Nikki’s work

Week One :

First working on this assignment i felt overwhelmed with all of the options in the library at Guelph for potential combinations of words and phrases. So instead at the beginning of my process I decided to gather books simply based on interesting titles, combined with visually pleasing spines in order to create myself a micro selection of books. From the titles I liked and gathered, I then worked in my “mini library.”

STACK ONE | ART THROUGH THE AGES

My first collection of books were found all together in the Art History section of the library. I firstly noticed they provided all the colours of the rainbow before noting that they actually also were written by the same author, Gardener. This piece felt more like a natural start to the rest of the assignment, and encouraged me to not just rely on the title of the books, but what books physically stood out to me. What I would naturally lean towards visually felt as if the selection of books did not just speak about the library’s collection, but also my own preferences as an artist.

STACK TWO | EDEN

My second collection, is quite possibly my favourite. I leaned towards more word play, but still wanted to keep visual aesthetics in mind. This was the resulted in the more blunt appearance with shorter titles, and a more muted colour palette. I loved how these titles reminded me of the creation story in the bible of Adam and Eve, and relates to themes I want to explore in my practice as an artist this semester.

STACK THREE | WAR

My final stack felt the most natural to the original assignment. I had originally gathered this series of books based on the worn look of their covers thinking it provided a lot of visual interest. Nearing the end of my time at the library I was stacking books to put away when I finally noticed the titles of each book. I decided to rearrange them to read the most like poetry, to tell the story of the transitions of peace and war and then hopeful rediscovery.

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ARTIST PRESENTATION | JAE RHIM LEE

Jae Rhim Lee’s TEDtalk | https://youtu.be/_7rS_d1fiUc

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Video Art Submission

This video was condensed from a previous art assignment, and is my submission for the Images Festival

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Book Research

For our class’ artist book, I really wanted to play around with editing and morphing images together. During one of our first days, I started with the idea of “men with mushrooms” and started gathering images. I noticed how everyone else’s images looked very similar with rectangles or squares on top of a solid colour background, so I wanted to see what else could be done in terms of making a spread. I did not want to only arrange images, but instead wanted to see how I could manufacture my own.

The first two pages I made for the book were produced by automatically selecting the image and allowing for gaps and holes to occur. Then I would layer images and textures playing with the opacity, and finally making all the images black and white for a sense of unity. I was inspired by zines and the idea of mass production, and wanted my images to almost resemble being layered and layered through a printer. Unfortunately, I got sick shortly after these pages were produced, and that maddest extremely difficult to come in and work. I was disappointed when I returned to class and one of my morphed images had been removed without notice because the last update I had received, “Men with Mushrooms” was still alongside another image I had created to compliment each other.

If we were to redo this assignment, I wish that maybe we assigned a set amount of pages for each student, in order to keep the amount of contributions even. Even though we were sourcing images from each other, I find that there was representation of certain student’s work much more than others and that really restricted the feeling of it being a “class book.” This was especially apparent for me when my final image I had created for the book was also nearly removed last minute due to it “not fitting the rest of the book.” Instead of a solution of maybe adding elements to an additional page to make a spread, I personally feel that maybe we were too quick to just remove pages. When it is supposed to be a class work and none of your own work is possibly represented, meanwhile certain classmates have their images present in nearly half of the book the assignment was really discouraging.

Women & Flowers
Men & Mushrooms

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Artist Multiple

For my artist multiple, I was inspired by a 1913 love letter a cartoonist had sent his wife in order to tell her about a museum they were going to visit. I love the attributes of pop-up the original design carried and I wanted to make a multiple that was a 3D object in space rather than just a pamphlet or piece of paper.

Original Reference from 1913

For my new artistic interpretation of this piece, I wanted to speak on the inaccessibility of art institutions and how it can be difficult for young artists to even get their foot in the door of these institutions. I included images of famous works I personally like in order to show a bias in the art community. I wanted to capture this feeling of being unable to enter such a closed off space, so decided to remove the original doorway from the inspiring design. I also included a run-on-sentance monologue to cover all four sides of the pop-up. I wanted to the receiver to feel as if they were reading and receiving the same advice over and over again, but not knowing what the advice is wishing to do.

From discussions in class, I think moving forward with this project I would like to have them as a monthly mail-out where people can receive new monthly art history information about different artists, or contemporary artists of all disciplines. I think rather than individually glues pieces, I can easily size the piece to be a single sheet of paper with fold lines for assembly, and then only glue the one edge. The reason I chose to present this work’s packaging as a letter as well, is not just to pay homage to just the original letter, but also to signify the future plans of this project being a mailed form of art. Not everyone is able to go to art institutions, so I really admire the idea of bringing the art to them.