Colour Project 4: Final

Untitled

In my art I strive to explore ideas of identity and past grandeur. I am fascinated by the press of time; what has come before us and what we have left behind; items once so important, now cast aside and forgotten.

This project is about that ideal of something forgotten. This massive plant, now almost completely subsumed and wholly forgotten by those who once placed it there and those who relied on it for their livelihood. It stands for decay, a past industrial age, now quietly disintegrating with time.
There is another aspect to it to though, this idea of the factory within the setting. It sits there like a monster simultaneously towering over a part of the landscape and an integral part of it. It is alien and foreign, but also a source of great life that the flora and fauna could not live with out.





- -
One last note: I mentioned this during my critique but I don't really feel as if this is the end of the project. I have had a lot of ideas and I definitely see a lot more work of this kind in my future.

Silkscreen Project 6: Final

Series II

Within a series, there is an inherent sense of commonality and conformity. However, at what point does that begin to break down and where does a series become a collection disparate forms.

This project seeks to explore the conceits of individuality and identity and how disparate elements change and affect said ideas.

Silkscreen Project 6: Thoughts

For my final project, I had a large number or ideas, inspired mainly by the works of the Dutch painter Piet Mondriaan. I wanted to work within series (as per my previous work in the class) but instead of simply repeating a simple monochromatic form, I was going to print a complicated shape utilizing the primary colours and black.



After talking with my professor, I decided to further expand this project by not only altering the internal colours of the shape, I would also alter the backgrounds to add a further element to the conversation.



Eventually though, after much more sketching and more talking with my professor, I decided to simplify this idea (which had become quite large indeed) and just print a single monochromatic form on an a variety of backgrounds.



In an effort to avoid have a very static project, I devised an organic system for choosing the background colours in which I started with either blue, red, or white and simply kept adding red, blue, or black respectively to the inks so that the colours printed would presumably change over time. Due to the unique problem of the screen drying and my haphazard almost arbitrary approach to the colour changing, the final images that resulted were not static at all but instead full of a wide range of colours, tones, and textures.

Colour Project 4: Thoughts

For my final project for Colour Photography, I wanted to do something that was an extension of my earlier work in the class but also moved in a new direction. The reason for this was that I felt much of my work this semester had suffered from my busy schedule. The combination of being very busy with extracurricular activities and my other class commitments (both in silkscreening and video) meant that I was not able to commit as much time as I wanted to (and probably needed to commit) to the class and as such I haven't been that happy with my work. Based on this, rather than trying to go back on change up a project that I had cobbled together, I decided to instead just go in a new direction, as I thought a breath of fresh air, would breathe some life into this final project, an aspect missing in my other shown work.

After considering a variety of options, I decided that to go with shooting at the abandoned cement factory near the municipal water treatment facility of my town. I originally took interest in it when I saw the factory in one of my professor's photographs, but later visited the site and became fascinated with it. Nestled in the trees off a private road and almost entirely hidden from view unless you are almost on top of it, the factory is a monolith of a bygone age. Its aged signs, rusted parts, and highly suspect structural stability construct a fascinating portrait of abandonment mixed with nostalgic past; there is an oddly melancholic beauty to the entire scene.

The shoot itself was moderately successful, shooting on medium format after a long hiatus back to 35mm was really nice and I think that the pictures, though I did not have long to spend wandering about, were well chosen and well representative of the space. I do wish that I had had more time, or an assistant but as I was on a tight schedule, a few miles trek through wind and snow and trespassing, I am still happy with what I was able to do. Being at the factory again –the last time I was there was the spring– was an interesting experience and I have a lot of ideas for stuff to shoot in the future, but for now, I just have to see where to go with what I shot