Month: September 2017

2D – Another quote.

The next quote I explored was

Listen, balance, my darling, is not letting anybody love you less than you love yourself.

it was a line from Eat, Pray, Love  by Felipe to Liz when Felipe asked Liz if she loved him and they got into an argument where Felipe screamed this at her and she screamed back that he didn’t know anything. He exposes her inner insecurities about herself and what she wanted to find in her journey and causes her to lose her so called sense-of-balance.

Draft 1, I used the skull to signify life, the heart to signify love, and the scales for balance. I went super literal on this and I felt like it was so plain. SCRAP!

Next, draft 2, I used the girl on a tight rope to show her own inner turmoil of balance. I put her in a plague doctor mask and put her on top of a roaring crowd of fans filtered in a moire pattern. I liked the story aspect of this, because the idea of the girl crossing the tight rope to find her balance, yet there is a distracting crowd pressurising her despite her anonymous look except with a plague doctor mask.

I did feel that this was not a good composition but a good concept to carry on, having a story to go with.

 

Draft 3, it was using the concept of listening to your inner self. The idea is having the silhouette of the maiden balancing and listening to the encased heart in lock and chain to find her inner voice. I’m not sure for this work. There is something off about it, maybe the use of the see- saw. But I liked the idea of listening, so I might continue the idea of encasing the heart and listening.

Draft 4, I carried on the listening concept and used the symbol of balance, yin and yang to encase the figure listening to her heart in a yin-yang symbol.

There’s something off about this image, but I wanted to explore the yin-yang symbol and push the idea even further.

Draft 5, I created the idea of listening to forest of your heart in your head. I really liked this idea, but I felt like it is still literal. I’m getting closer? But I do like the aesthetics of this.

After consultation, my tutor told me that a lot of my ideas began to be too connoted and there was too much to decipher from the image. I decided to scale back.

She told me to take draft 3 and expand the idea to that of a confessional.

I adapted the idea of eaves dropping into this image to include a confessional. The idea was to adapt the concept of eavesdropping into yourself. But I feel like I needed someone to tell to have someone to hear.

I removed the locks because it was too much and left the heart inside the confessional. I also added someone to “tell”. I chose an old woman instead of a younger similar woman. I guess it could show that the old woman is telling younger self to listen to her heart… which brings me to an even more interesting edit to the balance scale.

I added the clock face to the scale. I guess it would make it look like the confessional is a time portal. While I think it might convolute the quote and pack too much ideas into one image, I do think that there is a small value to it than having a simple balance scale.

After consulting Mimi, she told me to use an actual confessional and to blow up the size and to have someone listening to the heart. I came up with this at first and felt like I need to embellish the idea with more and more things.

I ended up increasing the saturation of the mesh to make the person look more ambiguous but seen. while balancing the heart on a see-saw and to encase the person in an actual box, setting a scenery behind their conversation.

I used a mesh technique to create a forest foliage look, I do have to commend myself on that creativity. Haha.

Overall, I do not like this one as much as the ones I have done, because I felt like I should have edited myself more concisely and to not put too many elements.

While I do like the idea of having the background. I could have done away with the see-saw or vice-versa. I could have made the silhouette more obvious by darkening the figure and then using the moire technique for the confessional instead of the other way round.

2D – Quotes to Ideas

So I have finally chosen 4 quotes to fill up my project. I will slowly ideate them here (because I need to write to fill my brain).

Pretty on the outside… but like a fruit that bugs have eaten from within

This quote came from the Japanese movie Helter Skelter. The premise of the sentence and the movie was the main character, Liliko, describing her rotten nature and personality despite her outer appearance as an idol. Liliko is a supermodel in Japan who had attained full body plastic surgery from a hospital with illegal practices and to sustain the beauty, she requires the expensive treatment. Due to the decline in her popularity, her manager is no longer inclined to invest in Liliko. As a result, her health and beauty starts to decline, she begins to age, look uglier, have spots on her body.

Some key ideas that I would want to demonstrate from this quote is the idea of beauty and fruit.

Fruits that have been linked to beauty would be the apple due to the links it had with knowledge and humility. Eg. Garden of Eden, Apple with Eve in the bible and Lilith before her despair in Faust.

Flies and maggots are a symbol of a symbiotic relationship of the world, where the flies are parasitic to left over and maggots are left to hatch in the crevices of the rotten fruits. The pagan God or Abrahamic Demon Beelzebub, has also been described as a giant fly.

