Project 1 Time | Final work & Reflections

(N.B I haven’t been tagging these posts right last time hence I’m reuploading them in hopes that they appear in the class pages again! ( please visit my page for a accurate timeline of posts though! )

Now that this project is over, it’s time to reflect. I’ve started his project with a very large and pretty unorganised train of thought. With some self reflection, I’ve decided to define time as a huge muddy sea of constants and variables.

Constants: The locations I visit, the timing of which I take the pictures, the subjects of the photo, the life I live, the society around me, the skies I get to see.

– Routines, structure, the inexplicable movement of time as the sun undoubtedly rises and sets.

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Variables: When the wind blows clouds over to cover parts of the sun, when a lady refuse to budge from her spot in my shot. How I see the world in a stressful morning, how I respond to it during a relaxed evening.

– Emotions of mine, emotions of others. The movement of nature, the inevitable bits of chaos.

How do we measure time in Singapore? This question still lingers in my mind.

I believe that in a society so obsessed with constants, are variables the only things left that at least give some idea that time has passed?

If we cannot control constants, we should try to be variables, or at least try to take note of the variables around us.

The Sun will always rise and set, but where its light touches, where a shadow is cast onto the ground. No two photos are the same,  no two seconds are the same. Everything is always changing every day, every hour, every second.

The book is hence titled “In the light of” from the idiom,

In the light of something:

considering, because of, taking into account, bearing in mind, in view of, taking into consideration, with knowledge of

The title is a play on the fact that, yeah the photos are of shadows and things that have been under the light of the sun. But also taking into account the life around us, how time passes, how constants drive us, how variations change us and how we feel about those things.

Anyhoo, I’ve included the photo book for you guys to read!

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A friend told me that my photos reminded her of Edward Hopper‘s works. If you are unfamiliar with his works, Edward Hopper is a American painter who captures scenes and architecture iconic of America’s golden years of the 1920’s to 50’s. The catch is that his works are without a lot of the glitz and glamour that usually comes pre-packaged with these imagery, but it’s not overtly morose either.

Hopper’s scenes usually depict those of people being indoors. White spaces occupy most of the canvas, nearly empty rooms, characters in the painting ignoring one another, geometric landscapes with blocks of sunlight invading the scene… these are common elements in his works.

A sense of isolation, loneliness, melancholy and serenity could be seen in his works.

rooms-by-the-sea

( One of my favourite works of his is Rooms by the Sea, 1951)

While the reference is unintentional, Hopper had been influential in some way because of how much of his works resonates with me. I’ve always somehow wanted to be in those rooms and scenes he paints because of how quiet, spacious and isolated it all is. I was pleasantly surprised to find a quote from him that accurately explains some parts of my project.

There will be, I think, an attempt to grasp again the surprise and accidents of nature and a more intimate and sympathetic study of its moods, together with a renewed wonder and humility on the part of such as are still capable of these basic reactions.

Pathetic fallacy, chaos theory; check and checked.

Edward Hopper is renowned for his reluctance to discuss himself and his art, Hopper simply summed up his art by stating, “The whole answer is there on the canvas.”

As much as I have lots and lots of themes and ideologies into my work, I think in the most basic reason we do what we do is ultimately for our love for sunlight and how it made a crummy rigid world slightly more beautiful.

As Hopper puts it,

Maybe I am not very human – what I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.

If he’s not very human, I’m not quite sure if I am too.

(Originally posted on 12/3/2016)

Project 1 Time | Process

(N.B I haven’t been tagging these posts right last time hence I’m reuploading them in hopes that they appear in the class pages again!)

Photos Photos Photos!

“Oh dear… Do I have enough content?” Is a number 1 worry of mine working on this project for about 2 weeks and running. Being a subject of 24 hours is bad enough, being a subject of roughly 4 hours a day is worse.

Certain takeaways that I have learnt from taking photos,

1) Do not ever ever ever think to yourself that “it’s alright, it will probably look the same tomorrow anyways”. It wouldn’t, and a perfectly good shot would be gone forever.

