Evaluation + discussion

Loved the class discussion following my presentation. It was interesting to see how many people were misinformed, it gave me new material to work with in the way of quotes. My personal favourite was "We were made to eat meat, it's science". Your knowledge from year 13 biology that you learned 3years ago doesn't quite convince me :)
The thoughts my work provoked were not constructive, jenny, tara, jess and mischa didn't listen to a word shelley said and would cling to scraps of second hand information in their arguments, whereas shelley knew all the facts and figures and was obviously very well educated on the issue and surrounding issues of meat consumption.
anyway... i ahve been giving the badges away to people, sometimes giving them more so they can then pass them on. Some people won't take them e.g the lady from painting only wanted the one with the lamb because she thought it was cute. When i told her what my project was about she didn't want it any more. She eats meat.

Why you should eat meat and battery eggs

You don’t need to be a physician, a nutritionist, or even have a fancy degree to understand why humans eat meat. Just check the teeth in your mouth. There are twenty of them devoted to eating meat, but only twelve for fruit and vegetables.

If you are inclined to examine the human body further, you will discover, as Dr. Max Ernest Jutte, MD, pointed out in 1936, “the stomach is a carnivorous organ designed primarily to digest lean meat, and that the small intestine, pancreas, and liver are mainly herbivorous and designed to digest vegetables, fruits, fats, and farinaceous (starch) foods.”

source: http://www.republicanvoices.org/war_on_meat.html

great article if you read the whole thing. It makes me laugh how stupid some people can be..

"It's evolution"
"It tastes good"
"It's the food chain"
"Humans are made to eat meat, it's science"
"Cage eggs are cheaper"
"It's the best source of iron"
"It's tradition"


any ideas post a comment :)

wear it with pride

Concepts for badges, and a few badges i have made using images i have found and created with text. Most of the text is taken from reasons given by people on why they eat meat or cage eggs.

Concept1

I want to give people something, originally it was a leaf but i decided it was irrelevant. It tied to my last project but i couldn't think of a reason for it being there other than it would be pretty. I also couldn't think of a possible message it could contain that would make people want to pass it on to each other... and the leaves were not easily transportable, rather a precious object.

In my studio this semester I have been looking at meat consumption and the way meat is advertised. I Don't know quite how to get my views about meat across to people. Bombarding them with grotesque images is not the way to do it, that is not what convinced me not to eat meat. I decided to just go with existing advertising campaigns.

Rirkrit Tiravanija

Top left and right, installation views of Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Untitled 1992 (Free) (re-created 2007). Above left and right, installation views of Untitled 1992 (Free) and a re-creation of Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1972 piece Open House (2007), all at David Zwirner Gallery.

(Photo: Clockwise from bottom right, courtesy of David Zwirner/Gavin Brown’s Enterprise and Ron Amstutz/David Zwirner/Gavin Brown’s Enterprise [3])

His early installations involved cooking meals for gallery-goers. Tiravanija's artwork, which explores the social role of the artist, is described by Nicolas Bourriaud as having a "relational aesthetics." His installations often take the form of stages or rooms for sharing meals, cooking, reading, playing music. Architecture or structures for living and socializing are a core element in his work. I love how he makes dinner for people, and they wonder what they are supposed to do, eat it? Give something back to him? It goes from passive viewing to active participation which is something i value in an artwork


Links to some sites on Rirkrit Tiravanija
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_n2_v84/ai_18004723
http://nymag.com/arts/art/reviews/31511/
http://www.operacity.jp/en/ag/exh31rt.php

Relational art

A HIPPIE TERM IT DOESNT EVEN MEAN ANYTHING ITS JUST A NEW 'ISM'.......

Relational art is "a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space."-Nicholas Bourriaud

The artwork creates a social environment in which people come together to participate in a shared activity. Bourriaud claims "the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever scale chosen by the artist."

In Relational Art, the audience is envisaged as a community. Rather than the artwork being an encounter between a viewer and an object, relational art produces intersubjective encounters. Through these encounters, meaning is elaborated collectively, rather than in the space of individual consumption.

I am very interested in art that does this...
at the moment i am hating documentation, don't see the point in it its just something 'official' that has to be done as proof/evidence. I don't see the gallery space as being the most effective location for experimenting with relational art in what i want to achieve with it.
Exhibiting in a gallery limits the audience to a privileged few that are interested in art in the first place, or have access to it. The rest of us either do not see it or just see the documentation.
The audience is always a select few and it doesn't have to be.... why not make art just for yourself or your friends??

Further thoughts

I am thinking of re-visiting this project for this semester's project drawing; taking the same ideas and basic elements and putting them into analog form rather than digital. I have been looking at relational art and the interaction between viewers of the work is something that interests me and i would like to create a work that explores this.

I thought of making a tree and leaves, then after some class feedback i thought i didn't need a tree. I want people to pick up the leaves i make, to notice them and hopefully give them to other people making a sort of tree branching out from me to the people that discover the leaves and so on.

Only problem is i can't think of anything to write on the leaves without sounding cheesy and lame like 'you are beautiful' .... 'believe in yourself' or whatever. I want the text to be there so that people think hmmm this isn't that relevant to me maybe i will pass it on to someone else that would need/ want it more than me.

That's all.......

