith

Artist Website:

http://www.stevesmithphotography.net/

Gallery:

http://www.sashawolf.com/Exhibition_AnnaSteven.html

Interview:

http://cds.aas.duke.edu/books/weatherinterview.html

"The idea I had of using conservation methods as my language helped me step up to the plate and work with a subject matter that had been explored a lot, and well. While I felt a little nervous about photographing in a similar vein, I also felt there was something more that needed to be said"

(Sims, Christopher. "Interview with Steven B. Smith." Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Aug. 2005. Web. 28 Sept. 2010. .)

Biography

"Steven B. Smith is a photographer whose work chronicles the transition of the Western landscape into suburbia. For this work he was awarded the First Book Prize for Photography by the Honickman Foundation and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. His book The Weather and a Place to Live: Photographs of the Suburban West was published by Duke University Press (2005). He has received Guggenheim and Aaron Siskind Fellowships. His work has been widely exhibited and can be found in many public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Smith received his BFA from Utah State University and his MFA from the Yale School of Art. He has taught photography at Yale and Brown University and currently lives in Barrington, RI, where he teaches in the photography department at Rhode Island School of Design."

(Sims, Christopher. "Interview with Steven B. Smith." Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Aug. 2005. Web. 28 Sept. 2010. .)

Unfortunately I was unable to find anything about Smith's "Close to Nature" which these photographs are from. I know that from the title of the series that he is trying to get people closer to nature. Through the lines and paints on the interiors of the buildings it replicates nature. I like the emptiness and bareness of the interiors. Unlike my own photographs these photographs speak to me in somewhat the same way. Where is all the stuff? Is someone going to live there?, etc.

Idea Entry- "Corner"

Corner:

"The point of departure of my reflection is the following: every corner in a house, every angle in a room, every inch of secluded space in which we like to hide, or withdraw into ourselves, is a symbol of solitude for the imagination; that is to say, it is the germ of a room, or a house."

(Bachelard, Gaston, and John R. Stilgoe. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon, 1994. Print, pp. 136)

"...being becomes manifest at the very moment when it comes forth from its corner."

(Bachelard, Gaston, and John R. Stilgoe. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon, 1994. Print, pp. 138)

"And all who live in corners will come to confer life upon this image, multiplying the shades of being that characterize the corner dweller. For to great dreamers of corners and holes nothing is ever empty, the dialectics of full and empty only corresponds to two geometrical non-realities."

(Bachelard, Gaston, and John R. Stilgoe. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon, 1994. Print, pp. 140)

"In an earlier chapter devoted to houses, I said that a house in an engraving may well incite a desire to live in it. We feel that we should like to live there, between the very lines of the engraved drawing. At times, too, the phantasm that impels us to live in corners, comes into being by the grace of a mere drawing."

(Bachelard, Gaston, and John R. Stilgoe. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon, 1994. Print, pp. 145)

Bibliography:

Bachelard, Gaston, and John R. Stilgoe. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon, 1994. Print

As I was reading I wasn't sure if this section of The Poetics of Space was going to help me with my work at all. I kept reading and found the quotes that I have posted. Not only do the quotes describe me as a person in a way but also describe some of the feelings that I would like the viewers of my work to feel. Bachelard writes: "...is a symbol of solitude for the imagination...". I don't ever remember spending much time in the corner when I was a child, I don't think i got into trouble that much. However, this quote said something to me since I suffer from depression. When ever I was having a really bad day I would seclude myself to a corner and there my mind would wonder on whatever it was that was bothering me. This leads me into the next quote where things are not so much clear in a corner until you come out of that corner is it that whatever it may be shows itself in a true light. I was particularly taken by the last quote when Bachelard talks about how in a drawing the fantasy of living in the corner is more concrete in a drawing. This is a feeling that I would like to come out in my work.

Artist Lecture- Wafaa Bilal

Before the lecture I did some "googling" on Wafaa Bilal and visited his website. When looking at his website there were so many links that I didn't know what to do at first. I decided to just start clicking on the links to see what would come up and found that a lot of the videos had been removed so I wasn't able to see a whole lot before the lecture. I was confused at first by what most of his work was about. I found some things that had to do with his brother and how he was killed in bombing in Iraq but nothing further.

I thoroughly enjoyed the lecture. I don't think that If I had heard Bilal speak about his work that I would have the same appreciation that I do now about what it is that he is trying to accomplish through his work. There is one problem that I have with a piece of his. When he took the video game The Night of Bush Capturing: A Virtual Jihadi and rendered himself in the game, Bilal stated that his work is to bring awareness to the American public on the Iraqi viewpoint. I feel that even though there hasn't been any violence as an outcome of his video game there was protest. I am afraid that that is where the violence starts is with protesting.

Unfortunately my second question about his work with famous paintings I was not able to bring up since he didn't touch on those works.

