Alia

Week #11: Pandemic Cake

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Technically I ended up with two pandemic cakes. The cake from the previous video art I had created made an absolute mess, I could not even attempt to put it back together to be ‘edible’. Rather than tossing it out and letting it go to waste, I ended up making cake pop ‘balls’ out of it, since it was already a mess with icing. Although they turned out very soft, they were thoroughly enjoyed by my roommates 🙂

Week #10: Food in Art

I played around with a few ideas. Traditionally when I think of food in the art world, it is always used as symbolism to mean something else. The Arnolfini Wedding features some small oranges that represent fertility, The Madonna Child depicts apples and gourds to represent the triumph of salvation over damnation in its religious ties, the halved walnut in Virgin and Child represents the holy trinity, and the list continues. Food has always been utilized to convey subtle meanings within art.

In the modern day, advertising also utilizes fruit. It is often over-sexualized as a form of appealing to the public while playing on desire and sexuality to draw attention where food can be capitalized through the instilled state of desire, tapping into the consumers sexual appetite (literally). Certain foods have been gendered as well, where long thin foods represent male genitalia, and round, halved fruits represent the female genitalia. This can even be seen with the use of emojis, where the eggplant is representative of a penis, the peach alluding to an ass, and melons depicting breasts. Even general female figures are given shapes, either is an apple or pear depending on the woman’s bodily shape.

I wanted to play on this sexuality linkage between fruits and genitalia, editing images as if they were NSFW and contained nude content. Featuring the 12 foods, including a banana, ice cream cone, grapefruit, oyster, hotdog, carrot, popsicle, fig, cucumber, peach, and eggplant, the series is subtly blurred and boldly censored. The censoring came down to where I feel on the body the food would be if it were genitalia, and I went from there.

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I kind of felt like the above piece was very mundane and did not challenge the boundaries much, so I developed one of my other ideas and created a video as well.

For this piece, I wanted to explore what was considered ‘wrong’ when it came to consuming foods. Immediately I thought of cutting things incorrectly, such as cutting the center slice out of a round pizza or a pie, or eating an ice cream cone with the cone first. These ideas actually made me laugh, because I just pondered who had collectively decided that these methods of eating foods were incorrect? After actually executing the following video, I then understood why.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9E-ablPxBVw[/embedyt]

This was a very challenging video for myself. First of all, it definitely makes a mess when cutting a cake horizontally. I began by making a very standard vanilla cake with buttercream frosting between each of the four layers. The top layer is also lined with strawberries. I found this funny since the person who would be assumed to get the top layer of the cake would get all of the top garnishes. This was a fun video to make, and if I were to recreate it I would have had a more stable film set-up, and I would have frozen the cake prior to cutting to make it more stable for a cross-sectional cutting through. Overall, I wanted to critique the way we eat food, typically to ‘westernized’ standards and methods, and I think this video achieves it. We do not take into consideration how other cultures may eat, if they practice differently or have different manners they follow. Along with a sense of humor, I think this video goes against the rightness of eating cake and critiques the westernized culture.

It would be interesting to take this series even further and think of different ways I can eat other foods ‘incorrectly’.

Week #9: Food in Art

Week #8: The Rise and Fall of Bread

Bread has always been a ‘treat’ to me. As a food that is very carbohydrate dense, and as a science student, the understanding of nutrition on such a detailed level has shaped the way and what I eat. My parents are traditionally very healthy, or ‘clean’ eaters, and bread was never a staple in my house. As a kid, I always wanted the nice white bread, and not the ‘brown bread with the seeds’, as I used to refer to it, whenever we did have bread in the house (I now have a very great appreciation for a classic grilled-cheese sandwich).

A comfort food now would be a nice stir fry over rice. My mom is a very great cook, but I think she gets that all from my grandparents who have owned multiple restaurants over their lifetime. Stir fry is very popular in Asian culture, and I always had it growing up. I believe it is also my mom’s comfort food so we ate it very regularly as kids, and now I am missing it when I am away from home.

After listening to the podcast, and the dive into deeper meanings that are upheld to certain people who eat and share bread, I found it very relatable. I saw eating bread as simply eating bread, but the social aspect makes much sense because that is often how I ate bread. It was typically a shareable portion at Italian restaurants put out on the table. Now, when I do have bread, it is often a shared plate at a restaurant, usually with a side dish of olive oil and balsamic vinegar concoction for dipping (and it is sooo good!) It is kind of sad, now with being in a pandemic and having restrictions when seeing other people, the joy of sharing bread with others is no longer present.