My finished work, although not originally what i had scripted works quite well. It took a lot of time, and even though it is not as nicely done as i would like, there is limited time for this project and i have so many other things to do! I will definitely go back to it one day and change it a bit, maybe make another ending, add some music if i find anything appropriate.
I want people to notice nature, not just dismiss it as background imagery. Because it hasn't been purposefully placed there as man-made objects are, people seem to take less notice of it. As i mentioned before, a lot of paintings depict the man made elements with startling accuracy and attention to detail whereas the grass and trees are just treated like a texture and applied without much thought.
When i visited the John Leech Gallery in May I found a classic example of this in Michael Hight's work which is said to be depicted with 'photo-realistic precision'.

Kerepehi

2008
oil on linen
1350 x 3000 mm

I do think his work is quite good but think it is quite silly to call it photo-realistic when the grass is just a few quick brush strokes and the ground too is obviously not painted with much care.
Through my work i wanted to get people to take more notice of nature, and see how beautiful it can be. I hope this is what people interpret from my work.

I chose to use the computer as my medium for drawing because i think this is the closest to being manufactured and man-made. There are no hard-copies of the frames i have drawn, they have only existed on the computer. The act of drawing them on the wacom tablet was just like drawing with a pen in the sense that it involved had movements, and the pen is pressure sensitive just like an analog pen :)
I wanted to comment on how we overlook nature so thought a digital medium would be the best tool to use.

Second Edit

95 frames later.... made it into a loop with a tree growing out of the palm of the girl's hand. Still don't know what transition to use between the leaf in th palm and the empty hand but I'll think about that later. so sick of drawing hands!!!! Plus i have an exhibition to make work for and an essay to write, this has been a lot more time consuming than i originally thought and it seems a shame to sort of rush the ending but oh well.

Well.... re-drew some frames because they looked a bit sloppy, where there was a zoom in to the hand, and looped the footage and burned it to dvd :) see the results below

for some reason the first few frames have black pixels where there should be white i don't know why this is!!!

Stop motion artist...notblu

I love the work of this guy, he hand draws each frame on walls/buildings/sidewalks and floors to create amazing moving morphing images which just blow me away. Check out his website here.
I like the fact that it is hand drawn, and interacts with the public. The scale of the work and the way the drawings interact and adapt with the surroundings is great. The design of his website is also pretty damn cool.

First edit

No ending as of yet because i couldn't get footage of blowing leaves, youtube is being difficult and the leaves are saying no because it's winter and there is no wind! So i will have to improvise and come up with an alternate ending.

Concepts for rotoscoping style

Below are some experiments on Photoshop of what i want my rotoscope to look like. I chose the last one, omitting the pixellated blowing tree because i felt there was already enough going on within the scene and i can re-write my storyboard to get my point across another way.

Brainstoring + Concept

Looking at colour
I want to draw the frames in black on white, maybe have the pixeallated leaves of the tree in colour, green or orange/autumn colours. I think i could make the leaf change colour and resolution when the person picks it up, or maybe have the person change to colour to show that they have notices the natural form and appreciate it. The city and paths will be carefully drawn and constructed with boarders, lines/restrictions.

Looking at the pixel

In Digital Imaging, a pixel(picture element)is the smallest piece of information in an image. Pixels are normally arranged in a regular 2-dimensional grid, and are often represented using dots or squares. Each pixel is a sample of an original image, where more samples typically provide a more accurate representation of the original. The intensity of each pixel is variable; in color systems, each pixel has typically three or four components such as red green or blue, or cyan, magenta, yellow and black.
Above is an example of pixel art, which is defined by the manual editing at a pixel level of the image. I am interested in the pixellation of images in the detail that is omitted and the constructed computerised look and feel it gives to the image.
This painting by Adam Scott distorts the person in the picture by pixellating them. He applies paint pigment in thick coats with vibrant artificial colors, making his images intensely bright to look at. Scott's images are often derived from elements of cinema, old postcards and personal memories and experiences. The pixels may be derived from computer culture and the reliance on technology and the internet that has emerged in our generation.I saw this painting by Kirsten Roberts
Figure, Two Dwarfs and Goat
oil on canvas 122 x 91 cm
at the Oedipus Rex gallery in Auckland in a back room. It immediately stood out for me because of the details it omits that are usually the main focus of the picture- the faces. I love the way they are smeared and distorted.

Why hello there

I want to look at drawing using the computer as a medium, or some other way of digitally recording information. I am interested in the way the computer pixellates things, and how colours have to conform to it's palette. I want to compare the way nature is portrayed in art today with the way we treat man made objects and try to subvert this in my work.

Artist research- William Kentridge

South African artist William Kentridge produces works that exist somewhere between film, drawing and theater and sometimes as a combination of all three. Kentridge's drawings and stop-motion videos often have a subtle but reflectively political undertone, investigating the cultural dualities of South Africa and the artist's birth city of Johannesburg. Using the reductive medium of charcoal with only a small amount of blue or red chalk, Kentridge is effectively able to portray narratives while allowing the drawing process to be revealed by erasing and redrawing the object on the same sheet of paper.

I saw one of his works in project drawing last year and was very impressed with the drawing style and the technique of 'rubbing back'. I like drawing with charcoal as he does but think the computer or some other digital medium could be interesting with new implications, new possibilities not to mention the speed with which you can create something, which is always a factor :).