Assignment 3 Proposal

This is one of the less impressive pictures I've taken with my trail camera in the past, but it's one that I was able to find readily. I liked it because on that night an orb weaver spider made a web right in front of the lens. 

After much deliberation, I have come up with an idea for Assignment 3 that I hope will have potential to evolve into a finished piece.  I intend to use my motion-activated trail camera to capture several series of pictures and then combine them into single images. I have always wanted to use my trail camera to make art and I am very excited to use it for this assignment. I like the concept of mapping information that is less traditionally mapped. The novelty is exciting.

One way that I might apply this idea would be to set my camera by the road for a while. I might capture, for three separate but related images, the garbage men collecting trash at night, the mail lady depositing letters in my mail box in the mornings, and the car and implement traffic throughout the day. The more interesting traffic on the road could be selected and cut into one picture, while a series of photographs of one event like garbage collection could be overlapped. These compilations might show interesting progressions or congruencies in their subject matter.

I do not plan to appropriate imagery for my project, but unless I end up using my trail camera for another subject, I will be using my own pictures of other people or people’s property. I would likely remove text and license plates present and blur or exclude pictures that included identifiable features of people to make sure my use would not be intrusive.

I was already playing with the concept of combining pictures from my trail camera for this assignment before seeing work from the example artists. However, some of the artists that we were shown, particularly Jason Salavon and Pelle Cass, have really helped me to develop the idea. They both work with combining the subjects of similar pictures, though they accomplish that in different ways. I couldn’t exclude the idea bouncing that I have had with my family, which has also been immensely helpful.

Jacob Tonski: Striking Balance

This Monday’s class was very exciting. We were very lucky to not only have the artist Jacob Tonski’s Striking Balance exhibition in our own Pearl Conard Art Gallery, but also to attend his lecture. Although Jacob Tonski’s work is fascinating and inspiring on its own, I could never have appreciated the depth of his pieces had I not heard his explanation of them first.

In his lecture, Jacob Tonski shared thought provoking insights about the world. It is the context of his world perception, I think, that makes his work so interesting. When he indirectly described his work in the balance exhibition through stories about the Burning Man event, he said that he found it very interesting to see how quickly people can adapt to the very different environment of Burning Man. People come from busy jobs and careers to the Navada desert and are somehow able to take on the very contrasting lifestyle of Burning Man for the short time that they attend the festival. We can adapt quickly and fundamentally, he said, “if our environment expects it of us.” To see the physical balance of his artwork in the gallery and understand that it was partly implying emotional adaptation in human beings created an entirely different experience than what I could have expected had I not heard him speak. I am very glad that I had the opportunity to do so.

A mind blowing piece of artwork in Jacob Tonski’s exhibition was the balancing couch which stood above everything else in the gallery. The Victorian couch stands upright unsupported in the middle of the room, extending its length toward the ceiling while touching the ground with only a single leg. It functions so well that one might be tempted to assume that its balance has been faked by suspension from the rafters or being bolted to the floor. As we saw in the incredible videos in Tonski's lecture, however, the couch is in fact balanced by a brilliant contrivance hidden beneath the cushions. He spent a year designing the machine which balances itself on a point in real time by rotating perpendicular disks. When one stands before the couch in person, the humming of the machine and the small, constant adjustment to its balance taking place in real time can be observed and are something to behold.  To see the piece as an example of human adaptation and the precarious balance of our lives was profound.

Jacob Tonski's work can be seen on his website: www.jacobtonski.com

Art Smashed in Questionable Protest

I'm always worried that I might accidentally break something in a gallery! This is an interesting headline: CNN World: Miami artist destroys $1 million Ai Weiwei vase in protest

Buy Something: Assignment 2

Here are parts one, two, and three of my Social Commentary/Critique assignment.

The artist Penelope Umbrico uses clippings of very specific parts of the images in magazines and catalogs, such as what can be seen through the cracks of slightly open doors and reflections in mirrors, to make her artwork. Although the clippings that she takes from other sources to use for her work are copyrighted material and do not belong to her, the new insight and ideas that she adds to them allows her to use the copyrighted images through the allowance of Fair Use.

Taking inspiration from Penelope Umbrico’s work, I used pieces of image backgrounds from catalogs to show the advertising themes used to sell different kinds of products. In the first panel, I used the backgrounds of photographs selling clothing and lifestyles in natural settings. The second panel is composed entirely of the rooms in which bed clothing and furniture were presented in their sale pictures. The food in the third panel was used to sell kitchen ware in cooking catalogs. The reoccurring themes of color, texture, and content used to sell the different products become apparent when the clippings are placed together. For example, one might note that bright white is used to sell objects for a bedroom, while red was the dominating trend used to sell items for a kitchen and green for clothing and fashion. Each theme appears to be targeted toward selling its product type with incredible consistency. Through my assignment, I intended to illuminate this phenomenon for the viewer.

The photographs used in commercial catalogs are no doubt professionally photographed and thoroughly copyrighted. To reproduce them unmodified would be a violation of copyright law. However, just as the work of Penelope Umbrico is fair use of copyrighted material because of the perspective that she contributes to the clippings, my social commentary assignment was intended to add new insight and meaning to the catalog pictures and therefore can also be justified as fair use.