Draft 1, I decided to go literal.

I used a female statue and the apple to describe heart and lungs (the core of a person) as well as a fly to ‘eat’ it. The background is negligible.

I don’t really like it because the apple looks too small and the rotten apple feeling isn’t pushed through.

Draft 2, I decided to go a little macabre, using virgin Mary as a symbol of beauty but the dead body and the rotten apple to signify rotting. It’s still too literal! But it is visually pleasing.

Draft 3, The lungs, apple, fly. I wanted to show the inner beauty thing with the rotten heart (rotten apple) being eaten by the fly. But it’s not pushing through aesthetically.

Draft 4, The tabernacle of rotten fruit. I decided to use an object that was sacred and connoted as beautiful, the tabernacle and replace the eucharist with a rotting apple with a lot of flies and being laid on a maggot background. I quite like this because it looks very eerie and stark. It helps to supplement my idea of beauty on the outside but rotten on the inside.

 

Draft 5, I decided to redo draft 2 to include a mirror frame. It would look like a reflection of self and had a more refine quality to it as compared to the original.

Consequently, I realised that it was a good idea to continue with this and to clean it up so it looks like a good print for silkscreen.

Overall, I do enjoy this work as it encapsulates the quote of self-reflection and decay. I think it has spoken for itself and I’m glad I chose this permutation.

2D – Quotes for Forrest Gump Project Research

Kamikaze Girls :

If It Makes You Happy, Do It.

My Soul is Rotten

Humans Are Cowards in Face of Happiness

Confessions :

As She left, I heard the sound of something important to me disappearing

The Weak will always hurt those weaker than them

Amelie :

Your bones aren’t made of glass, you can take life’s knocks

He’s Just Not That Into You :

You’re Either the Exception or the Rule

Devil Wears Prada :

I refuse to be sick, I’m wearing Valentino for crying out loud.

Everyone wants to be us.

Florals? For Spring? Groundbreaking.

Please bore someone else with your questions

Details of your incompetence do not interest me.

By all means move at a glacial pace. You know how that thrills me.

Helter Skelter : 

Pretty on the outside… but like a fruit that bugs have eaten from within

It’s certainly, convenient to be pretty

We’ll be forgotten, we’re machines for the processing of desires.

Lose weight, get prettier, beauty makes you strong

Eat, Pray, Love :

Listen, balance, my darling, is not letting anybody love you less than you love yourself.

You don’t need a man, Liz. You need a champion.

Hey, Groceries. Believe in love again.

It won’t last forever. Nothing does.

My Line is Emo

Concluding the project, I was really glad that most of my classmates appreciated my work and understood my concept. I was glad that many people understood my layering process and ideology and was intrigued by my methods.

Recapping from my instructor’s feedback in which she liked the exploration of the black background and appreciated my exploration of various line work, however I needed to explore different papers. I understood her point of view but I do stand firm that I liked the consistency of the papers.

Moving forward, I think for future work, I could continue using layering and texturing for my image making and to consult my tutor if I do have ideas before it’s too late. I could also come out with more drafts and not be too emotionally entangled with the drafts so that I can let them go and redo a cleaner and more refined version of the work.

My First 3D Project

This was my first one which I felt it looked really off and ugly, it mainly relied on the plastic sheet instead of the points and planes of the thread.

I created the second one because I wanted to focus on simplicity and reduce the amount of twists and turns. In the end, I wanted to be less greedy and ambitious about creating a larger amount of planes but creating planes that had a clear direction.

The Pre-Seminar Questions

Dialog by Zul Mahmod

Zul Mahmod creates and codes a timely sequence of solenoids hitting on copper pipes of different length and thickness to create a sound. Being a site specific installation, Zul confronts the audience in a long underground passageway towards the Esplanade. The audience is then confront on their midway journey by the sound they hear from the artworks while on a visual escapade with the visible artwork itself.

I feel that the work takes advantage of it’s site, where the potential audience are just transiting from a point to another, and using the sound to surprise the audience on their transit. While the intention of the artwork is very intriguing, and the visual aesthetics of the complex pipeline is pleasing, the artwork seems to be weak in perpetrating the audience to confront the artist’s intention between sight and sound.

Peace Can Be Realized Even Without Order – TeamLAB

The work is an interactive art during the Singapore Biennale 2013. The viewer is to enter a room where it is faced with multiple holograms of feudal Japanese musicians. The viewer’s movements would trigger the music by these holograms to stop and due to the capacity of viewers, it starts to trigger a cacophony. However, this chaos is soon harmonious after awhile should the viewer stay still or leave.