I thought Bilal's response to a question by one of the people in the audience was interesting. Someone asked him in so many words what he thought about turning Iraq into a democracy. Bilal stated that he thought it was a good thing, however that he thinks it is going to take 25-50 years before Iraq will be able to stand on it's own as a democracy without U.S. forces over there to help with the violence.

Even though Bilal thinks what the U.S. is trying to do in Iraq is a good thing he still uses his work to show the American public the other side, the Iraqi side.

I hope for his sake and the American public's sake that he accomplishes what he has set out to do.

I want to say that I was mostly impacted be his piece "Domestic Tension", where he places himself in a gallery for 30 (31) days and can be shot at by a paintball gun controlled be viewers on the internet. I don't remember ever hearing about an artist making a piece to help themselves emotionally get through a traumatic event, such as that of loosing a loved one. I'm not sure that it completely helped since some professionals have told him that he now suffers from PTSD but apparently from what he says it did help him with the death of his brother. I can only hope that my work will in the future be able to help me deal with "life's unexpected casualties".

http://www.wafaabilal.com/index.html

Artist Blog- Jeff Wall

Interview:
http://moreintelligentlife.com/blog/melissa-goldstein/qa-jeff-wall-conceptual-artist

Gallery Representing:

http://www.mariangoodman.com/artists/jeff-wall/

Quotes:

"I don’t prefer one or the other. I think I have paid attention to the 'extraordinary'. But in general I think it’s more interesting to recognise the interrelation of what is ordinary and what is extraordinary, rather than seeing them as two separate entities, or ways." (Goldstein, Melissa. "THE Q&A: JEFF WALL, PHOTOGRAPHER." More Intelligent Life. Web. 20 Sept. 2010. .)

"I have gotten so much enjoyment and inspiration from works of art since I was a child, and most of the art that I saw was decades or centuries old. So, the ageing and surviving of art seems a central aspect of its value to us. It tells us how we both are and are not contemporary in our own time, and how such a thing as survival is possible, and how we can relate to it, even though we are all mortal."Goldstein, Melissa. "THE Q&A: JEFF WALL, PHOTOGRAPHER." More Intelligent Life. Web. 20 Sept. 2010. .

The third photograph is what I have been mostly looking at from photographers to inspire me with my own work. The first one though speaks more to the way that I have been photographing lately. The third one I guess you can say is the way the I was photographing and am trying to work in with the way the I am photographing now. I think that Jeff Wall was a good photographer for me to revisit so that I now know that it is possible for me to incorporate both the way that I was photographing and the way that I am now.

Idea Entry - 9/16/10

Oneirism: absent minded; dreaming while awake

"For the real houses of memory, the houses to which we return in dreams, the houses that are rich in unalterable oneirism, do not lend themselves to description."

(Bachelard, Gaston, and John R. Stilgoe. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon, 1994. Print, pp. 13)

"Centers of boredom, centers of solitude, centers of daydream group together to constitute the oneiric house which is more lasting than the scattered memories of our birthplace."

(Bachelard, Gaston, and John R. Stilgoe. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon, 1994. Print, pp. 17)

Bibliography:

Bachelard, Gaston, and John R. Stilgoe. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon, 1994. Print

The term oneiric(ism) describes what it is that I do when I think about the abandoned houses that I photograph. I always daydream about what it was like living there. Did a family live there? If so, was it a happy family? Were there children?, etc. I always picture myself as someone from the future looking into the past at this "family" living in the house. Looking at the people and how they interact with each other and how they decorated the house. Did they live there most of their lives or did they spend a period there and leave it for the next family? How much did they appreciate it's existence? These are most of the questions that run the my mind as I am photographing and at times I make up my own answers to the questions.

Link to video:

http://vimeo.com/4751819

(Lauren I don't know how to upload a video from the web so I just added the link)

Wafaa Bilal Lecture Question/Response

1. You said in regards to the video games that you wanted to make people look at them. I think you achieved this, however, don't you think that you have created more controversy and "corruption"?

2. Most of your earlier work is based on famous paintings, why is that?

Artist Blog - Robert Polidori

Interview: http://bombsite.com/issues/99/articles/2883

Gallery: http://www.arthurrogergallery.com/dynamic/artist_media_and_press.asp?ArtistID=57&ArtistCVAttributeID=305

The reason that I have chosen Robert Polidori as the artist this week is because he has taken what I am trying to do to another level that I can only hope to reach. Polidori's images are "beautiful", they draw the viewer in to inspect the space that he has photographed.

"Polidori is unapologetic about the beauty of his photographs. 'I don't think a photograph should be worse than what you see, but better. Otherwise why even bother doing it. Just go and look. ' "

(Many Rooms of HIs Own, Border Corssings, Nov. 2008, Vol. 27 Issue 4, pp 23-24)

(Lauren, I am having problems with blogger. I had to take my new laptop to have a data transfer done from my old laptop and haven't gotten it back yet. I am hoping to get it back on Monday 9/13 sometime. I have put up what I could but I'm not used to a PC which is what I am using at the moment to get what I can posted. When I get my new laptop back I will finish the post.)

