I’m presenting my project Tuesday and we will be making prints as a class. We are going to be printing our hands on shirts or pants to mimic holding up breasts or buttocks. Please bring a spare pants or a shirt or apron if you want to decorate your own items. We will be using thermochromic ink that changes colour with heat. The base concentrated pigment is highly concentrated and it’s noted to not interact with skin. I have the information sheet on the product to show for everyone to be properly informed. This concentrated pigment is highly diluted and mixed with oil based fabric printing ink that is washable with soap and water. I have tested this ink with my own hands and have found no reaction to it or irritation at all. I will provide saran-wrap to cover hands if people do not wish to have the ink directly on their hands. Further I will get some bandoes in case people forget or don’t have an item.
Here are the new book stacks I made to continue with the idea I had for expanded stacks that being in this case boardgames and books that were whispering potent messages at me just when I need to hear them. I’m sorry I’ve been sick, and I’m trying to catch up while not delaying my recovery. I have periods of it’s all good and mad energy like “yeah dance time!”, but I know if I indulge my fever will instantly return and I’ll be worse for wear. I’m doing the best I can here with this pesky flu. Anyhow I thought the obscuring of the white box and part of catacombs with only a hint of digital help to hide a red thread on the couch was a enjoyable optical play on the reaching up from these more grounded games with morbid undertones to an extent. The fun on top being above the mystery void is the table is lava, resulting in misery raining down from above. I think the game one is fun but I definitely vibe more with the call out books, it’s got a cinematic moving comic book vibe and while it might be sharper with a boost in contrast or black point, I think the soft paper haze makes it feel less sterile and more genuine and loved.
Book Stacks
I explored lighting, fake books and my book display arrangments based off elements. I wanted to play with the notion of books and reading and their outwards appearance. I often take a chance on books based on their covers and appearance finding something I didn’t know I wanted or needed to learn. I have small sections in my room of books organized into elements and meanings. The first one is my water element section with mermaids and sea creatures. The middle one is my earth section to ground me, be realistic and connect with my lived experience. The last one is a bigger experiment with lighting and fire, a hint of book burning but also falsehood from the books being fake.
A Further Exploration of Katie Patterson
I am a big fan of rocks, fossils, crystals and geology. So when I saw the example of Katie Patterson’s work being a necklace of fossils made into beads from the various major geological events in our planet’s history, I was ecstatic! My interest was furthered by the meticulousness of collecting and processing materials. It is a feat to amass such variety and even in terms of time commitment it is a daunting feat. Examining their body of work while finding many thread lines of interest it was ultimately To Burn, Forest, Fire that I was equally enamoured with. I will have to sift through my computer but I had read about an exhibit that made the use of fiction and specifically scent to convey a believable realism to an exhibit about merfolk that lived in a valley. I will add the piece when I find it but the main intrigue was the use of fiction and the believability sold through sensory engagement. I have a bit of discussion about the merfolk exhibit but what connected so well for me in the To Burn, Forest, Fire, was the use of scent to fully immerse and encapsulate an environment and time.
Overall, Patterson uses strategies of curation of time and scientific data collection mainly in their practice. Temporality and an attempt to catalogue and capture how knowledge and things have changed with technology over time plays an important role in their practice. A core theme in Patterson’s work is, the connectivity and encapsulation of our planet at large from birth to possible death. They assign points of history, time or place and from their work to gather the milestones and ingredients from specific locations. Their response is generally not abrasive but has palpable silence and contemplation. It is curatorial in you are seeing all of our time or the edges of what we saw as the world, or a first and last. They have to collect a lot of scientific data and materials from various regions and historical documents to properly make their work with accuracy and consult with scientists. There is a value of reaching out across time and space; allowing someone to connect to all of it in one space emanating from Patterson’s work. They make the final products feel both intimate and yet monumental.