The work is abstracted from the Awa Dance Festival in Japan . It contextualised contemporarily by noting to help viewers feel that they are part of the installation and that they can feel peace without order. As in the festival, individual musicians would play in their own rhythm but subconsciously matches to other groups as they congregate in the town. Unfortunately, the work fails by perpetuating a set of rules to allow the artwork to reach consonance again.

The Seminar Questions!

What is sound?

I suppose upon reading Neuhaus’ article, sound itself is movement of waves in the air which becomes audible to an individual. Sound when composed in a lyrical sense would be contextualised as “music”, which with the workings of time signatures and proper rhythmic structure and symmetry bar structures would also be known as “a different way to tell time”. Sound art in its entirety form a different category on it’s own. It separates itself from music, losing most of it’s integral rules and constructs itself into anything that could make sound, or not, that is placed into the context of fine art.

How has it been use in culture and society?

The idea of sound has also been used culturally with phonographs to record and convey messages across time and space. The act of recording on a phonograph presents the idea of the background or surface noise, which Adorno relates the phenomenon to cinematic use known as “hear-strip”, the buzzing sound during the film recording of silence. DeMarinis’ article further states that as time goes, popular music begins to fill the void of silence with sound in fear of confronting it.

Likewise, various traditional cultures have continued the idea of “background noise”, such as in Carnatic Indian music, the tambura is used to generate a drone, a continuous base that carries the traditional art form through silences and movements. The Western classical equivalent would be the bass line which most famously, the Alberti bass would represent.

What makes it an art?

Sound art under the context of “fine art” transcends the notion of craftsmanship and ventures into an abstracted territory. As Neuhaus states that most of the time, sound art is not necessarily about sound, or about art itself. The comparison of creating a steel sculpture that generates sound, that is repurposed as sound art would only mean that any work of art producing a sound would be generalised as sound art.

While definitions are not entirely necessary, Neuhaus corrects the reader by informing that works of art that makes sound are mostly considered as “sound art” as a secondary label. Therefore, making it “an art” through association with it’s original intent.

How does advancement in audio technology affect our sense?

With the advancement of technology, in recordings and film, audiences require a void of silence to be filled. As mentioned previously, the fear of confronting silence is mediated with a buzzing sound known as the “hear-strip”

Neuhaus explains in 2000 that sound could be shaped to infinite possibilities, going beyond music. In retrospect, DeMarinis observes back in 1997 that artists like John Cage have gone as far as to use silence, as a form of reflection of the acoustics, causing an incredible tick to the listeners mentally, thus perpetuating the notion that the advancement in audio technology causes us to be unable to accept silence.

 

Inspiring…

I found some abstract artworks I really like and used them as an inspiration to some of my works.

Untitled. 1960. Oil on canvas. opening: 156.4 x 156.6 cm. (61 9/16 x 61 5/8 in.). Museum purchase, Fowler McCormick, Class of 1921, Fund. y1987-47. Photo: Bruce M. White

I liked Ad Reinhart’s idea of similar tonality. In his work, he played with the colour black, processing blacks of various tones in a 3 x 3 square to question on the idea of absolutes.

Mark Rothko, Untitled. From the Gugenheim

I also like Mark Rothko’s work. Seeing a Rothko piece in South Korea, I was in awe by the beauty of his use of blending and tones. They seemed really soft and really smooth and evoked a slow, calm effect.

Gerhard Richter, from his website

Gerhard Richter’s work look like scrapped paintings. His aluminium pieces create a nice “wipe” effect to the panel.

Autumn Rhythm by Jackson Pollock from his website

Jackson Pollock’s beautiful work might look like a mess after eating McDonald’s, but the vivid strokes show energy and tells a fierce, fiery outburst, to the audience.

Foundation 4D : Project 2

I brained stormed with a few words like, necessity and salvation.

When I thought of necessity, I thought of the idea of Singaporean queuing, and I created a draft of Singapore Pools and Hawker Centre queues.

However, I thought the idea carried a connotational message of negativity as the idea of Singapore’s queuing culture was connoted to be negative “kiasuism” & “kiasism”

I also thought of salvation and picnic. But I thought Googling for “People looking up to the sky” was more appropriate.

It created a more optimistic message and the denotational idea of looking up in the sky was very apparent.