Submissions

So here is my proof of submission to both the American Photo On-Campus & VMFA Fellowship. Although its not shown, I also submitted 8 images to the Photographer's Forum Magazine Contest, which is sponsored by Nikon.
I'm hoping & crossing my fingers that I win one of these, or hell at least an honorable mention would be nice.... :)

Artist Lecture- Su Friedrich

The Su Friedrich lecture was pretty interesting; I especially liked how through an accidental mistake/ flaw she discovered the style of writing and/ or etching on to the film with words. , I thought this to be very cool as well as what she said about writing out dreams on note cards. It reminded me of a high school psychology assignment I had where I was supposed to document my dreams for a week. We had to say whether they were in black and white or color, how many, because we can have multiple dreams a nite. I’ve recently I’ve been thinking of writing my dreams down in a diary, but I found it to be time consuming in the morning. I have a hard time as it is just getting out of bed. That’s probably why I procrastinated on the assignment and had to think up stories or old memorable dreams to put in place of the days/ mornings that I forgot.

Also thinking of dreams reminds me of a movie that I’ve recently watched, called “The Science of Sleep”, where the main characters’ dreams are intertwined with his everyday real life, it was weird & silly, but interesting. There’s probably more I could say, but I can’t think of anything else to say right now.. so. X

October artist Lecture: #1- Kate Gilmore

I really enjoyed Kate Gilmore’s lecture and it’s probably one of the best lectures that I’ve been to since my years at VCU. I especially liked how she didn’t even take an art class until her last two years of undergrad and how she started in sculpture only to move to photography, then finally to video. It just goes to show that you should never limit yourself to just one medium to express yourself or your work.

It’s funny when she talked about “Star Bright, Star Might” and how it’s somewhat about how girls have this idea in their head that you should never mess up or hurt your face because unlike her I never really had my mother printing that into my head, but I have grown up with that sort of mentality in my mind. Especially since I’ve been in an accident where my face was in danger of being fatally injured and actually did somewhat mess it up. Long story short, I got dragged by a horse. While getting off, I got stuck on a piece of twine that was attached to the saddle and was stuck half way on and half way off the horse, so I was practically underneath it’s belly and of course it took off running. While it was running I was being kicked by its galloping hooves, and somewhere in between there and finally falling of the saddle onto a gravel road scratching up my entire body, my front tooth got pulled forward and a large piece chipped off (half of my tooth). This fatal accident happened ironically on New Years day, but more importantly a couple years after having braces which made my teeth perfectly aligned. As a young girl it really damaged my self-esteem not having my perfect smile anymore, so I think from that is where I got the idea in my mind to damage anything but your face. Plus I think the media projects the idea that you’re face is what matters, especially if you’re a girl. So back to the lecture….

Although her work was overall very interesting, I found the way she talked about her work to be even more fascinating. I don’t think I could choose a favorite video however, because they were all equally good. When she talked about how she used specific characters that perhaps at first you despise or hate, I did eventually start to feel sympathetic towards them and their situations, particularly the “With Arms Wide Open” and “Main Squeeze”, which because of my fear of being stuck in a situation such as that, not necessarily claustrophobia, but I did almost have to watch it with one eye open. Her attitude and outlook towards her work is something everyone should use, because you do learn from your mistakes and/or failures. I also found it very interesting when she mentioned that she does sell her videos, but in slots of only 5. To think of having a collection of videos sounds strange, but considering how society seems to be focused on the media, television, & the internet, it makes sense.

Train Set Videos

While in an individual meeting with paul, we talked about how train set model enthusiasts sometimes put small tiny cameras on the fronts of their trains and create videos of the train making its way around the town if you will. So I went on youtube searching for a good quality video, but let me tell you i did have to go through a lot and some where VERY cheesy and terrible in terms of video quality as well as miniature quality.

-This is a bad quality of video, but I like the camera aspect and the sound effects that come with it in that position. Like from the Ann Kroeber lecture the sound effects from the train, not to mention the camera aspect, really put you in that place and make you feel as if you really are there.

-This is the train video with the best video as well as miniature quality, but it's a little weird and cheesy b/c of the dido song attached with it.