MerFolk Exhibit Adoration
The narrative presented was not very realistic or particularly believable, but the use of smell and presentation gave authenticity. Most people eventually understood it was an art exhibit and not an anthropology or scientific endeavour but the space fiction left the viewers to self project gave greater impacted than cold facts. The show was overall about environmental concerns and global environmental degradation and habitat loss. Most shows would try to be destructive, sensational and stern but generally most people know or have seen these things first hand, and yet are not moved to action. This show however mimicked authenticity of scientific and anthropology processes but with more whimsy and fantasy, allowing viewers space to not feel directly antagonized or in peril from environmental crises. The fiction allowed for emotional connection removed from direct implication of viewers, letting viewers make their own attachments and connect it back to their personal life and experience of the world.
Environmental Video Art
Chloroplastic is currently just one song but I think it’s too cool of a name to be only one song. This was an exploration of using audio clips with digital instruments to compose outsider music. I really enjoyed this project and while it has a steep learning curve and can be finessed more, the beauty of it lies in that you can continue to pay homage to this song and remake it. I hope to continue this audio work and make more songs in the future for Chloroplastic as an album.
The suit of food wrapper armour is a piece that I’ve been sitting on for a while. I have a deep love for design and an a sucker for commercial packaging and aesthetic boxes and mascots. The things so often tossed aside and thrown away, I find collectable and cherish even if I can’t keep everything. This video was a way to share my acknowledgement of my participation in a plastic consumerist world and appreciate that I still hold the natural world dear and more comforting than a bed of plastic.
When researching this project I reflected on things such a planned obsolescence that many technologies and items sold now have. The article above talk more specifically on technology based stuff but I was lead to this topic from another video. I had happened upon a discussion of why sewing machines now have all these computer parts and stuff while the actually technology we use to sew hasn’t truly changed in almost a century or more. The argument was that those old machines still work and don’t really break so companies tried new gimmicks to make people buy more machines. However, even when they made machines designed to break they lasted pretty long and other companies would make replacement parts to fix them. More modern sewing machines have computers and digital interfaces much more difficult to replace and such incentivizing people to keep updating and buying more machines sine they can’t really replace and fix the computer parts.
This article discussed notions of consumer republic that I had learned about in visual culture class. It makes an interesting assertion that the suburban neighbourhood was the central stage for this battle of fitting narrative and proving self reliance through purchases.
Fast fashion is another avenue of investigation as I buy and own a variety of clothing, fast fashion or not. I however, repair and repurpose old clothes and try to give them new life. Many people have no qualms getting rid of a plethora of clothes and constantly replacing them when they are still perfectly good. Such high consumption practices have an environmental cost that wearing once does not justify. There are further battles of ethics aside from labour and environment. Many of the largest fast fashion pushers blatantly steal independent design’s works and make much cheaper worse versions of their designs. The concept of a single non formal garment being more than $80 is crazy to most people. Our sense of value is skewed as with fast fashion many costs and quality have been reduced to keep up with consumers and make them such a low price point that people don’t bat an eye when buying.
Chloroplastic plays on this rejection of the environment and natural world showing a battle between our warped perspective of consumerist comforts and what we are rejecting.
In terms of musical stylings I was initially going for something similar to Dorian Electra’s songs like Drag and My Agenda. Or having an off beat note to add unease like in Hex Haywire’s, U got Hexed. I have no musical background or theory at all so it was a real stretch to get something with some musicality while still being true to my playful unconventional style. While it does not sound how I had envisioned, it has a life of it’s own and is rather interesting.
