Intro to Visual Practice / Fall 2010

This word has a variety of meanings and connotations. It is a noun, adjective, and verb. As a noun, a model can be a person who is a subject for an artist’s work, a person who wears clothing to advertise it, a style or type of something (like a car) or a replication of something. Something that is “model” is usually exemplary or a standard. Verbally, to model can mean to replicate or imitate, or it can be the act of wearing clothes or being the subject of an artist’s work.

Image Source: http://www.enasco.com/product/SB33502M

The term “painting” can be a verb or a noun. A painting is a visual representation involving the application of pigments to a surface. Paintings can be done in oil on canvas and seen in museums or be grade school art projects of tempera paint on construction paper. To paint is the act of applying paint (pigment/color) to a surface. Painting does not necessarily have to have an intrinsically artistic connotation; houses, cars, and other objects can be painted. The term “painting” does not have to be taken literally, it can mean to describe, ie. using the phrase “painting an ugly picture” to mean “describe an unpleasant situation”.

image source: http://www.unschoolingsupport.com/supporting_the_unschooling_journ.htm

For my project, I struggled with the idea of defining a place as art. I started thinking about landscape paintings, pictures, and prints. Many times, these are actual places that have been transcribed into art by an artist or used as a source of inspiration.  For this project, I decided to redefine famous landscape paintings or landscapes by well-known artists by bringing “them” together in one place, a local landscape ( the wooden area in Edens Quad). My criteria for selecting each well-known artwork was the following:

1. It had to involve a landscape or seascape
2. It had to be well-known or by a well-known artist
3. The original had to still be in existence and located somewhere other than the place that the artwork depicted

My goal was to bring this variety of places into conversation. All of the originals are scattered across the globe, yet people can view variations of them easily through the internet or other reproducible means. My reproductions in a landscape gallery not only refer to the originals and their subjects’ locations, but also to the current locations of each piece. In this manner, a “web” of art as place is created.

In the Nasher’s Record exhibit, Gregor Hildebrandt’s Cassette Record captured my interest. The piece adeptly incorporates many of the overarching themes of the show. In his work, Hildebrandt unwound the magnetic tape of a cassette and reformed it into the shape of a record. By appropriating an alternate “newer” type of music into the formation of an older record, Hildebrandt suggests the interconnected nature of music. Tapes were just being phased out as I began to listen to music at a young age, and my only experience with the record come from my dad’s extensive collection. What interested me most about this piece was that despite the changing forms in which it is packaged, music remains music across the decades. Even though Hildebrandt’s piece is basically an unwound, unplayable cassette tape, it is both a figurative and literal representation of music. Today I am fortunate to have the option of listening to music like a Beatles’ song from my dad’s record collection or my Itunes library, and each mode brings a different connotation to the music.  What’s old can be revived and become popular again, and today, when both the record and the cassette tape are outdated forms of technology, the still speak to the cultural relevance of music.

Alan Storey has been working on various concepts for drawing machines throughout the past twenty years. In his definition of a drawing machine, he includes the concept of mapping human actions. In his “Device for Drawing the Movements of a Ballerina,”  Storey traces the dancing of a ballerina on a stage over a series of her performances through computer mapping. The end product is a paper with a series of lines delineating the ballerina’s movements.

Both Storey’s machine and my machine involve taking something with an untenable aspect – the movement of a ballerina and the composition of my Itunes library- and translating it to a two-dimensional version on paper. Without proper contextualizing, both products could be seen as “just a bunch of lines or dots.” When taken in context, however, the products become a visualization of something not commonly drawn. While both machines deal with the visualization of different art forms (music and dance) and create a different product each time they are implemented, they do so in a different way. Storey’s drawings rely upon the live actions and movements of the ballerina, while my dot vibrations revolve around the content of my ITunes library and the length of each song. Because of the human element in Storey’s machine, there seems to be an unlimited amount of possible outcomes for his drawings. While the number of different song variations that I can map in my library is exponential, there is an eventual boundary.

"Alan Storey: Device for Drawing the Movements of a Ballerina", Queen Elizabeth Theatre, Vancouver Canada, 2008. All images of this work are copyright © Ashley Judge, 2008.

Click Here for more info about Storey’s machines:

http://www.c4gallery.com/artist/alan_storey/artist-alan-storey.html

http://alanstorey.net/drawing-machines.html

My machine involves both a process and an apparatus. It combines two modes of technology that I use on a daily basis to create a “drawing.” The apparatus is my cell phone, set on vibrate with marker tips attached to one side. The cell phone is placed marker side down at the top left corner of a piece of paper. Next, I opened up ITunes on my computer and shuffled my music library. I called my cell phone for the duration of the song, allowing it to vibrate in place, creating a “drawing” on the paper. Once the song ended, I stopped calling the phone. If the next song that came up on shuffle was country, classical, blues, or bluegrass, I moved the phone one rotation to the left. If, after several rotations to the left, the phone reached the end of the page, I rotated the phone back to the right. If the next song was rock, alternative, pop, or rap, I moved the phone down one rotation, until I reached the bottom of the page. Once the bottom of the page was reached, I began to rotate the phone back up if the next son was rock, alternative, pop, or rap. I repeated this process for the duration of ten songs, creating a drawing of the intensity and length of my music.

10 Songs on Itunes

10 Songs on Itunes, Starting with Rock Genre

10 Songs on Itunes, Mostly Rock and Country

This project was my first attempt at using Photoshop. The initial picture I took (top right) is an interesting play of shadows and color on the pathway outside of my dorm. All subsequent images in this project are manipulations through Photoshop. I played with complementary colors and brightness/darkness to  highlight different shadows and portions of the original sidewalk image.