During the beginning of the pandemic, I remember scrolling through Facebook and being bombarded with bread post after bread post of homemade loaves by what seemed like every person on my timeline. With the time and effort and care it takes to make bread, and the abundance of time we had being stuck inside, it made sense.

The bread I made from class on the right. I followed some modified recipe from the internet, did not come out that great so I wanted to do another take using my neighbors grandma’s recipe. I was planning on making a cheese loaf for the second attempt but I first wanted to attempt getting this right – maybe I will post a successful cheese loaf in the future if I get to it 🙂

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My one neighbor is Portuguese, and her grandmother makes THE best fresh sourdough bread EVER. When it’s still warm, my family will split the loaf and share some butter and devour it fairly quickly. After my first attempt of making the sourdough bread, I asked her for some guidance and attempted to make it again. I think it tasted much better with some expert guidance (left).

Week #7

Racism is being addressed now more than ever with countless movements, and the prevalence of social media that can spread awareness very quickly. Traditionally, I think Canada has been seen as a subjectively ‘good’ country, and many people believe that racism does not happen here, that it’s below those who live in Canada, and happens only in the neighboring American country below. But that has not been the case.

Michelle Pearson Clarke draws attention to the racism prevalent in Canada through her artwork. In Suck Teeth Compositions, she introduces the noise made by sucking air through the teeth and pushing the tongue against the backside of the teeth while doing so to make a noise. This noise is used to convey feelings and emotion, often negative, such as distaste, frustration, anger, irritation and disapproval.

Basil AlZeri’s Kitchen Lab is a performative piece that includes him cooking, and his mother played over a video call where she relays instructions for him to follow. In his work he aims to bring light to Palestinian roots through stories of culture incorporated into his recipes.

Both works have a cultural appreciation, although very different. Both pieces almost work towards praising their respective cultures and the traditional aspects about them and how they have changed through generations. By being able to share these experiences through new technology, it is an interesting didactic between new media outlets showing historically traditional cultural practices.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpT9_O16y40[/embedyt]

After bouncing my idea off of Diane, while still being able to convey repetition and playing on the slipping sanity I have as the semester slowly melts away, I developed the idea into a multiple video stitched screen of recordings of myself in lectures over the span of a few days. I thought it was interesting in the full version to have the different videos ending at different times, and leaving the screens to fade to black (they all end at the same tie in the shorter version uploaded above).

I think the idea of conveying the online zoom classroom of today speaks a lot about the mental health of students. Despite there being multiple versions of myself in the video, the individuality of each of the videos marked by the frames forces each version of me to feel isolated even within the screen. It reflects how many of us students would be feeling at home when they no longer receive the social interactions with their fellow classmates, now rarely not even seeing them from a computer screen.

Week #6: Zoom Video Art

Zoom meetings, and online meeting platforms in the age of online schooling have become the norm everyday. The strain on mental health and sanity is at stake when we have these faux social interactions without actually socially interacting in the sense we have grown up to know.

As a university student, 5 days a week are spent joining meetings for lectures. The repetition of having the online delivery of lectures for a year now has become the ‘norm’ in the student’s daily routine. Although it may not be the standard ‘trapped at your desk’ at work, this goes hand in hand.

I want to explore repetition in my work. I also want to convey shifting sanity, as well as routine, through the overlay of me ‘attending lectures’. I think this will turn out absolutely chaotic with a couple videos overlapping with different movements and narratives, even different sounds. I will experiment with audio as well as video to try and convey these emotions and feelings we often are unable to pick up through the screens we view every day.

Week #5: Video production

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[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqAFy7IeGvE[/embedyt]

I really pondered the idea regarding what I would want to teach nature – that being trees or simply a houseplant. From the preliminary work of ideas I developed from Week 4, I wanted to boil down and emphasize the bigger message I wanted to convey. In this piece, my goal was to demonstrate and perform with trees how humans show affection. The major gesture was hugging, some light kisses and caresses as well, but in conclusion this work is a compilation of affectionate gestures to the trees.

I considered how I felt; when going on walks the trees provided a calming and gentle ambience where the presence of the trees was looming yet comforting. I wanted this piece to be about returning those affectionate gestures to comfort the trees this time around. I wanted to branch out further than my house plants, finding a more direct lifeline to mother nature herself. I wandered around this area in a small forest and was drawn to the trees that gave me a lonely energy, so I approached the ones who really felt like they needed a hug.

I wanted to have someone else film me during the gestures to distance myself from having overwhelming control of the manipulation of the videos. I did not have a say in how my friend filmed me, and I did not retake the clips; I didn’t even review them to see how they turned out after they were shot, I only saw them once I started editing. I wanted the clips to be raw and unedited, and fairly experimental.

The video is a compilation of clips edited together of myself giving back to the trees. The biggest inspiration for this piece was the guided audio walk Trees are Fags I found a greater connection to the trees I made contact with so I wanted to channel this energy into my work for this project. The idea of Machine Project’s Houseplant Vacation work in providing a space to take your houseplants for a vacation, they intended on giving back to the plants, and I wanted to develop this idea to incorporate into this project as well.

Week #4: Artists Commune with Nature

Notes for the project:

Video Draft – process

Week #3: More Text as Art

Final

This piece aimed to play on the words of the banner created. Typically a banner is a bold statement hung directly in a location with great visibility to make a statement to those who view it. I found it comedic to incorporate the word ambivalently into a banner that is defined as opposing. By pinning the banner to one side of the wall yet allowing the other side to fall and lay across the ground, I feel this choice reflects the ambivalence directly and exploits that. Rather than making a statement with the words presented, this banner makes a statement by oddness and very opposite method of display. The choice to make the words white to blend them slightly with the background also stems from the same idea to be opposing to the bold statements banners usually convey. The letters want to be seen, they are in all capitals, but they are not making an evident statement by being white letters and hung halfway.

Additional:

Additional: This piece I wanted to completely edit. By utilizing the word excerpt “Kiss of death”, I wanted to channel the energy that as developed from being amongst a pandemic for a year. By incorporating two masked figures appearing to be leaning in for a kiss, I wanted to separate them by the words. The idea that being close to someone today could mean risking your health and essentially your life was the message I wanted to strongly convey here.

This piece was edited and created in a photoshop app – I wanted to see what I could create on a strict digital platform rather than a physical banner or completely staged photograph to develop the skills I would be using for editing. I wanted the text to also be continuously one page as a cursive sentence but I did not have paper long enough so the digital option developed.

Week #2: Text as Art

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Notes as Text

Following the art as text lecture, I found I was very drawn to two of the works, more so than the others, for similar reasons – Jenny Holzier’s Truisms and Shelley Niro’s The Shirt. 

Jenny Holzier’s work is very bold and crass in the best ways. Her ‘one liners’ are comical and blunt and absolutely make a statement. The presentation through formats of billboard’s and large signs, as well as galleries and even clothing apparel, Truism’s acts to be right in your face through multiple means. Her goal was to garner a rise out of the audience, a reaction or a spark towards that start of conversation amongst the viewer’s. When present in such public places, the likelihood of this occurring increases greatly compared to the presentation in just a gallery or museum space. I think every aspect of this work is successful, and the format of the piece only operates to develop her bold content further. Shelley Niro’s The Shirt gave me a similar effect. Aside from both works being printed clothing, they also make very bold and political statements. Niro uses the stereotypical tourist shirt to display her message through dark irony and satire, making an almost too bold statement but does not stray from truth. Her work directly addresses the long-standing effects as a result of colonial settlement on First Nations peoples, creating discourse. In combination with the shirt making a statement, the woman who wears it, and the background, this piece was also very successful in making a statement to start conversation among the viewers.

Week #1: Book stacks

Process of my work

I relied heavily on Nina Katchadourian’s work as inspiration for my stacks. I found the narratives very entertaining and extremely creative, how she could convey and paint portraits of the libraries the books belonged. She enabled clever and I wanted to create short narratives in my work as well.

The number of books I was working with was very limited. Neither my roommates nor I brought enough of a collection to our student house that we would deem it a library, but I worked with the given resources.

It was, at first, difficult to separate the titles and view them not as books as a whole to reinvent them and utilize them for a different narrative purpose. The stacks I created do not explicitly convey me or the owners of the borrowed books, but rather interesting and somewhat ominous and distant narratives giving the viewer space to convey the meaning how they choose. By grouping like titles or meanings, I began to form the stacks below.