2) Shucks that aunty is looking at me weird, maybe I shouldn’t take this shot. (Refer to point 2)

3) Man! I’m really a hermit huh!

Points 1 and 2 made me think about the butterfly effect or chaos theory:

As American mathematician and a pioneer of chaos theory, Edward Norton Lorenz’s explains,

When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future.

What this means is that a single small element of the past could lead to a larger chain of events and changes that is beyond our predictions.

Sure, that day could be sunny, but I could leave the campus later that day, or my phone could have not enough battery to last for the day etc etc…

Several factors have to come into play including the limits that I have imposed upon myself while taking the photos.

a) It must be a sunny day. (it made me hate rainy/ cloudy days)

b) My phone, of which I take the photos from, have to have enough battery/ memory space to take photos

c) No one must be in the photo ( personal preference)

d) I do not have a shaky hand while taking the photos

This inspired me to also document these factors, how many elements does it take to be able to document a beautiful mundane scene? How much of it is fate, how much control I could I have over this scenario?

These photos in some way or another feels to be the collaboration between fate, time and me. After all, I’m just a tiny person trying to capture little scenes of time against the larger factors of the universe that I can never control.

routine map

I’ve also created a routine map of the places I often or only visit in a week. (Click the photo for a bigger view.)

It looks really empty for now. Perhaps I should add a few more data such as time spend travelling in those routes, when I’d usually go these places etc etc.

(originally posted on 4/3/2016)

 

Project 1 time | Idea generation|Pathetic fallacy and the body clock.

(N.B I haven’t been tagging these posts right last time hence I’m reuploading them in hopes that they appear in the class pages again!)

Ideas Ideas Ideas, there’s too much of them and too little time, however I decided to narrow down what I’d like to do into two main aspects.

1) Pathetic Fallacy

2) Emotional clock

So what is pathetic fallacy?

Pathetic Fallacy

Pathetic fallacy is a kind of personification that gives human emotions to inanimate objects of nature for example referring to weather features reflecting a mood.

For example, the sentence “The somber clouds darkened our mood” is a pathetic fallacy as human attributes are given to an inanimate object of nature reflecting a mood.

so what does that have to do with time?

While researching, I came across the chinese body clock. (x)

Our bodies feel emotional changes throughout the day, largely fuelled by the hormonal balances of our bodies. I find it interesting that they name different hours of the day with different organs.

Anyways, as mentioned in a previous post, I decided to focus on the golden hours of roughly 6 – 7 am and 5 – 6 pm in Singapore. Why those hours, I believe that the time represent beginnings and ends at the same time. The end of day and the beginning of night or the end of night and the beginning of day. I believe that Pixar’s Day and Night animation represents this the best.

While photographing my life during those hours, its rather difficult to differentiate from both. The high contrast between light and shadows and the warm lighting are almost the same.

Why the focus on high contrast between light and shadow?

I like playing with the idea of dualities, polar opposites and contrasts. One of my favourite works of all time would be Vincent Van Gogh’s “Wheat Field With Crows”

wheat-field-with-crows

This work has some history going behind it. It is documented that a few days after he finished this painting, Van Gogh, on July 29, 1890, killed himself with a gunshot to the chest. He sustained a gunshot injury to his abdomen while out in those fields before dying in an inn two days later. On his death bed he revealed he had shot himself.

A common analysis on the work is that it shows Van Gogh’s struggles with his bi-polar depression (known as manic depression during Van Gogh’s time). The dark night against the bright field of gold wheat does not make sense in the natural world. To me, I believe that the painting can go two ways. Either Van Gogh started painting in the day and finished when the sun was setting or he was expressing his own emotions onto the landscape as he normally does with his masterpieces. The unnatural contrasts of light and dark stood out as a clear contrast between maniac happiness and depression. The joy of a journey ahead as one is to traverse in to the path of gold contrasted with the onset despair of doing so in a dark night. One just feels trapped in this flurry of emotions, indecisions and beauty.

