I think I've found my favourite image in the Polaroid Book. There's so many pictures in the book it's easy to completely miss some. The photo is by Stephan Erfurt and its called New York Restaurants. It depicts the inside of a New York restaurant whilst looking out of the window at the same time. There is a light from outside beaming through the window plunging everything inside into darkness. All the objects become hidden in the shadows and the people become silhouettes. The air of mystery surrounding the photo combined with the calmness of it all is something that I just love about this picture. Being black and white means it doesn't become over complicated with colours and the fact that everything is in the dark means it takes away all the tiny details of the objects out, there's no fuss and everything becomes simplified down to just their black and white tones. It reminded a lot of those moody black and white photos of 1950's Paris you find in a lot of poster shops.

I've tried looking on the internet for the image but I can't seem to find it anywhere. I can hardly find any information on the artist himself which is annoying. I think he's just not as well recognised or well established as some of the other artists in the book.

Polaroid Book

I finally managed to buy the Polaroid book the other day. I saw it in the Tate Modern shop a while ago but didn't buy it and have only just got round to getting it. It's full of so many different artists with such a variety of different work, it was hard to find just one favourite. There were four artists in particular though that stood out for me.

First there was the artist Ansel Adams. His photos showed natural objects positioned and arranged in a slightly unnatural setting. The one in the book showed a shell standing upright on some rocky sand with a wisp of what could either be cloud or smoke behind it, placed so it looked like the shell was producing it.


Then there was a really tranquil photo by Werner J Hannappel of the tip of a boat pointing out towards the rest of a big lake lined with trees opening out in front of you. I've tried to get a picture of this image up but unfortunately the internet isn't letting me do it.


Barbara Crane's Photos of trees in a forest were surprisingly good as they were such simple images yet they had a distinct quality about them that made them seem that much more special and unique. I especially liked the colour one as the the oranges and golden browns just engulf the picture filling it with bright, rich colours.

Gleaning Light

I found more of Tokihiro Sato's work but these photos are in colour which adds a whole new dimension to the image. All the more gritty greys of the concrete and natural blues of the sky contrasting against the artificial glaring lights of the fairground carry on Sato's theme of creating an unreal world within the real world. His photos shows its easy to blur the line between imaginary and reality.

Light and Space

I recently came across the artist Tokihiro Sato, a photographer, who focuses mainly on his ideas about light and space. His work concentrates mainly on his movements through different locations and different spaces and then tracking his movements using light. Because of the long exposure he uses on the camera, and the fact that Sato is always moving to create the various light spots, the photos dont actually depict the image of Sato, they just depict his prescense.



I love these photos, the way that everything feels so busy and alive with movement yet its perfectly still and calm at the same time. Each image allows itself to become bathed in light but doesnt get dominated by it, it still maintains its original atmosphere. Even though the photos were taken in fairly ordinary landscapes, Sato has managed to create a much more lyrical poetic world of his own within the image.

Cvijanovic's 'Love Poem' portrays a world with no gravity, freeing us of all our everyday worries and burdens, creating for Cvijanovic, his own world where he would feel more at ease, like his own paradise.
Sato creates a similar aura in his photos; by portraying his prescense in different spaces using light, he is able to create his own atmospheric paradise where he is free to roam anywhere.
Both artists have managed to create their own lyrical poetic world using normal objects in this one. In a way, it's like they are saying there is just as much beauty in the world we are already living in, we dont just see it or dont appreciate it as much as we should.

I was taken along to a private exhibition on Tuesday of an artist called Gbenga Ilumoka in The Millinery Works Gallery. Ilumoka had had previous exhibitions at this gallery before as a solo artist and also part of a group exhibition and it was also interesting to find out that he used to be on the Fine Art course at Middlesex. I was quite excited because I'd never been to an actual private exhibition before but I was slightly disappointed when I saw the work.

The exhibition was called 'Reflections' with the idea coming from the 'close scrutiny and observations of objects in relation to eachother'. The paintings reflecting certain aspects of the artists life with colour and light playing a huge part in his work.

One side of the room was covered with still-lives and nudes, the other side being more of landscapes and natural surroundings. To me the paintings seemed very bland, it wasn't very exciting or stimulating, it was all quite ordinary. Don't get me wrong, they were good paintings, I could never paint like that but it wasn't the kind of work that I'm interested in. Some of his landscape paintings appealed to me as they had quite a similar style and feel to Cezanne's work, bright rich paintings of vine yards in Spain filled with yellows and greens.
However the painting of a pair of old trainers just put me off really, it's not something that I myself found particulary intersting to look at, which is where I think the more personal aspect of the artists work plays a bigger role. It was a good exhibtion with a variety of good paintings but it was just not something I was interested in personally. By the end of the evening, I was more interested in the free wine and crisps!