And with almost any youtube search you discover there are a lot of crazy people out there willing to make fools of themselves.

Lost in America

So part of my research towards each landscape involves searching the internet (soon books) focusing on particular environments for photographs and information that depict the types or certain areas that I might want to mimic in my landscapes or just use as references. While searching the internet for these inspiring images I stumbled upon an artist, Troy Paiva, who uses ambient moonlight, multicolored strobe pops and light painting with a flashlight to create a eerie surreal like mood to rundown abandoned junkyards, buildings, etc. out in the American desert.

I really like his night photography and use with ambient moonlight, but the use of strobe lights particularly the color red reminded me of the idea surrounding aliens especially out in the desert. Growing up in Nebraska and watching a couple movies, one in particular, I had a small fear of aliens and spent a small period of time sleeping in my parents room because of this fear that I was going to be abducted in the middle of the night. The movie was called “Fire in the Sky” and what really set it off was at the end of the movie my friend told me it was based on a true story. Then the slumber party turned into a night of scary aliens stories, the most coming from the girl whose house we were at which was a large farm and her dad had had people calling in the middle of the night claiming there were lights in their fields and so on. Then when I went home the next day I asked my dad, who was in the air force at that time, if he or anyone had seen aliens? He said that they did have people calling in about seeing things in the sky and he said that he had heard stories from pilots claiming they’d seen things while flying at night. Although the thing with sleeping in my parents room faded away I guess I still do somewhat have a small fear of aliens.. :)

Anywho, back to his work I like that he uses the American desert as well as abandoned places, but above all I really enjoy the surrealist mood and possible narrative that he creates with his use of multi-colored strobes and choice of location.

When it comes to my work I’ve been thinking about incorporating night time into all of my landscapes as well as touching on one of my childhood fear of aliens, but perhaps saving that for my landscape of the Midwest.

Inspiring Desert Landscapes:

Tony Paiva’s work:

http://www.lostamerica.com/

youTube

So i found this while i was searching youtube for videos of train sets... enjoy

Anthony Goicolea

In my last meeting with Paul he showed me Anthony Goicolea’s most current work in which he digitally composites photographs that depict seemingly apocalyptical landscapes, yet scenes and pictures are taken from present day locations. Not only are they beautiful black and white images with interesting compositions, but with a deeper look into them you start to notice little things such as people either sitting on a bench or laying in a hammock, and fish that because of the subject matter surrounding them appear to be dead. His craftsmanship with digitally combing particular scenes and landscapes is exquisite. I also love how he focuses on the environment and de-emphasizes the human figure, but yet still reveals small signs of a human presence to create a narrative aspect to his work, much like what I’m trying to create with my series.

”In these large-scale black and white photographs, the artist digitally composites elements culled from different locations and combines them into new topographies. Seemingly familiar elements such as telephone wires, power lines, and factories are juxtaposed in a way that torques reality and compresses space and time, creating subtly off-kilter and barely inhabitable worlds. The dense woodland environments of his earlier works are replaced with desolate urban and industrial wastelands that, like its few inhabitants, appear to be atrophying. The sky is a major character in many of the photographs. Thick-layered clouds dominate the composition or slide into the frame from above like an impending threat. This emphasis on the sky conjures Northern Europe's romantic and early nineteenth-century American landscape painters. Like those artists, Goicolea also de-emphasizes the human figure in favor of the landscape, alluding to an alienation or disconnection from their surroundings.

Goicolea, whose photographs are often energized by paradoxes, also alludes to the history of cinema, including Film noir, French new wave, and science fiction. The bombed out building in Deconstruction suggests the opening scene from Fellini's La Dolce Vita, the gondolas in Sky Lift are reminiscent of The Third Man, a film by Carol Reed with Orson Welles, and the skyline in Smoke Stack takes on a Dickensian quality. These familiar elements are catapulted into dreamlike scenes of decay that are displaced or dissolve into each other. The environments, however, undoubtedly come to us from the future, alluding to films that present palpable visions of post-industrial worlds, including Blade Runner and The Children of Men.”

- excerpt from the artist statement presented with his “Almost Safe” exhibition

falsifying the Real

Last semester working with both miniatures in my first half of senior portfolio as well as my concepts class I came upon an artist, Olivo Barbieri, who although didn’t work with the same media as I, he does however photograph landscapes from an aerial perspective using a tilt shift method with his lens that causes his environments to look as if they were massive intricate scaled model cities. Therefore falsifying his audience to believe the real is in fact fake. The only shame is that one; I couldn’t find any statements from the artist himself, and two, I’ve also come to find that this method of using a tilt shift lens (which is quite expensive) has been done repeatedly, most with the cheaper ways of accomplishing the same looking images with lens babies and photoshop. It’s a shame to know that it has been somewhat overdone, but that seems to happen with everything these days.

These are a couple of his images:

Now here are a couple of images that have been done by other people using photoshop or a lensbaby instead of an expensive tilt shift lens:

it's a start...

Even though I’m in frustration with the fact that I’m having a hard time finding and buying all the equipment needed to set-up my landscapes at home, I have come to the conclusion that for the first landscape & or environment I’ll be going with the desert, partly because I’ve worked with the materials before, but the main reason has to do with the fact that out of all the places that I’ve traveled with my grandparents the American desert is one of the places that resonates the most with me and is a place that I’ve been dying to go back to, especially the Grand Canyon.

With that said I’ve been trying to think of subtleties to add to the desert and these are a couple that I’ve come up with..

- even though it’s a with a car, it’s not being used like my last series, I was thinking of burring a car into the sand only having a small glimpse of the car showing through the sand, as if it was buried a long time ago and/ or is just now eroding through weather and time.

- this next idea somewhat conspired from the last one b/c of the mystery of a suspicious act or murder. I had the idea of having a hand, bones, or a whole body/ part of a body somewhere in the desert or like the car coming out of the sand. Also I could either photoshop, which I would rather stay away from or at least not depend on for my series, bones or a body into the wall of a rock as if it were a prehistoric find or something like the last idea of a murder.

All in all this makes me realize that so far all the ideas that I’ve come up with are mysterious and seem to deal with murder or suspicious acts. I don’t know if this is something that I want to have throughout my series, but it’s definitely a starting point.

Miniature Killer

After watching an episode of C.S.I (Las Vegas) the other night I can’t believe I haven’t mentioned it already as a source of inspiration. I’ve been watching the show for the past few seasons and really enjoy it overall, but when they started with the miniature killer, who kills people with making intricate ½” scaled models of the crime scene and their victims, I became intrigued and envious. here’s a video, or at least one that I found to be the best at summing up clips revolving around the miniature killer, although there’s not much dialog, just music, but anywayz…

p.s the next season which begins with the continuation of the miniature killer starts this Thursday @ 9 pm, just in case anyone wants to watch :)

More bloggin & Someone of interest

Now that I have a more focused plan and idea with where I’m going with my series, I need to start finding lighting equipment so that I can set up my scenes at my place of residence and leave them up for long periods of time or however long it takes me finish the scene. Leaving my sets up for longer versus taking everything into the school’s studio space with a limited time allows for my scenes to evolve as I go and I won’t have to have as much as a set plan with where I want everything to be.

The other thing that I need to work on is locating hobby stores that sell train set landscaping and accessories. I’ve looked up hobby stores on yellowpages.com and found a couple located within the area and some in Southside. I’m going to hit them up to see what I can find because I need to find accessories and landscaping that can’t be hand made as well as stuff that I can just use the idea to make myself if need be. Since I plan to continue this type of photography/ sculpture installations throughout my entire artist career I can buy all types of accessories, but I should probably figure out before I go which type of landscape or environment that I’m going to first focus on for my series, because lets be honest I don’t have a ton of money right now to go crazy buying miniatures with, especially having to also buy lighting equipment.

I’ve been researching or trying to find other artists who are working with the same genre and I happened to find an artist, Michael Samuels, who does amazingly detailed and exquisite miniature scaled sculptures/ installations. I especially love his table top water scenes with islands, but I also like the way he chooses to display his works with uniquely set-up installations. I would love to watch and learn how he goes about making these scenes with what I’m sure is a massive amount of resin.

You gotta love the internet. I don’t know how else I would have found him, which I must say I’m very happy and excited to have, because his work is very inspirational and I will continue to watch and admire him.

http://www.michaelsamuels.co.uk/

Bloggin...

I’ve come to the conclusion that either I’m looking in the wrong places for inspiration or just over thinking it. So with that, I’ve decided to just keep working with what I’ve been doing and hoping that something will evolve from that.

Artist Statement

Since the invention of the automobile the desire to travel by car has become part of the American Dream. Although technology has enabled multiple ways of travel, the car is the icon that allows you to take full control of where you’re going as well as making for an enjoyable pastime.

Thanks to my parents and grandparents I’ve done quite a bit of traveling on the road as a child and I believe through those travels I have a great appreciation and awareness of the environment with an even greater inspiration to travel. Since those days my travels and discovering of the United States has diminished. Becoming more burdened with everyday worries, I’ve come to realize not only how much I desire to travel, but how deeply I miss my childhood adventures on the road.

Call it my peter pan complex if you will or some kind of mid life crisis in my twenties, but somewhere inside of me I would like to feel like a kid again. Having no responsibilities and able to drop whatever I’m doing to travel. In reality that isn’t the case and one must go on with life sometimes compromising or pushing aside a few of your dreams. Yet, through the art of photography I’m able to bring about my dreams in a beautiful and sophisticated way creating a series that is a reflection of my childhood as well as a projection of future travels in and out of the studio.

This is the artist statement that I presented with my series last semester and I feel that it does better explain the meaning as to why I found the inspiration to create what I did with my work. Although, I also feel that if my work were to be presented without the artist statement it wouldn’t get the same reaction or reading from the audience as if it were to be shown with a statement. Something that crossed my mind while I was attending Ann Kroeber’s lecture was the statement that sound effects are really what puts the viewer in the place of the movie, more than what’s actually on screen. If you have no sound in a movie or even a picture, one must rely on the subject and details of the work or to their imagination. In my case, as a photographer, many people rely on the artist statement to really understand the meaning and/ or concept to the work. That’s something that I’ve found that I love and hate about the artist statement because I like the idea of leaving the meaning open to the audience or individual looking at the photograph, allowing them to decide and relate to it for themselves, rather than depending on what the artist wants you to get from it. Although; at the same time I do enjoy and want for my audience to know what inspired me to create that particular work or series.

Ever since I’ve started working with miniature scaled things I haven’t exactly been able to verbalize or articulate the root to why it is that I find them interesting. I mean as children we all play with small tiny objects and toys, but there is that idea of distorting reality with miniature inanimate objects to make the viewer believe that it is something that it’s not that I find fascinating. However, with my work I try not to go to the extreme, giving hints to revealing its true reality, especially since I go to such lengths to making these small scaled sets. This also brings about the opportunity to apply my desires to create with and use several media and materials. Perhaps this comes from my background with the formal arts, because I’ve been taking art classes since I was in elementary school and have always known that I have great passion for the arts. From drawing, to sculpture, to painting, and of course to photography, I have always admired and enjoyed them all. Although with photography there is more versatility as well as stability in relation to how much and how widely it can be used. Also with photography, I am able to produce images of painterly quality with which I have printed onto stretched canvases; therefore turning a photograph into a painting, which in the end I guess someone could just paint a realistic oil painting without going through all the work and various steps that I go through, but where’s the fun in that? Plus, to get the quality and small hints of hand made imitated objects one would have to exactly copy or replicate my work first.

p.s. I hate crickets

artist Lecture- Ann Kroeber

I’m not going to lie being the horse & movie fanatic that I am, when I saw the list of movies that Ann Kroeber has worked on I was pretty excited. I only wish there was more time for her to discuss certain movies she’s worked on as well as the unique sounds or ways she came up with recording, like finding out that the sound of the ship sinking in “The Black Stallion”, which was one of my favorite movies as a kid, came from a toilet. Who would have thought? She seems like a really fun & interesting person to work with.

