Enviromental Art Research
Eyes as Big as Plates
Eyes as Big as Plates # Agnes II (Norway 2011) (Credit: Karoline Hjorth and Riitta Ikonen)
- Riitta Ikonen and Karoline Hjorth’s photography immediately struck me. I was struck by the way that the artists used costumes to camouflage with the environment, but more impressively these artists found away to blend the models personality and character seamlessly as well. The woman pictured is named Agnes, and here she dresses as the “fabled north wind”. The artists clearly used a strategy of understanding Agnes before photographing here. Agnes parachuted twice in her late age (At both 85 and 90) and she described these experiences as “pure joy”. Due to this comment the artists chose to depict her as this wind.
2. In this example the model not only dresses and camouflages into the environment, but he actually wears a coat of native fish. Here the artists demonstrate how they combine the environment, animals, and human in one image. Through this beautiful combination the artist achieve ideas of magic and anthropomorphism. As well as demonstrate a clear respect for life, age as it applies to Humanity, animals, and cleary the environment.
BOOK STACKS
Guelph English Literature
The following book stacks are created from a collection of books that I have been required to read in the English program at the University of Guelph. This limitation in my book collection critera produced very small pallette of available texts forstacking. I feel as though this limitation created an on brand route for book stacks…English as a subject. This book pallette allowed me to reveal the messaaging that Guelph University and University English send through their required texts.
Enviromental Video Art Project
Throughout this project me and Zoe struggled through several iterations of what this video would become. When our brainstorming began we were working with 2 ideas that formed our orginal concepts and also carried over to the final piece These were mental health and nature documentaries. Nature is extremly impactful on human health, both physcially and mentally. Even simply meditave walks in nature can have longstanding benfits, yet soceity is increbicly removed from nature and these befenfits, strangely people will even choose to consume nature in a more manfucatured way… Nature documentaries. Originally we had planned away to transport and show nature documentaries to different settings in order to create/expose some kind of interesting truth or situtiton. However; while we were searching for Nature documentary clips to use we had a epiphany moment were we realized that we should be using books instead!
Nutured by Nature – https://www.apa.org/monitor/2020/04/nurtured-nature
THE NATURE YOU SEE IN DOCUMENTARIES IS BEAUTIFUL AND FALSE- https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/04/problem-nature-documentaries/618553
D’Arcy Wilson – Artist Research
Protect your Love– Wilson’s dedication to excuecting a task seemingly blind to basic information in regards to said task continously creates interesting dynanmics. This s is the clash between her youthful corousity and respect with her ignorance.
#1 Fan – this work (and artist) were first introduced to me in class. When I first saw this video I was not its “#1 Fan”, but after explore more of Wilsons catolgue I found a greater aprecaition for this work.
The Memorialist Museolgy – this peice in particular was channeled in our final video. We took insiparation from the idea of almost naively committing to the task of of informing a inanimate object.
The Tree
Book Project
Book Cover
Children’s Book Research
This artist book is a collection of found children’s books image with one theme -unruly red hair. Each decision making step off this project was hard. I was initially drawn to the beautiful illustrations found n children’s books . After checking out many from the libary, I quickly begin to notice how similar the 2 genres are. I would aruge that several books I found were artist books disguised as children’s books. It makes sense considering that most illustrated books are illrustred by and written by artist’s. Children’s books are artist books in nature.
Below are some examples:
Red Hair Book Pages
I collected as many children’s books I could from the library, but I still need a theme. Something featured a lot in childrens books are characters with red hair. In fact there are a lot of books spefciallly about dealing with redhair. I grew up reading a lot of these books because I was a child with unruly red hair. Even once I landed on this theme I found I needed to be more specific. What about red hair did I want to feature? Most of these “red haired children’s books” are described as “learning to love red hair” and most of them deal with the attention and messiness of being a child with red hair. At this point in my life I love my hair and do not want to change it. As a child, that wasn’t the case, lots of tears, mostly from the pain of people (mostly my mother) aggressively pulling or brushing my hair.
Mornings before school were often filled with tears, both mine and my mothers. At times we resorted to cutting knots out because neither of us yet knew how to deal with my hair.
The frustration of child became the energy and theme I wanted to convey throughout the book. I wanted to create something that a younger me might have passionately scribbled in anger one school morning. The doodling paint lines and the endless drama and horror of having curly red hair are channelling a playful naivety of young people with red hair, or at least me.
Hard Copy-Print Verison
Artist Multiple
Badge of Dishonor
My original idea for this project stemmed from gold star stickers. I thought that these stickers provided an interesting opportunity to manipulate and play with because we have strong associations with this symbol as a reward. These stickers are often used to persuade or encourage children to accomplish goals in a usual educational setting. I started thinking along the lines of reward and participation. This leads me to the idea of ribbons- or participation ribbons. Similarly, participation ribbons are often given to encourage children to try and participate; however, in past years, these ribbons have faced much backlash as they have been revealed to remove competitiveness, drive, and resilience. I began to think about how participation is rewarded and what kind of participation is rewarded. As individuals existing by nature, we are participants and complicated in systems, particularly in the West.
“Take a Stand” Playlist
The “Take a Stand Playlist” is filled with artist making bold statemant and commentary a through processing the world around them.
AI Weiwei
Ai Weiwei is a artist and activist. He often combines tradtional Chinese styles with modern materials and concepts, thorugh this exploration he makes bold and politcallly charged art. Ai video explains that he strives to “give testomony to the world he is living in”. This seems to be a common trait of the artsit featured in this playlist.
Barbara Kruger
Krueger is an American conceptual artist. Her work is based in her knowledge of architecture, and is known for incorperating photography and collage. Her signature style being the red text box and white writing.
Throughout this video, Krueger descirbes an intersectional appraoch to art, you cannot examine race, class, or gender ever truly independently). Kruger challenges these norms by confronting her viewers with power dynamics represented in the world around us.