The golden hours feel sort of like that to me. Chiaroscuro.

Chiaroscuro

:  pictorial representation in terms of light and shade without regard to color

:  the arrangement or treatment of light and dark parts in a pictorial work of art

b:  the interplay or contrast of dissimilar qualities (as of mood or character)

:  the interplay of light and shadow on or as if on a surface

:  the quality of being veiled or partly in shadow

( originally posted on 13/2/2016.)

Project 1: Golden Hour | Golden years

mindmap

Time is fickle as it is unsympathetic, it could not stop and will never stop. A reliable constant, a cruel constant.

Golden Hour, Golden years, golden ages.

Time seems to be fraught with our nihilism and our enthusiasm. The hope for a good day as the first rays of light peeps through window grills. Watching the beautiful melancholy of sunsets slowing sinking behind rows of HDBS in a packed train home. Admiring the day’s dying breath, while something gnaws deep inside of having wasted a day or perhaps a year, or a life.

The golden hour is often used in photography to signify the times when the sun is close to the horizon of the earth. The atmospheric light is diffused, colour is enhanced. Sunrise, sunsets, both are good. Although we see it on a almost daily basis, that short period of magic, where light seems heavy and the world looked a tad more beautiful, time becomes a bit more precious.

Time is full of paradoxes, of contrasts. Light and shadow.

Reflections – Time of Others

The exhibition was a rather eye opening experience for me as I find the social political context that most of the works were dealing with was rather interesting. The dissonance between the past and present was often highlighted in the works and how the factor of time affects people and communities. I especially loved how comparisons could be made across works as to how a drastic event in the past affect different communities and how these communities dealt with them.

One work that particularly struck out to me is Vandy Rattana’s Monologue, which largely discusses the effect of time and how it wears down on the significance of events or symbols. The context behind Monologue is a rather interesting one as the artist receives a map from his father which marks the location of an unmarked grave between two mango trees. While sounding like a murder mystery at first, it was later revealed that the man was possibly a victim of a mass killing during Cambodia’s communist era as his body was found not far away from an unmarked mass grave. The dissonance between generations of Cambodians living during or after the Pol Pot regime was rather evident through the dialogue between the artist and his unnamed compadre. Through the monologue of the artist, addressed towards the person in the grave, we were informed that the artist had seen at least seen a photograph of the mysterious man although we ourselves as an audience were not shown this. In addition, instead of sympathising with the man for his tragic passing, Rattana scolds him in a harsh, condescending tone, giving off an air of disrespect towards the deceased. While shocking, his actions are not far off from how the Cambodian community are treating the deceased. It was later revealed how the area of the mass graves have turned into rice paddies for farming are still being used for that purpose, highlighting the indifference of the modern day Cambodians towards the victims of the horrible past.

And the end of it, many questions were still left unanswered in the film. Who is the person in the grave? How did the artist’s father know about him and does the victim’s family know about the location of his grave? Did they even try to find him? Taken onto a larger context though, the same questions can also be asked about every one of the 5,000 bodies found in the mass graves that were left forgotten over the years. While the anonymity of these victims is a rather distressing issue, one also tackle the issue that acts of respecting the dead compromise that of the still living. Should the livelihood of the rice farmers and the communities which feeds off the rice that they plant over the graves be heavily affected when the plot of land is to be turned into a proper burial area or monument?

I loved how for most of the works and the communities involved in them, the significance of certain things, events and people although have died down, but are never truly forgotten. There is always a sort of a new “life” growing from a physical and symbolic death under the effect of time. One could infer that rice plants and the mango trees could grow and flourish due to the nourishment provided by the bodies buried underneath them. As such, it can be argued that there is always progress in time and the dead in some way or another, will always still contribute to the next generation.

p.s I find it amusing that even the work itself is an example, the death of an unknown person once recorded on a hand-drawn map eventually became that of a 18 minute video to be shown on art galleries.