Sculpture Project 2: Mould-making

Untitled
Cast Wax and Silkscreen

"Emissions Trading (also known as cap and trade) is a market-based approach to control pollution by providing economic incentives for achieving reductions in the emissions of pollutants

A central authority sets a limit or cap on the amount of a pollutant that can be emitted. The limit of cap is allocated or sold to firms in the form or emissions permits which represent the right to emit or discharge a specific volume of the specified pollutant"

"Experience with Market-Based Environmental Policy Instruments"
Stavins, Robert N. (November 2001)

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.





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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.

Colour Project 3: Staged Narrative

Shift in Focus

At one point in your life sitting half-naked in a hallway is your morning ritual, but fast forward a few years and for many that is replaced by the newspaper. These images explore various habits we develop in college and what they often will become when we leave and start out real 'professional lives,' the juxtaposition of the two speaks to what we find important at a certain time and how our focus changes.

Colour Project 2: Sense of Place

Spaces

To people, the edifices that surround us form a kind of visual white noise. Not only are they iconic in our landscapes, but in no small way do they also become integral to, if not the entirety of, the landscapes as well.

Colour Project 1: Rebirth

Phoenix

In this project I attempted to print some horribly mangled negatives.
As we seen the disintegration of the original image, false colour and artefacts of the process begin to emerge and thus a new image is born out of the wreckage of another.

B/W Photography Project 2: Mapping Project

A map is an item that tells you about something. It can tell you about a space, a location, where to drive, or the torrid history of someone's love life. The point of this project was to choose something, and then, quite simply, 'map' it.

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When I first head about the 'mapping' project, I decide that I wanted use Harkness Kitchen as my subject. Harkness is my house and I feel a deep connection t it, but a lot of people have a very skewed impression of what goes on there and who we are. Much of this project is about trying to rectify that by showing a different, more intimate view.

To this end, I shot, developed, and scanned nine rolls of film taken during all the meals, during clean-up crew, or after everyone had left, in the middle of the night. Unfortunately due to time constraints and problems with my negatives (light leaks in the camera, light leaks in the developing tank, old film...) I decided to greatly scale down my project from a holistic 15-20 image collage ranging from Harkness desolate in the wee hours of the morning to the hustle and bustle of our weekly 'Pizza Night.'

After a few hours of deliberation with the 180-200 negatives I shot (only about two thirds of which were fully viable options) I finally decided on a new concept: THE HARKNESS KITCHEN: an atmosphere unique.

In this, instead of a large scale project with many images, I really spent a lot of time choosing specific images I felt were really representative of the cooks, the atmosphere of cooking, and the camaraderie and passion of all the people involved with the cooking in Harkness. Each image was placed with intent and chosen to illustrate a specific aspect of the kitchen that I feel is important. Harkness is busy, complicated, but above all a real community of people who care about each other and I really tried to bring this out in my prints.

Enjoy.

B/W Photography Project 3: Emmulation Project

Some of the best pieces that have been made were based partially or wholly on preexisting pieces. It is also said that imitation is the purest form of flattery. Irregardless of whether or not these are true, for this project we were tasked to choice an artist or group of artists or style of art and then attempt to emulate it in our own work.

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In Modern Society, the human body has become an intrinsically sexual, fetishised ideal. Modern culture seems to seems to obsess over the perfect shape and its gendered appeal.

In the 1970s Allen Teger did a photographic project entitled Bodyscapes, in which he decided to refashion the sensual object that is the human body into a seductive landscape. The curves of a woman's breasts become rolling hills; the masculine flatness of a man's back becomes a the setting for a motorcycle race.

In my emulation of the self-same work, I decided to keep with the concept of 'the body as landscape' but to take the project's impetus in a different direction. Instead of embellishing the sensual nature of the body, with my models I tried to remove their inherent sexiness/sexualized gender; effectively trying to dehumanize them. I also choose to replace Teger's vintage plastic toys with stuffed animal pandas — the reasoning behind which is that the panda is often caricatured by the uninformed public as a docile and innocent. The inclusion of the cuddly panda then changes the nude from an abstract human form to a surreal landscape.

In this project the supremely innocent figure is presented on the naked body to explore preconceptions and perceptions; it is impossible to view and image and not make judgments and conclusions about it, but why?

B/W Photography Project 4: Persona Project

The concept of identity and what composes a person is a topic often fraught with with discussion and disagreement. In order to generate ideas, we reviewed a large variety of different photographs that were related to the concept of the persona. Some were of self portraits, some were of trains, but all had and underlying sense of exploration and definition. For this project, we were tasked to define persona in our own way

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"Indexing is the act of demarcating an object at a specific time, to represent how it behaved/existed in that time frame alone as to avoid possible confusion. For example Daniel: Age 3 behaves very differently than Daniel: Age 15."

- General Semantics Theory

There is no such thing as two completely identical objects. When you look snowflakes under a microscope, obviously they are not the same. However, if you measure an orange one day and then again weeks later, the same orange will give you a different reading. To measure this temporal change, we use indexing.

Throughout my life I have always found myself flitting from one group of people to the next, making friends easily, but making attachments only with great difficulty. In addition, as a third culture child, my sense of otherness has been magnifies as after returning of my place of birth I find I am more of an alien than in the foreign lands I just departed.

This project attempts to index the different facets of my life and subcultures that I did/still belong to. Some of the representations are literal and some are metaphorical but all are true and are me. The images are presented fading into the black background to represent the tentative and intangible hold that each had on my life, never quite becoming fully realised, but instead fluctuating in and out of my life, just like the many locales I have tried to call home.

To be added

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Project Slideshow:

B/W Photography Project 1: Experimenting Projects

In the beginning of my photo class we did two short projects where we were basically supposed to just mess around with and get a feel for the camera - what were its strengths and what were its weaknesses. These projects were really just about exploration and nothing else.
The negatives for both projects can be found at the end of the post.

Print a Photo project -
For this project we were supposed to print one of the photos that we shoot on the two rolls of film that the professor supplied us. Mine was of the dining area in the co-operative that I eat in.


Black and White project -
For this project we were supposed to take pictures of and print 3 images. One that was black on black, one that was white on white, and one that was black on white. This was to get us used to printing with the full spectrum of black to white. It also was to show us that even though something was white when you shot it — that does not mean it has to or will print white.

B/W Photography Project 5: Utopia Project

For the final project in my photography class we were invited to explore the concept of Utopia. Disregarding B/W film for this project, I choose to shoot this project in medium format colour film. Unfortunately, my camera stopped working and so I re-shot the project digitally (hence their are no negatives for the final prints)

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Throughout my life, I have been searching for meaning. Cynical, dark, agitated, and pessimistic in humour, I often view my surroundings through a prematurely jaded lens. With this nihilist approach in mind, I am more apt to scorn utopian thought and concepts than embrace them.

However, in the past few years, I have been trying to dig myself out of this self imposed hole and ground myself with a more appreciative view of the world. In this journey, I have latched on to various loadstones to anchor myself in reality. Moments, images, events, little glimpses or extended parts of my life; these have really taken hold of me in a strong way.

It is in these objects, fragments from a tumultuous life, that I have found my utopia. Each one brings another side of me: personal, emotional, and powerful. In them, I find my peace.

"Utopia is not perfection in entirety, but an interwoven mass of imperfections culminated into one individual's perfect moment"