The legal term "transformative" is often applied to adaptations that are ruled to be fair use and not in violation of copyright laws. This word implies that copyrighted material must be changed in a fundamental way in order for the appropriation to qualify as fair use. By altering the meaning and purpose of the catalogs’ images from advertisements to commentary, my artwork should be transformative of the original copyrighted material. In addition, it is also important to note that one of the biggest issues in copyright infringement disputes is when money is made or prevented from being made through the unpermitted use of copyrighted material. I am neither making a profit with the clippings nor preventing the companies which made the catalogs from making money by selling their products.

Assignment 2 Proposal

The three piece format of our next assignment is intriguing to me. It seems like it would invite the artwork to tell a story.

My idea for the assignment is to use pictures of both beautiful nature scenes and dark, indoor activities to create a sort of social commentary. I might use images, if I could find them, of people inside of dimly lit examples a factory, an elementary school, and a computer room. Using one for each panel, I might add colorful nature scenes through large windows or other means to show the contrast of people hiding away indoors and the world that they are missing. The progression from a factory and an elementary school, which both require people to remain sheltered inside of them, would compare with a dark computer room, which people often stay locked away in voluntarily. This might comment on people’s odd tendency to miss beauty in the world through preoccupation with their own diversions.

Although I am loath to tempt the wrath of copyright laws, I think I might be able to justify this project as fair use because it could have potential to be transformative in nature. If my use of copyrighted images created new meaning and combined several different pieces, it might be just enough to rationalize transformation. In addition, because I would be using it for noncommercial means, it would be slightly more innocent than a commercial use.

I was influenced by several of the artists whose work was displayed in one of our lectures. Although regrettably I do not remember the artists’ name, some of the pieces that particularly inspired me were those that combined news pictures from different situations. Combining war and popular culture made a profoundly powerful statement.

Stolen Hope?

            When the street artist Shepard Fairy made his iconic ‘hope’ poster featuring the face of President Barak Obama for the 2008 election, he likely felt that his use of someone else’s photograph as a reference for his own piece was valid. However, I feel that the manner in which he referenced the photograph was not sufficiently inventive to qualify as fair use and was a violation of copyright law.

            According to Teachingcopyright.org, “A particular use is more likely to be considered fair when the copied work is factual rather than creative.” (http://www.teachingcopyright.org/handout/fair-use-faq)

            Photographs of public figures, as well as other well-known elements of popular culture, do have a tendency to be used as factual work. The public generally needs pictures of elements of culture for reference and the sharing and building of ideas and information. I think that Photographs should be regarded as creative in nature, however, as they are a form of art. To avoid copyright infringement, images intended to be redistributed should be restricted to those licensed as public domain or with Creative Commons because those licences imply permission for this use in limited contexts. To redistribute a copyrighted image without permission should not fall under the protection of fair use because of its exploitative nature.

            Shepard Fairy did not redistribute the copyrighted photograph he used as a reference, but he did use it rather directly to make his poster which was distributed thoroughly. Although the work on his poster is his own art, it so closely resembles the reference photograph that, side by side, the two images appear to be different versions of the same piece. Given that Shepard Fairy has relied on the copyrighted reference photograph so closely, I feel that he did, whether intentionally or not, copy the photographer’s work and violate copyright law.

            A more practical option that Shepard Fairy might have considered before creating his iconic piece would have been to use several different photographs of President Obama as references. By using different elements of many references to influence the anatomy of the portrait, Fairy might have created an equally recognizable piece that was uniquely his own.

 

 

               

Proposed (Assignment 1: Psychological Self-Portrait)

 Here's my psychological self-portrait, titled Proposed (like all of those classes on the chart that I haven't taken yet).

(I nearly brought Photoshop to its knees with all of the layer masks I used for this.)

The deadline for this psychological self-portrait assignment marks the end of my first month at college. In acknowledgement of this occasion, I have made my portrait to illustrate a snap-shot of my perspective of the world at this particular point in time.  I feel that as a Freshman in college I am suspended far too precariously above a sea of disappointing outcomes while simultaneously facing a looming but unpredictable future. I molded this portrait around that theme, using a rusty bridge leading into the multifaceted abyss of my degree audit chart to portray the concept.

I went to the woods to gather photographs for this portrait because I love the wild things there. I also chose feathers and pressed flowers to scan. These fine, concrete things seemed appropriate because I tend to focus on the detailed aspects of life before looking at the bigger picture. By placing some of these smaller things in the foreground of my portrait, I hoped to show different levels of perception. I also wanted to illustrate how concentrating on the small things can be at once complementing of and distracting from the whole. The yellow flower is a stalk of forsythia scanned on the phone book page from which it could not be removed. This is the origin of the phone numbers written beneath the petals.

In the background, I used a photograph of a hen to draw the eye to the linear nature of the bridged path to my audit chart. She stands, perhaps not totally confident in the situation, on an old rusty trolley bridge; looking at the dark water beneath and the future ahead. I used both abysmal inky-blackness and scans of blooming magnolia flowers to form the black hole of the unpredictable. These are elements of my future as I see it now; promises of new beginnings mingled with contaminating uncertainty. Thank goodness for the small things!

Just for fun, here's the before picture: