Author: Klara

what with the strong focus on the female body (feminine mannequin heads & legs plus hatched egg imagery) as well as industrial material and construction equipment in my final exhibition, I thought this somewhat outdated sign would make a good ground for intervention when i saw it. obviously i did not actually graffiti this sign, mostly because i’m not really into breaking the law on public forums. instead, the magic of photo editing helped me achieve this intervention. woohoo

here is my final exhibition — feast your eyes!!!!

spent the last day building and painting shelves in the 3D lab, and collecting more materials. bought relevant books on the human body and sociology from the red cross, and borrowed some on posthumanism and prosthetics from the AUT library.

REFLECTION

overall i’m happy with how my work ended up turning out. i sort of knew from the beginning i wanted to focus on the intersection of inorganic material and the body, specifically from a standpoint of human body enhancement, and I think i achieved that pretty well for being on a 5-week time crunch. i really enjoyed laying out the exhibition; i think this maximalist, almost painterly way of scene-setting really works for me, especially since i tend to be very detail-oriented. i drew inspiration on this exhibition setup from the way my desk looked most days in the studio. honestly, though, if i had more time, I’d pay even more attention to the little details to really make the space look lived-in.

i drew a lot of inspiration from all the artists i’ve previously mentioned in my blog posts, but another cyberpunk body-horror film that i think consciously inspired much of my work here was 1989’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man, in which a crazed man inserts a metal rod into his leg, seemingly in an attempt to become stronger. I didn’t much like the movie or its nonsensical Lynchian ways, but i think that inspired me to try to execute the core concept in a way i did actually like. also worth noting, the cumulative ~38 hours i’ve spent watching the Saw movies throughout my life definitely influenced my interest in the industrial in conjunction with the body, and explains why all the body parts i’ve used look as though they’re suffering a little.

i enjoyed sculpture a lot. i’m a little sad i can’t do it alongside painting next year – at least, not really to this extent.

here’s my bibliography.

~klara

i figured out what to do with the leg! took one of the metal ‘legs’ off of a found construction tripod sort of thing and stuck it inside this mannequin leg. it wouldn’t sit very nicely with just the rod in there, so I tied some embroidery thread taut around the nuts and bolts i had screwed in. I like the sort of cat’s cradle it created, with all the strings crossing over each other to hold everything in place. after this week’s crit, I definitely had in mind some of the comments I’d gotten about my work – specifically the idea about leg lengthening surgery. the sort of human-body experiment theme I’ve started developing is definitely in line with surgeries like this one. here’s the description of the procedure:

“A hole is drilled into the leg bones – which are then broken in two. A metal rod is surgically fitted inside and held in place by a number of screws. The rod is then slowly lengthened by up to 1mm each day, extending until the patient reaches the desired height and their bones can heal back together.”

aside from sounding completely nightmarish, it mirrors what I spent all of Wednesday evening doing. cutting the leg open, drilling holes and securing a rod inside with screws was my exact process with this piece. I do appreciate that my sometimes crazed art-making process can actually mimic a real surgical operation. I also like that the leg no longer stands up on its own; it’s too top-heavy. this is kind of a running theme in my works. the modifications I make to these body-like objects for aesthetic purposes are actually totally ineffectual and inconvenient in practice. this leg is now longer; the person attached to it would be taller, but at what cost?

finally got around to putting a hole through this plaster hand. it took a lot of work with a screwdriver and some tactically placed hot water; i didn’t trust myself to use a drill slowly enough to keep the plaster intact. at first I didn’t like all the squishy plaster where I had repaired the joints that broke off, but I think it adds to the intent now. it kind of looks like weird flesh, or like the fingers are soldered together; in that sense, this hand has suffered, but at least now she will never lose her house key.

i think, at this point, I’m just creating and seeing where it goes. i might not display all of the pieces i’ve made in the end, but they’ve all contributed to the overall development of my ideas.

at this point, I want my final exhibiting space to echo a maximalist sort of mad scientist’s work area. I intend to fill a tabletop with erratic sketches, scattered papers, scientific beakers and my finished sculptures. this, obviously, could change before next week rolls around, but as it stands I really like the idea of my works being somebody’s drafts for much worse things to come, as well as the idea of exhibiting a workspace; i really tried to make my space in the studio feel like home this semester, so it became sort of a spectacle on its own as i accrued more junk and personal items. in this way, I’m very interested in the intimacy of a person’s workspace, and who the sort of person to perform these experiments would be. the work of New York artist Ghiora Aharoni, specifically the Genesis series, very much inspires this idea of the maximalist scientific workspace. the bio-industrial elements of his works have been informing my practice throughout the last few weeks.

and, of course, throwing it back to the Surrealists, Man Ray’s mannequins have obviously been a big influence on some of my work in this block, as well as Hans Bellmer’s endlessly disquieting “Dolls” series.

