Zoe Leonard…

Since the mid-1990’s, Zoe Leonard has subtly altered the content of her art practice, turning away from earlier enquires into gender and sexuality toward extended meditations on how the affects of time can manifest themselves in objects and the relationship between the man-made and the natural.

Her series ‘Analog‘ is an ongoing archive comprising of several thousand photographs that is equal parts artistic venture and documentary undertaking.  It catalogues the disappearance of handmade signage and storefronts on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where she lived for over twenty years, as well as imagery from other cites around the world.  

What I like about her work is that it never seems to dictate, it rather shows than tells, and this allows the  viewer to create their own personal response to her sculptures and photographs.  I also like the fact that she documents places that have, or potentially are in the process of being lost, and by doing this creates a new platform from which they can be consumed again through art and documentary.  It reveals the beauty and tenacity of human expression in the midst of corporate monopolies and global economy.

Flight patterns by Aaron koblin…

Aaron Koblin is a digital artist based in San Francisco.  He creates software and architectures to transform social and infrastructural data into artwork using processing, an open source programming language and environment capable of programming images, animations and interactions.

This work ‘Flight Patterns’ uses data from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to create animations that show the flight patterns of planes over the U.S over a 24 hour period.  The flight paths have then been plotted to show the flight patterns and traffic density.  Please see this site for more information.  

 

Although this piece is not related to my specific line of enquiry, which is the non-space that is our roads and motorways, it is still an investigation into another example of non-space, and although the results are beautiful, fluid patterns, they also act a poignant reminder of our permanent presence and continuous activity within this non-space.

My reasoning for bringing this work to attention is for the purpose of my future development.  I intend to continue to investigate and question the non-spaces of our modern society and to observe new ways of identifying with these spaces.  The air space is probably the most challenging of all.  It throws up new ways of perceiving time, as we travel across time zones into the future and also the past. It does not possess as much of a physical quality as its terra firma counterparts, and this consequently throws up new challenges as to how we affect it.  It is also probably the greatest example of our modern, accelerated world, as our bodies alter to cope with the pressurised cabins and then readjust themselves as a result of literally traveling forward/backwards through time.  

I look forward to researching this space further in the future, there is a lot of scope for investigation into this space and I feel it could lead onto some quite interesting work.  

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster…

Dominique Gonzalez-Foersters work invites the viewer to virtually adapt the works to suit themselves, inevitably supplementing them with their own emotions and idea when approaching them.  Gonzalez-Foerster formulates and tests various vocabularies of the imagination and memory.  In her atmospheric environments she creates links to real or invented stories that speak of the relationship between individuals and their environment, and the fluidity of this relationship in impressions, memories, projections and dreams.  The works become fragmentary narratives created from colour, personal references and precisely composed passages of emptiness.  Gonzalez-Foerster is interested in the way in which spaces reflect people’s stories, obsessions and wishes.  The works thus become transitory places that oscillate between inner intellectual spaces, and those outside: beyond our body.

In Séance de Shadow II (1998), the visitor is aware of a blue glow emanating from a corridor-like space. Entering the room triggers a series of bright lights, casting shadows of bodies and objects onto a blue-painted wall.

Gonzalez-Foerster is interested in subjective experience, and the ways in which emotions and physical sensations are translated into visual form. Here the work is a living surface in which the movement of visitors is transformed into a theatre of performing shadows, making us aware of our bodies, and making us conscious of ourselves as actors as much as viewers.

Gonzalez-Foersters work has parallel’s with my own practice.  She too is interested in the ways in which we associate with space, how we formulate our perceptions of space and how this experience becomes fragmented by time and memory.

MADA 3: Colloquium. Video Presentation…

Mircia Cantor ‘Shortcuts’…

Mircia Cantor’s photographic series ‘Shortcuts’ (2004) shows the formation of beaten paths left in the ground where pedestrians have cut a corner. These new walkways create alternatives to the “official” pavement plan, forming new lines of flight.

These photograghs  join documentation to indeterminacy: while the photographs appear neutral and objective, embodying a form of straight documentary representation, their meaning couldn’t be less secure as you may ponder the motivation behind these alterations in space and discourse,

Cantor’s photographs reveal intervention but explain nothing, as if to avoid the authoritarian associations of directing subject matter, producing clear messages, or controlling interpretation. 

