This piece is a portrait of the love between to people. I have decided to portray it by photographing love through art and gift-giving. On the left we have the gifts that were given to the male and on the right are gifts given to a female. One of these people is an Artist and the other is a business major. Everyone expresses love toward each other in different ways and I wanted this piece to showcase these two people's personalities through what they made for eachother.
The sound of the Hunted.
This piece was made by using a dangling microphone as a cat toy. It is supposed to take on a new perspective of mimicking how it would sound like if you were the cat's toy. This audio consists of 2 cats in different locations playing with the same microphone an hour apart. You can hear the noises of the predators clawing at the "prey", biting it, and the microphone being tossed around and running away from them. Near the end, you may even hear a "meow" from the distance.
Video Series
This piece showcases a person staring at a reflection of themselves over two minutes. As the audience you feel like a spectator of this intense and personal scene. You can witness how this individual interacts with themself. That moment is broken once the individual stares right at the camera making it feel like they are aware that you have been there. There are 3 screens and cameras in this piece, the one on the top showcasing the subject’s entire face, the one on the bottom showcasing a zoomed-in portion of their eyes, and the one that records this whole scene.
Reflection of Humanity is a piece that includes a sample of randomly selected people sitting down in front of 5 screens with no instructions. It is a piece about individuality and self-identity. The subjects are able to observe themselves from all sorts of angles. For some, it is intimidating, while others feel comfortable. In this video, you are able to observe how this sample of people behaves in a new situation, isolated only with themselves and the TVs. You can see each tiny gesture that is unique to them. And in someway see part of their true identity.
This video loop showcases a person doing their makeup in a reflection on a TV that inverts them. You can see all of their emotions and small movements as their face is displayed on a zoomed-in screen. It is interesting to see how technology may not exactly replicate reality. In this case, it replicates a mirror yet is much more difficult to use and does not give the same result. The loop also indicates the constant struggles of failure and perfectionism as the makeup keeps on getting put on and wiped off.
Passing
Passing (2022) is a piece by Maria Juxtapose representing birds made from torn-apart shoes. It is a visual piece that allows you to walk under a sky filled with many birds. At first glance, they seem like beautiful birds but with more observation, the more destruction you see in the shoes that the birds are made of. The symbolization of this piece is human and natural migration and its struggles of which tend to go unnoticed by others. It relates to me as my family and I immigrated to Canada and I got to witness the good and bad of it firsthand. To everyone in Europe (where we immigrated from) it seemed as if we were going to live the perfect life as showcased in “American movies”. They did not see the struggle of trying to find a place to live and a completely new life without others to rely on.
Pour Your Own Body Out
This interactive piece is 7354 cubic meters. Its purpose is for the audience to bring their body into this studio to watch and feel what they see. They are allowed to treat it as their own space, to sing or dance if they please. In the middle of this studio there is a circle of couches and in the middle of them are speakers. Along the walls are projections, that consist of many blues, greens, and reds. Their overall theme seems to be connected with nature. The video projections include one human, one pig, a snake, and worms. The videos seem to have been recorded in a choppy way as if they were recorded for filler parts of a film, focusing on small elements like the worms or grass with a steady hand moving slowly along the images. The music and video have a slight surreal type of feel to it mixed with nostalgia.
Rist VS Tiktok
Rist shows a lot of self-expression in her pieces. Both her and modern videos on Tiktok align with the idea for the audience to explore their theme of identity exploration, to see and feel things that they typically would not experience otherwise. They also both have a sense of community, for TikTok, it consists of things such as trends and shared experiences through videos. While for Rist it is about bringing a crowd to experience her work. For example, the piece Pour Your Body Out creates a sense of community by bringing all of these different people to experience the visuals, music, and overall vibe of her work.
Experiment
I wore my shirt inside out for a whole day. Feelings of insecurity and anxiety filled me as my brain tricked me into thinking that everyone was looking at me. As if they knew that something was off. In reality, many people did not tend to notice, they did not even bat an eye. Even if strangers did realize they did not act on it, they probably had better things to do with their time. I met up with 4 friends that day. Out of the four only one noticed and told me so I was aware that my shirt was backwards. I guess that it would also make a difference in what type of shirt I would wear backward, the one I had on was a plain black tee, so it may have been hard to tell that it was on the wrong way as the only indicators were small seams and the tag on my back. What I got from this experiment is that even though you may feel embarrassed about what others think of you, you should not really care as you will only see them for a part of the day and perhaps never again.
1km
We travel many kilometers every day and don’t really take in the surroundings, so the little things along the way tend to go unnoticed.
I plan to Walk A Km and take 1 photo every 100M showcasing how long a Km is and how many different things go unnoticed in that sort of distance, the deeper image to me behind this would be to slow down and appreciate the little things that you see every day
I’m starting at a bus stop in the middle of downtown Guelph and walking a kilometer down a familiar path to me to see the small things that I miss daily.
Walking down and stopping every 100m gave me a lot of mixed feelings. It was nice to stop and appreciate the surroundings but on the other hand, it also did not feel safe doing that as a girl downtown.
In the photos down below I displayed the path taken along with the images at each destination, at the bottom left you can see how far from my destination I am.