WET LAB – Week 2

STUDIO – Week 2

Inspirations for pinhead specifically:

Clive Barker’s Hellraiser. obviously. My favourite classic horror movie, chock-full of fantastic bio-industrial and human-experimenty imagery. Obviously, this character was my direct inspiration in making this sculpture. We all have a couple of shamelessly obvious influences; don’t lie.

Raoul Hausmann’s Dadaist work “The Spirit of Our Time”. Was created to reflect ignorant post WWI German societal attitudes, but I think the weird, gormless expression is pretty timeless. The assemblage of the human with the devices we employ every day creates this strange sort of analog, wooden cyborg.

WET LAB – Week 3

STUDIO- Week 2

Went on my third trip to Super Trash;

Found an old rusty caravan wheel, some metal doohickeys and lots of keys. I have plans!

At this point in my work, the verbs ‘to pierce’ and ‘to industrialize’ are jumping out at me. I sort of prefer to work in this way, that is, by creating and then seeing what descriptors come at me. I tend to feel a little limited when I force myself to create something based on a single word or idea from the beginning.

INSPO/ARTIST REFS

Aforementioned; Raul Hausmann and Clive Barker

Stelarc! What a cyborg freak. I love his weird, borderline Geneva-conventions-violating bio-art. He’s hung himself from electrical hooks, allowed Internet-connected electronic muscle stimulators to control his body, and grafted a third ear on to his forearm, among many other extremely outlandish pieces. He somewhat aims to demonstrate the obsolescence of the human body in the age of technology. Stelarc is totally bizarre and a marvel of a performance artist. This mad-scientist-esque, morally questionable crossover of the industrial and the human is what I’m partially aiming to visually emulate in my sculptures.

The Dadaists, specifically Duchamp (of course), inspire my methods. Most of the bases of my sculptures I’ve made are found objects (read- mannequin heads that I haggled with $2 shop workers to let me buy even though they weren’t technically for sale). The idea of a regular thing becoming art, simply because an artist declares it to be so, has always been interesting to me. There’s been some physical ‘making’ involved with my sculptures so far, particularly in the wet lab, but I always find myself coming back to assembling found objects.

WET LAB

On Tuesday afternoon we went to the wet lab and made a plaster cast of a fruit! I loved this process; was lots of fun and an awesome skill to have under my belt going forward.

SUPER TRASH

We went to Super Trash looking for verb inspiration. I bought a whole lot of screws, nuts and bolts for $5. I spent two days sorting them into this box we bought. I got some cool stuff I’d like to use going forward, like this old medical resuscitation device (I think?).

I also brought in some tools from home that I can see myself using. I’m excited to see where the next wet lab workshop leads us! Here is my verb video; “to sort”. The process was strangely satisfying, and was even sort of a performance piece in itself, as John pointed out.

Looking through the verb list, I could sort of see some possible sources of inspiration, but none of the ones listed really spoke to me except “of equilibrium”. It made me think of the idea of two things that looked completely different, and had totally different properties, but weighed exactly the same; sort of like the classic pound of feathers vs pound of steel. I might like to do something performance-based in relation to that going forward, specifically involving scales. “To bite” sort of came to me as well, especially after looking at Ann Hamilton’s work Malediction, in which she casts the inside of her mouth repeatedly by taking a bite of dough. It reminded me of the putty they use at the orthodontist to make a cast of your teeth for braces, which I absolutely hated as a kid and actually sort of felt similar in process to what we ended up doing in the wet lab on Tuesday afternoon. I look forward to what comes next this semester!

This work, specifically inspired by Thomas Ruckstuhl’s still life paintings of his bathroom sink, is what took up most of my final weeks in class before the break. It’s pretty small relative to my other works, but the paper I painted it on just absolutely sucked up whatever paint I tried to apply, so it took some grunt work. This work was a continuation of my long-running interest in light, which has really showed its face this semester. You can find at least a hint of clear visual interest in light within each one of the works I put up for examination.

These are the works I ended up installing as my final 6.

I’m happy with the way my focus on light is conveyed in these works. I like how obvious my interest in light is, and that these works explore different forms of light, different light sources, and how the light’s environment interacts with it. I’m also happy with how the theme is established very clearly in the first three works, and then continued on in a more specifically focused way in the next three.

I really enjoyed this painting block. I felt like I was kind of back in the saddle again, doing what I loved after a whole lot of uncertainty in the first semester. I like to think it shows in my work.

Edwin Howland Blashfield’s (1848-1936) works, although mostly done in the 19th century, manage to feel intensely modern. I think one of the reasons I enjoy looking at his paintings so much is because of the way he used light as a framing device. He absolutely knew how to draw the viewer’s eye to a specific part of the painting, and the way he paints light reflecting off flesh and material is both realistic and larger-than-life. I think I took a lot from his works in my paintings for this brief; my painting of the illuminated traffic cones definitely draws from The Angel with the Flaming Sword, both in its use of colour and sense of focus. The way the moonlight reflects off the subject’s legs in Spring Scattering Stars is also something I drew from when it came to painting my birthday candles, as well as the way light is used to draw focus in The Law.

Week 3

I enjoyed returning to the image a little more in week 3, but still keeping unique mark-making and paint consistency in mind. Working with oils again was definitely a breath of fresh air; I felt much more inspired to paint this week. I drew from the Impressionists and their understanding of light for some of these works.

Week 4

Week 4 was a little different. I tried to move away from traditional portraiture, but I wasn’t feeling super inspired by still-lifes. I have some ideas in mind for next week, but I’m happy with what I’ve done this week, even if not all of it is going up on the wall forever.

In my research, the above three paintings stood out to me. I really like the focus on light and how it interacts with surfaces; I’ve been trying to do similar things in my own work. Specifically for the piece with the traffic cones, I was very much inspired by works like “Salutarious” that experiment with the way coloured light spreads and fades. I’ll probably continue in a similar vein with my focus for the rest of the brief.

The work I did last week was mostly focused on trying to break down an image into nothing more than a series of colours and lines.

I don’t know that I completely succeeded in deconstructing these images – all the works still resemble their source material pretty closely – but I don’t mind. I enjoyed doing these quick, more gestural studies and seeing how few marks I could afford to make. The Death of Marat in sharpie was done pretty much all with one continuous line. I enjoyed working a little more closely with reference photos, and teaching myself to deconstruct colour and shape was a lot of fun. Thinking of reference photos more like a series of blocks of colour as opposed to a complex image has always been how I go about painting, so this was an interesting extension of that skill.

In the first week of the semester, I worked on reducing my understanding of what ‘painting’ is back down to the very basics. I usually err on the side of realism with my work, so getting more gestural and abstract with paint was sort of daunting.

All my work in the first week was just a result of experimentation around how I could make marks. As is evident from all the drips, I worked a lot with watered-down acrylics to make my materials stretch as far as possible. Other materials I worked with included a sponge, a shower squeegee, metal scrapers, dish soap and plenty more water.

I don’t think these works are very cohesive; they don’t have very much in common with each other, and don’t look particularly good together, but that works fine for me. Experimentation was my goal, not making something beautiful.

I think I drew a lot from Gerhard Richter in my techniques. His way of scraping paint down the canvas with a squeegee and seeing what kind of gestural marks it can create was very interesting, and inspired me to go out and collect my own scraping tools; I think that’s evident in a few of my works here.

This has been a weird semester for me. So much of my practice has changed; I don’t know that I’d even recognise most of my new works as my own if you showed them to me in February. I guess that’s kind of the goal, though. The hyperrealism that I used to aim for in my portraits and still life is an afterthought now; I find myself much more interested in work that elicits a response other than “Wow, I thought that painting was a photo!” from its audience. Specifically, I really enjoyed the Necessary Distractions brief. It helped me to recontextualize exactly what painting was in my mind. In that vein, I think my work produced under that brief is also some of my favourite. Everyone who saw the work, whether in the studio or from photographs, had the sort of strong reaction to it I’d always been aiming to achieve. Some of my friends said it felt like exactly the kind of art it made sense for me to be making. Visually, I think the more confusing aspects of that installation worked in my favour. Recently, I’ve found myself aiming to make work that leaves the viewer with more questions than answers. This is the kind of departure from my previous style that I never thought I would make, but I’m glad I have.

The process of working in the studio is really what brought me the most inspiration. During online work, I sort of stuck to my guns a lot and didn’t do anything outside of my comfort zone; I think I was still very much in a high-school mindset, and didn’t know what kind of experimentation was “allowed”. This was definitely one of the things I found challenging about this semester. I never wanted to be the first one to post my work on the blog for the week, in case I had somehow done it wrong and everyone else was going to laugh at me or something. Being in the studio alleviated a lot of that anxiety; seeing everybody else’s work around me, and having my own dedicated space to do whatever I wanted, allowed me to take the trust fall I needed when it came to my art-making ability, and to realise that there’s not a whole lot of ‘wrong’ ways to approach these briefs.

I could definitely improve on a few things in semester 2. Firstly, I’d love to bring in some new materials. If I end up doing a lot of sculpture, I’d love to draw more from the Dadaists and their found object sculptures. I found myself getting kind of tired of working with the same visual and tactile concepts over and over; I could utilize my studio space a lot better. Secondly, I’d like to start calling things ‘finished’ more confidently. With the way I manage my time, I often get the whole brief out of the way in a few days, and then instead of working on documenting it or writing about my work, I just keep going back and adding new little things that don’t really add to the work. I might be a lot happier in my works if I knew when to confidently say they felt finished, and move on. In this same vein, I should probably document the processes of my works a lot better. It would be nice to look back through my photos and see how they came to be, starting from just a blank wall.