For me this series shows how we, over time, can shape a spaces identity.  Like the Colorado River that has carved the Grand Canyon over millions of years thus authorising its’ identity, the same principles can be applied here.  Individuals over time have shaped these discourses until they have become valid routes for transit, a pertinent example of how we affect space.

moving = events

Throughout this project I have often addressed to what extent movement defines the motorways identity and as my investigation has progressed it has become apparent to me that movement is the predominant force  that shapes this space. Why? it may seem like an obvious observation but our movement through the space creates the events that shape it.  

Every event that affects this zone originates from this act of passing, and as my work has become more focused I have become more and more interested in solely capturing this movement, to strip away the identifiable objects that trigger memory and association to leave the viewer with an abstracted representation of the movement that shapes this space.

With this experimental video piece I filmed a busy interchange capturing the people that passed through this space, then using filters stripped away the identifiable objects to reveal the true movement of the space.

This piece in many ways reminds me of Christopher Wools work, albeit a moving image in this case.

         

 

Gabriel Orozco…

An artist whos work shows the evidence of time within objects is the Mexican Gabriel Orozco.  His work makes use of salvaged everyday objects, but for Orozco the significance lies not in the objects themselves but in his encouter with them and their subsequent transformation.  In Black Kites, a human skull is graphedd out with a chessboard grid turning it into a densely allusive entity that contrtasts the ideas of interlect, modernist history and Mexican symbolism with death.  He says ‘Its about the body pressing against the material, it’s the form determined by the mould of my fingers’

This statement runs true in a wider sense of his conceptual, sculptural and photograpgic practice as a whole which constantly returns to the material collision of culture and nature, man and his environment.  He articulates this in the most intimate of terms in fragile improvisational objects chracterised by an ephemeral, modest beauty.  Such as ‘Lintals’ which is a collection of flimsly lint mats saved from  laundromat tumble dryers after a years worth of clothes washing.  This work shows in a poignant manner the passing of time and the interwining of a body and its surroundings.

Melik Ohanian…

Melik Ohanian’s work explores the notins of territory and space.  Using multimedia such as video, photography, installation and text.  His images usually incorporate several superimposed layers of the real in which he shows ‘other places’ telling of a reality that is already infused by the imaginary.

‘White Wall Traveling’ is a film and a collection of stills.   As part of this series Ohanian shows the now inoperative liverpool docks, which were the scene of great strikes in the late nineties, and now lay empty, a gigantic space void of people in a decaying no mans land-which could be anywhere.

Ohanian also photographs apartment towers or municipal fringe areas yet excludes any depictions of their residents.  By removing the people we are left only to view the effect we have had on the spaces, and this absence seems to make the human presence in this series resonate more strongly.

In ‘Slave to Valse’, Ohanian invites the viewers to produce through his pre-historical computing machine different letters, words and signs on five lightning boards placed into the gallery space, in the process where the viewers acts as a computer.

On the opening day the word ‘Slave’ appears on the boards as a hypothetical starting point and on the final day of the show the word ‘Valse’ operates as a hypothetical ending point. During this time, the space would be the place of countless small modifications performed freely by the visitors.

 The viewers shape the work with their own choices.  The work becomes a digital representation of events that occured during a specific space in time which led to the works new identity.  For this process of recording and displaying a collection of events I find Ohanian’s work quite poignant with regards to my own practice, whereby I am aiming to capture the series of events that occur within the non-place, and consequently define it’s identity.

Vera Lutter….

Vera Lutter practices photography in its elementary form and in an extremely artificial manner.  She works with the original principles of the light drawn image.  She sets up large wooden boxes to capture the light or uses entire rooms as her cameras.  She covers the windows in black plastic, cuts a tiny hole in the centre of this and thus exposes the photo paper hung on the opposite wall – sometimes for hours, often days and even weeks.  the pictures become originals created without a negative. There are no tricks, no retouching, her work simply documents the fall of light which inscribes itself in the pictures as areas of darkness.

The photos depict a ghostly counter-world of city views, airports, docks and factories.  It is an uneasy, silent world, without people, leaving the impression of condensed, suspended time.

Lutters work holds relevance with regards to my own practice.  Not just for her subject matter, as she too is preoccupied with the more ominous products of modern society, yet in addition to this she utilises the process of time to create her work.  By using time and light in this way her photos become evidence of the events that shaped it.

 

There are parallels in this process to the way in which the motorways identity is shaped, which is by the accumulation of events that we collectively impact upon it.  Every event that occurs within this landscape originates from an individuals act of journey through it.  Even if our impact upon the motorway is as subtle as the exhaust fumes from our cars slowly staining the undersides of the bypasses that support the roads above it, we still affect it.