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Explore a collection of all my work done in ART103 on my new website...Enjoy!

Natural Art

I approached this project hoping to convey the theme of life’s process of creation. I begin and end with a clock, but the symbol and movement of this image are more significant than the actual time itself. Art takes a great amount of time, but the sources from which art is derived are not linear. By including the turning pages of the book, I hoped to express the research and reexamination of ideas. I used the lighting and shadows of my hand to capture a feeling of the spirit taking form and impressing itself upon the work – it is ready to create. The roses drawn in charcoal represent a natural art, but the process is captured in a digital sphere, which fuses the two different mediums. Using the vignette effect on the second transformation really improved the focus on creation and destruction – this image is drawn and then erased. Finally, the golden revision at the end signifies the final form. The gold makes it stand out from the rest of the process, since most of the other images are black and white. By using the zoom into the middle of the flower, I am asking the viewer to take a closer look at how the work is made - such as, color and texture. I end with time rewinding in order to exhibit reflection and another moment of understanding the importance of time and duration in digital media and the creation of art.

Photographic Truth: No Pie In Kitchen and Purple Introspection

The “realistic” image presents a scene of civil war (Robert E. Lee photograph), slavery (the rope hanging in the corner and the lamp as a symbol for the Underground Railroad), poverty (sign of “No Pie In Kitchen” and the old brick), hunger (the sign and pie), and religion (faded rose on the wall with thorns pricking a finger – brings to mind images of Catholicism, such as Jesus’ crown of thorns and Mary’s identification with the rose) all lit by a flame of hope. These images of American history and struggle, some of which still carry on into the present, reflect a society whose ideology of true community has been skewed by these issues. The separation, as a result of the political issues of war, social stratification and discrimination, and religious controversy, has partitioned our unity as a human race. 

 We all have basic needs (symbolic pie), individual identities and memories (a photograph within a photograph), and the potential, but seemingly fading ability, to find beauty and good in this world (which will always come with some pain and danger – identified by the rose with the thorns). The largest of the images in the photo is the lamp, a most important symbol of hope. It is a need to rekindle the fire and passion within humans to care about each other, for the American people to become aware of the division, and then to burn these false boundaries, and light the way for a better future. The pie is not cut and is not “in kitchen.” Thus, are we serving ourselves to a greater, global cause? How would the viewer serve the pie? Does it need to be cut and divided? Can it be shared another way? The divisions we make are imaginary; they are not real.

The “fantastic” image I created addresses a world of convention and order overlooking, with fear and desire, a land of wildness, change, and freedom. The woman sitting on the balcony of the apartment building looks upon a version of herself in that chaotic world. However, she feels trapped by her manners, only able to overlook the scene. The building in the background, which has been to some degree covered up and hidden by nature, symbolizes domesticity and foundation, as well as the old opinion that the place of the woman should be at home. Both images of the woman are a little transient in their opacity to show that their role is always changing and their place is not defined or set in stone (as conventions and social constructions would lead one to believe).

The color scheme adds another underlying message. Purple, a color on the color wheel that is between red and blue, adheres in this image to the connection of females with the color pink and further empowers them with the potential to cross into the traditionally masculine color of blue. Purple is in between the two, a color of unity and equality of the sexes. In fact, the hue of the woman in the picture is mostly blue, challenging the male perspective, as well as her own. This blur of color significance leads the viewer to contemplate what the “true” role of women is and whether there should be boundaries at all. In a moment of introspection, which this woman has found herself in, can she break loose of the walls around her? Can she redefine her sense of place and purpose?

The Evolution of Time

Time is evolving as much as we are.

Is time only relative to the numbers we've selected to convey its duration and fragmented increments? Maybe. Is its meaning and value captured best in the changing visual symbols we've designed or chosen to express its functional reflection of order and repetition? We know that there is a sort of length of our existence leading to our mortal death, and we’ve counted and recorded that by how many times the sun rises and sets, the cycle of transmutable seasons, the swing of a pendulum, the sands of an hourglass, on the hands of modern clocks, etc. examples of how people in the past calculated what we now consider time. That time is a sort of current, a cyclic one on a clock (which just mirrors the sun) that we’ve created for ourselves to provide us with a “future." It is a strong current, because technically we haven’t been able to forge the stream back to the past; we have to move forward with it.

The body also has an internal biological clock that keeps a periodic rhythm from day to day which adds to our conceptualization and perception of time because it regulates and alters by means of the senses, such as sight.

The face of time is ever-changing. The visual representations and symbols we use exemplify our past and current technological advancement and our evolving ideas of time and how we choose to measure and understand it.

Time is alive, but our depiction of it is transitory and as mutable as humanity. When and how it started may be as mysterious as human life, thus its visual involvement in our culture and daily lives helps to sustain its significance and purpose.

Remember - Don't believe everything you see

http://www.examiner.com/cognitive-science-in-national/how-fake-pictures-can-create-false-memories

"People know that photographs can be faked and yet they still find photographic information to be believable." - Gunjan Singh, Source: Examiner.com "How Fake Pictures Can Create False Memories"

I think it's interesting how we create technology that performs similarly to how the human body and mind function. Photographs can create and preserve memories, which can indeed be altered just as much as our own brains reconfigure our experiences and permit us to imagine different scenarios that never actually occurred at all. This article puts into question how much truth a photograph can really convey in a digital age where so much modification is now possible.

The Argument

Duplicated photographs of a personal acrylic painting using different effects to represent emotional stages of an argument between a man and a woman.