Something that she’d mentioned that really stuck with me or made me think of sound in a whole other way was how her husband Alan didn’t have that great of vision, so sound and his hearing was very much a way for him to know what’s going on around him. Overall the lecture inspired me to think about sound more when you’re watching a movie because like the man said in one of her clips, the sound effects are really what puts you in the movie like you’re literally there watching it first hand. I can also relate to this very much because of the fact that in my History of the Motion Picture class we’ve been watching lots of short movies that only have music playing and some nothing, pure silence with screens of captions now and then. Although it’s somewhat aggravating going from what were used to watching now to watch films of silence, it definitely makes you respect movies a lot more.

continuation in thought...

I’m really trying to come up with or find a strong enough theme to continue my series with, but I think its going to take more time, research, and more importantly the right inspiration to kick start myself into gear. However, some inspiration came to me while watching the movie “Black Snake Moan”, a scene of Christina Ricci’s character crouched over crying in a field watching her boyfriend drive away off to war made me think of both what I’ve been working on already with this series (in aspect of using the backside of cars) as well as perhaps a further more thematic direction to where I can start to go with this series. It also made me think of the famous painting “Christina” by Andrew Wyeth in retrospect to looking back on something and the abstraction of not knowing exacting why or what she’s looking back on.

"Christina's World"- Andrew Wyeth

Blog for thought

After presenting the work that I worked on last semester, which is still what I’m most inspired by, and hearing some advice on where it should go, I do agree that my work needs to become more thematic than where it’s currently at. Although with that, I’ve hit somewhat of a rut with where to go or what sort of theme to associate with my series. As with many artists I do find my childhood and movies, which I’m a huge fan of, to be very inspirational to the person I am and the work that I create. However, I also find that if I were to try to relate to some of the major events that have happened to me or to America for that matter, it might be too similar to Lori Nix’s, as well as the fact that these “major” catastrophic events aren’t the direction that I feel comfortable dwelling into. Not that it’s because I’ve lost someone towards them, but because they have affected me as a person, perhaps to the point that I don’t find ease or inspiration to revolve my work around. Also I don’t know how those ideas would be taken by my audience and if they’re willingly ready to accept or even look at it. The world has changed and will continue to change throughout my lifetime. Morals have loosened in certain areas, especially with younger generations, not to mention the effect we’ve had on the environment and how were steadily destroying the planet earth.

Some ideas to inspire me in this event of focusing on a theme to my series are to reflect on some of my favorite movies and why I find them to be my favorites, although, I still want to focus or leave open to the idea of revolving or associating with the environment along with my desire to travel. On the note of inspiring movies, over this summer I watched some documentaries that I found to be very eye opening in many different aspects; for example, perhaps it’s the environmentalist in me, but my favorite and the one I found to be most stimulating was “An Inconvenient Truth”. Another was, “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Cost, 2005”, which led me realize how terrible the Walton family, who owns Wal-Mart, really is and how it’s destroying America’s values of freedom, not to mention that it’s staggering our economy, which isn’t being helped by our ever soaring gas prices and crisis in Iraq. Like I mentioned before, times are changing and they certainly don’t seem to be for the better, at least not from what I’ve seen in my short lifetime.

to be continued in thought….& in blog....

what's to become of me......

Upon graduating VCU which is in my very near future, I want to become a commercial freelance photographer and eventually have my own studio; but, to build up my connections, knowledge, and skills I first want to work as an assistant to other commercial photographers already established in the photography/ art world. There are many aspects of photography to which I enjoy so it’s somewhat hard for me to just pick & stick with one. I believe being a freelance photographer or at least a commercial photographer will allow me to one, pay the bills, but more importantly let me to dwell into the many aspects that photography has to offer.

An influential photographer that influences me, especially to the work in which I’ve created in last semester’s senior portfolio and will continue with this semester is Lori Nix (www.lorinix.com). Her work is a combination between David Levinthal’s because of her work with miniatures, and Gregory Crewdson due to references from her childhood as well as from motion pictures which have been major influences to her ideas and vivid imagination. I admire her work not only aesthetically and conceptually, but like both Levinthal and Crewdson, she has a keen eye for detail and brilliant colors. Another thing I respect about Nix’s photography, she uses a hands-on-approach to create her set ups relying on capturing her image through the lens of the camera, rather than depending on photoshop.

..from her series
"Accidentlly Kansas"