Idea Entry- 9/9/10

Verticality: 1. Being or situated at right angles to the horizon; upright.

2. Situated at the vertex or highest point; directly overhead.

“A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability. We are constantly re-imagining it reality: to distinguish all these images would be to describe the soul of the house; it would mean developing a veritable psychology of the house.”
“To bring order into these images, I believe that we should consider two principal connecting themes: 1) A house is imagined as a vertical being. It rises upward. It differentiates itself in terms of its verticality. 2) A house is imagined as a concentrated being. It appeals to our consciousness of centrality.”

(Bachelard, Gaston, and John R. Stilgoe. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon, 1994. Print, pp. 17)

“Finally, the house that Bosco describes stretches from earth to sky. It possesses the verticality of the tower rising from the most earthly, watery depths, to the abode of a soul that illustrates the verticality of the human being.”

(Bachelard, Gaston, and John R. Stilgoe. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon, 1994. Print, pp. 25)

Bibliography:

Bachelard, Gaston, and John R. Stilgoe. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon, 1994. Print.

This term (verticality) Bachelard uses a lot throughout the first chapter of The Poetics of Space. He uses the term to explain the way the house represents the human soul. I am going to start experimenting with this through my photography. I am going to start paying closer attention to the vertical lines of the houses that I am photographing.

Artist Entry- Todd Hido

2260, Todd Hido
1928a, Todd Hido
1913, Todd Hido
1637, Todd Hido

BORN
1968
Kent, OH

EDUCATION
1996
M.F.A., California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, CA

1991-1992
Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI

1991
B.F.A., Tufts University, Medford, MA
School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA

(http://www.wirtzgallery.com/bios/bio_hido_frame.html)

I have chosen Todd Hido and his work on foreclosed homes. Even though Hido specifically seeks out foreclosed homes, the presence that his photographs gives of the homes is very similar to what I want to achieve with my own photographs. The main difference between what Hido is doing and what I want to portray is the foreclosed vs. the abandoned. I have still chosen this particular body of work because the the questions that people start to ask about the homes when looking at Hido's photographs.

"Hido’s images contain traces and impressions of lives previously having been lived in the now-empty homes. His potent and surreal photographs of empty spaces evoke a longing for the time when things were better in those homes. What went wrong? Who used to lived there?"

(Hido, Todd. Witness Number Seven. Vol. First. Portland: Nazraeli, 2009. Print.)

"Hido doesn't dwell on the sociological, however: his interest, indicated by the care with which he modulates light and color, lies in the haunting quality of these spaces. In a sense, the photographs duplicate the banks' seizure of the houses by repossessing them in the name of art."

(Grundberg, Andy. House Sitting: The Photography of Todd Hido, Artforum, May 1998.)

Artist website:

http://www.toddhido.com/

Gallery Representation:

http://www.wirtzgallery.com/bios/bio_hido_frame.html

Interview:

http://seesawmagazine.com/roaming_pages/roaming_interview.html

(Lauren, I am not sure what exactly you were looking for with the biography. Artist biographies have always been more lists than anything of substance. I will ask you in our meeting on Thursday but just wanted to let you know that I am a little stumped on what exactly it is you are looking in regards to the biography)

Idea Entry - Anna Tingle

TOPOPHILIA: "love of place"

"Of course, thanks to the house, a great many of our memories are housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate if it has a cellar, and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated. All our lives we come back to them in our daydreams. A psychoanalyst should, therefore, turn his attention to this simple localization of our memories. I should like to give the name of topoanalysis to this auxiliary of psychoanalysis. Topoanalysis, then, would be the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives." (Bachelard, Gaston, and John R. Stilgoe. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon, 1994. Print., pp. 8)

"And so, faced with these periods of solitude, the topoanalyst starts to ask questions: Was the room a large one? Was the garret cluttered up? Was the nook warm? How was it lighted? How, too, in these fragments of space, did the human being achieve silence? How did he relish the very special silence of the various retreats of solitary daydreaming?"

(Bachelard, Gaston, and John R. Stilgoe. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon, 1994. Print. pp. 9)

Bibliography:

Bachelard, Gaston, and John R. Stilgoe. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon, 1994. Print.

This book was the exact thing that I have been looking for. I haven't read that far into it, but have already

can tell that this is exactly what I have been trying to say. Bachelard has poetically put into words when I have not been able to. I have a really good feeling that the more I read the better I will be able to explain what I feel about my series. I also think that I will have a better understanding myself and will have a new found appreciation for what it is that I am doing.

Michael Eastman - Isabella's Two Chairs