Summer 2014: Femminilità Radicale – Museo Gucci

Today I attended the Femminilità Radicale exhibition at the Museo Gucci in Firenze. This exhibition was created from the work of Lee Lozano, Alina Szapocznikow, and Evelyne Axell.

“The real body, brought to life by the performances from Evelyne Axell or the conceptual projects from Lee Lozano which blur the line between art and life. The broken body, smashed to pieces in the sculptures by Alina Szapocznikow, whose work is on the fringes of both art and decorative art. The transposed body, in abstraction or confronting the triviality of the (masculine) universe of objects by Lee Lozano. The body at play in a critical look at the history of art from Evelyne Axell. The desiring body, dressed in the virtues of seduction, with Axell and Szapocznikow. The suffering body, threatened by exclusion, illness and death, with Szapocznikow and Lozano.”

Shown below is my favourite piece from each artist.

Evelyne Axell, La Clôture or la Cloison, 1967
Clartex, enamel, canvas, striped painted wooden pole, painted wood frame and stand

Alina Szapocznikow, Sculpture-lampe IX, 1970
Coloured polyester resin, electric wire and metal
127 x 42 x 33 cm

Lee Lozano, No Title, 1965
Oil on canvas, 2 parts
234.3 x 310.3 x 3.9 cm

Summer 2014: Annabel de Vetten

http://www.conjurerskitchen.com

Summer 2014: Warner Brother Studio

Yesterday I visited the Harry Potter tour in Watford and was amazed by the attention to detail that went into all of the props, outfits, etc. Below are a few of my favourite photographs taken (images 1 – 6). There were many maquettes and digital pieces on display.

Collaborating with Anastasia: Kayan Lahwi (Burma): Creating Designs

Angus suggested that I look at Damien Hirst’s sculptural bodies.

After this I looked at anatomical illustrations.

Gallery Visits: Art14

At this exhibition I found pieces that were relevant to FGM:

  

Pieces that are inspirational in terms of sculpture and clothing items:

  

And pieces that the techniques used to create the pieces and the ending results were interesting:

Collaborating with Anastasia: Review with Tina

Tina was pleased with how our joint video had turned out and also noted how both pieces were able to be work successfully as individual films. She pointed out that we shouldn’t fall into a routine where we are unable to work alone because of reliance on the other person, which is good advice.  The collaborative groups she has given Anastasia and I to research are:

• Juneau Project

• Ilya and Emilia Kabakov

• Fischli and Weiss

 

• Art and Language
• NSS
• Oliver Paynet and Nick Relph
• Jane and Lousie Wilson
• Heather and Ivan Morrison
• Cornford and Cross
• Super Flex

The individual artists Tina has given use are:

• Tacita Dean
• Stan douglas
• Francis Alÿs
• Doug Ailken
• Eija – Liisa Ahtila
• Ann Hamilton
• Catherine Sullivan
• Claude Cahun
• Nan Goldnen
• Vanessa Beecroft
• Silvie Fleury
• Susan Hiller
• Runa Islam

Collaborating with Anastasia: Review with MA student Hannah Hillier

Hannah took interest in the food element of my practice and how it has developed from extravagance to gruesome minimalism. She also noted my new interest in crochet and looked at linking my practice with this.

Artists she suggested to look at

• Emily Pope (Her website)
• Ernesto Neto

• Rachel Harrison

• Simon O’Sullivan (Aesthetics of Affect)

Hannah suggested contacting RISC for our Spring term exhibition.

Spare Time: Photography Workshops: Week One

The first session was a seminar on the different uses of photography.

Francesca Woodman

• Places self in photographs – performative
• Never sure of how the work was created
• Use of shadow + contrast
• Diaristic entries on the work
• Use of objects for similarities
• Exploration of sexuality

John Coplans

• Sculptural forms – forces body into frame
• Playing with the ideas
• Breaks into triptychs

Melanie Manchot

• Collaborated with mother
• Somewhat provocative
• Mother – Daughter relationship

ORLAN

• Taking performance to the max.
• Link between performance and photography

Sally Mann

• Controversially photographed her children growing up
• ‘Photographing mothers’ fears’

Cindy Sherman

• Doesn’t title her work
• Only person she uses in photographs is herself
• Moves to theatrical photographs
• Works entirely alone

Wendy Ewald

• Collaborations with children
• Revolves around participation
• Asks to recreate dream
• Large format camera/ negatives
• Titled under artist’s name but who is the author?

Rineke Dijkstra

• Photographing teenagers using fill-in flash
• Reality

Danny Treacy

• Not sure about story behind figures immediately
• Larger than life prints
• Found spaces + painted grey, uses material found and creates costumes
• Very independent

Hippolyte Bayard

• Offended that he had not been recognised int he creation of photography
• Stage to create a message

Joe Duggan

• Romanticism staging
• Painted background
• Use of mannequins
• Interested in theatre studies
• Recreated plays and displayed and photographs

Melissa Moore

• ‘Land Ends’ – Ex-hippy colony
• Photographs in mother’s house
• Occupies odd space
• ‘Stealing their soul’

Trish Morrissey

• Collaborations with sister
• Dresses as anyone but themselves

Helena Almeida

• Denies every link you might assume of her work
• Doesn’t all it photography or painting
• Declines that it is herself in the work even though it is obviously her

Valie Export

• Body configurations – yoga positions in a cityscape
• Claim of space
• Performance – Touch cinema

John Stezaker

• Use of found images and combines
• ‘Marriage’

Alexander Rodchenko

• Pop artist
• Political statement through blacking-out faces
• Power of images

Man Ray

• ‘Dust Breeding’
• Solarisation
• Staged some images

Marcel Duchamp

• ‘The Bride Stripped Bare…’

Eva Stenram

• Old NASA images downloaded, rewrote to negatives, left to gather dust and then printed

Bernd und Hilla Becher

• ‘Blast Furnace’
• Topographic photography
• Pin-hole projection

Chuck Close

• Daguerra photography
• Printed on metal plate, shone, buffed.

Anastasia and I

We explained to our tutor, Martina, that we are interested in furthering our collaborative work through these workshops and the artists we have been given to research are the follow collaborations:

• KennardPhillips

• Gilbert and George

• Webster and Noble

• Bloomberg and Shamarim

• Art Lab – Richardson and Cullinan

Seminar: Stockholder and Huyghe

Jessica Stockholder

• Bright, sharp, crisp, plastic coloured
• Love chaos
• “Intuition’s a kind of thinking, it’s not stupidity”
• Plastic – cheap and easy to buy, inexpensive material that is part of our culture
• No literary story, just visual, put words to after
• Focuses on pleasure although it may not be easy to make
• “Feel” the materials

Research Donald Judd

Pierre Huyghe

• Need to create a world, takes time
• Circulation of stories, how is or isn’t fluid
• Infinity of culture and boundaries
• Less narrative, more emotional landscape
• Audience to experience more emotional rather than a simple narration
• Humour is important to break the possibility of critical judgement
• Not interested in filming reality as it is given, or creating fiction, interested in creating a reality and documenting it
• Exhibition is not the end of the process but a starting point to go somewhere else
• Forced mythologised

Collaborating with Anastasia: Female Genital Mutilation: Future Fashion

“Another campaign that she is working on with the Shoreditch Sisters is to raise awareness of female genital mutilation, a practice that still goes on in countries around the world and even in the UK. After hearing that the term ‘embroidery’ in Persian relates to the act of FGM, she created a campaign that encourages people to create embroidered vulvas, which will be put together to create a large art piece”

http://urbantimes.co/magazine/2012/09/the-future-of-fashion-with-tara-scott/