Love Poem

I was looking through Art Us magazine and spotted this artist called Adam Cvijanovic and just loved his work. He has an online exhibition on the Bellwether Gallery website and I thought it was great. He creates a lot of large-scale illustrational landscape murals and the one I saw, 'Love Poem (10 minutes After the End of Gravity) I thought was pretty amazing.

It depicts Los Angeles 10 minutes after gravity has failed and all the houses, bungalows, cars, street signs and household items are exploded into the skies, floating around in the air all around you, freeing us of our everyday burdens and worries which is what all these objects embody.

"CvijanovicÂ’s utopia ascends in a whirlwind of consumerist ecstasy"


http://www.bellwethergallery.com/artistsindex_01.cfm?fid=10&subid=1





The images cover three walls so it's literally surrounding you and I can't begin to imagine and amazing it must look full size and up close. There's something quite scary and terrifying about it yet really spectacular.

wardrobes

I think I've pretty much finished with the book project for the moment. There's only so much more I can take of cutting up books and sticking them back together again.
The whole reason I started this project was because of today's mass production of books, magazines and the internet, written words loose their meaning and I don't like the fact that books become less important and precious as they were once regarded. They have now become the literature equivalent of IKEA furniture. Mass produced, cheap quality that can be found everywhere. By taking some cheap books and cutting them up, burning them and taking them apart, I've reversed their function and given them a whole new purpose. Every time someone reads them, they come up with their own interpretations and stories from the words and jumbled sentences that have been created from the cut up pages inside. Each book becomes something different to each viewer, and will say something different to each reader.


I was recommended to read some work by the French writer Gaston Bachelard and even though it was a tough read, I quite liked some of his concepts and its given me a few ideas of what to do next. His book, 'Poetics of Reverie' talks a lot about what we think about when day-dreaming and the impact of being lost in our thoughts and it is quite fascinating but it's the parts about our childhood memories that interested me.

'The child sees everything big and beautiful. The reverie toward childhood return us to the beauty of the first images'

I love the way that even the smallest things can be so much more wonderful and fascinating to a child than to a grown-up. It's still all so new and exciting to them and they appreciate things and look at things in a completely different way than what adults do and it's a shame that not everyone still sees things with the same enthusiasm anymore.

I also read a tiny bit of Bachelard's other book 'Poetics of Space' which deals with how we interact with intimate spaces. There was a whole chapter on wardrobes cupboards and drawers and I liked what it said about how a wardrobe or a chest of drawers can be very intimate spaces, not open for just anyone to look at which is why its a great place to keep or hide our secrets. He also mentioned a bit about how certain smells or sounds will trigger particular memories in our minds which, again, interested me.

'Images, smells and sounds are stored in the brain in keep-sake boxes that preserve fragments of the past'

'Memory is a wardrobe'

I was thinking of maybe combining the smells/sounds of memories and the whole wardrobe/drawers idea to sort of create a box of different memories from my past, and what triggers them. It'll be a lot more personal than the books but I'll still have to think more about it.

Fat Batman

"Virginie Barre creates fictions which invite us into reailty, plunge us there and presents us with unusual confrontations"

I came across an artist called Virginie Barre in a magazine I was reading today and the picture of her work 'Fat Bat' had me in stitches. In her work Barre wants to give the viewer the feeling that life is sometimes tinted by fiction. Like the picture above, she'll use famous cult film icons such as Batman and places them in a scenario that would appear more real to us, blurring the line between fiction and reality and trying to think as many ways possible to link such diverse elements together.
The way she went about portraying this idea though made me laugh. Due to peoples lifestyles nowadays, an obese Batman or Spiderman would seem more real to us, as thats the kind of person we're more likely to see wondering down the street. Batman would be more believable if he ate a few more burgers.

John Latham

I went to the Tate Britain the other week to see the John Latham exhibition before it closed down as I was told he worked a lot with books, which is what I've been using in my own work recently. Latham is seen as an important figure in contemporary art as he challeneged the notion of what constitutes art and embraced the idea of using philosophy and science in his work which went beyond the traditional boundaries of fine art.

"The books are a highly effective metaphor for this state of coming into being.......Like humans, books contain a kind of genetic code that dictates their character"





I could relate to Latham's work by the way he used found objects, in this case books, and by manipulating them, changed their purpose and use. However, when reading about each peice, I found it hard to take into account why he had done what he had done. His approach to his work seemed a lot more scientific than what I'm used to and his reasons where very complex and too much to take in. From I could understand, his ideas were very profound and intense and while they were all quite interesting and fascinating ideas, I couldn't really identify with it as much as I wanted to which was a disappointment. His much more scientific and philosophical approach to his work restricted my understanding of his reasons behind what he had done and it was quite frustraing as this exhibtion had been highly recommened to me because of its content. However seeing the technqiues he used and the way he actually went about constructing everything, it was good inspiration for my own work and ideas so the trip wasn't a total waste.

so....yea

ok its taken me forever but I've finally managed to set up my blog! woo-hoo!