Visual references and works in a similar vein to my project and ideas
The book itself has some explanation on the ideas behind it to not misconstrued the intention. With parody one can often feel it is attacking or mocking the medium it is parodying. That is not my intention with this book and I think the while more implied understanding at the beginning of the book is more subtle the end notes make it pretty explicit. This book is intended to be humorous and playful in tone, not mocking the sources but easing public discomfort with topics of sexuality, kink, fetish and adult content. So often these topics are difficult to discuss due to negativity, discomfort or shame associated with it. We can lead healthier lives and push back against a culture of shaming by openly discussing sex and kink. Through open conversations there are greater learning opportunities and encouragement to share important safety information that could be easily missed when learning in solitude and feeling ashamed to talk about sex. Furthermore there is a lot of work that goes into adult content and it is often dismissed as simply, look traditionally beautiful and show skin; or even non adult content creators are told they are just given more views or money because of their looks. My goal is not to discredit adult content creators, and while the text is campy the images themselves have a certain beauty and care to convey my respect for those creators. This idea came from the pun of Onlyfans instead being about mechanical and manual fans but the precedent of using the platform in a parody manner seeing who stumbles upon it either genuinely aroused or in on the joke came from Bernadette Banner, who made an victorian era notion of erotic content mainly sock covered ankle reveals. They also did not do this to antagonize adult content but out of curiosity to see what the culture was like and acknowledged the effort it took to even just run quality content on an account to the platforms level of standards for a week.
Maya Ben David Video Art
The best way to describe their work is being apart of online culture and parodying it from within. There’s an interesting sense of humour and sincerity in criticism while also blending in with the very culture it’s critical of. It’s interesting to see some of the work behind making these chaotic masterpieces and what gets the full production fineness. There is a lot of work that goes into making the outfits and getting the makeup correct to try and film a clean shoot and it can be a frustrating process. It’d be interesting to see how artists can further integrate and appropriate platforms to succeed in artistic endeavours. With all social media platforms you have to battle against their algorithms which often reward rapid fire content and constant production. Trends can be helpful to follow but it can be difficult to stand out or instead give off the notion of being a sell out or content farming. Instead Maya embraces the absurdity of trends and interrogates said trends both blending in with them and standing apart. The playfulness and absurdity gives an air of camp but that very camp is what makes it fits in so well with the absurdity that is internet culture.
Take A Stand Videos
“You Make Me Iliad”Mary Reid Kelley
I found it interesting to see how historical text and media could be given reactions from those they discussed but did not get docummented in historical record. There is so much missing and lost to history that we often only have scraps of info to go off of and need to use roundabout ways to uncover people outside of mainstay power holders. The crafty filmography of Mary’s work has interest in materiality and also interrogates the viewpoint and information from historical records. It shows how to give information room to breath without forcing a singular narrative of current cultural ideology.
Stephanie Syjuco in “San Francisco Bay Area”
This artist’s work reminds me that the medium is the message at times. Materiality can have an important role in the meaning of a work. It’s interesting to see ways of working within culture and how to shift and critique what is going on in the world. Parodying and hiding within culture can create different layers of intrigue where something can be taken at face value or seen for the irony and criticism it is. Repurposing green screen to be the feature that is seen shows what the hidden labour of digital skills and comments what we hide and censor from the final product.
FanBoy Magazine & Artist Multiples
It was a lot of fun making fanboy magazine taking the humour of an only fans page about ceiling fans and expanding it into a mock playboy magazine. As Anna said it critique it’s making goofy humour over discomfort around discussions of sex and also highlighting the absurdities of attraction and fetish. While it can be seen purely as playful humour there is likely a genuine market of people who would be thrilled by such content and the underlying fetishes displayed can subtly be broached by the magazine. The print quality was really nice and while having a more coffee table bougie show book in future would be fun, I think the playful magazine was definitely well received.
My artist multiples built on the previous work offering a Fun for 1 package of a mini mag, a penis ornament or keychain with colour changing tip, a set of push pompom boobs and a kissed paper in a charming milk box package. The multiple kits had playful humour and was about having self satisfaction and having body positivity, being able to gloat that you’ve got your very own penis or boobs to enjoy should people be insulting. The prints were a further testament to self love by literally uplifting ones’ breasts or buttocks with their own hands in ink onto clothes. That way we can offer ourselves the love and support to uplift ourselves when we need some support. The printing process as well was a learning experience of finding comfort in interacting with ones’ body. All in all I think it turned out super cool and a ton of fun and hope to do more printing with my friends this weekend!
