Intro to Visual Practice / Fall 2010

When I first started on this project, I was interested in the depiction of sites and what happens when the site (a setting) is transformed into an object.  To do this, I visited a few galleries and art shows both here in the Triangle Area and back home in Atlanta.  After documenting multiple encounters between subjects and objectified sites, this photo really stood out to me.  In this photo, the two women gaze at the painting as if it is a genuine beautiful site rather than a 2-D representation.  However, their mimicry of usual reactions to a beautiful site as they gaze at the picture is ironic. Such reactions are often triggeredbecause a site is “picturesque”-because it resembles a picture or work of art.  It is this blurring between the site and the object, between the work of art and thenatural feature that I found compelling.  As the two women gaze at the work as if it is a landscape, the image mimesis that evokes the site.  This imagined site is picturesque, and re-envokes a beautiful image, which completes the cycle.

I have produced samples of what this image would look like when integrated into another landscape – namely an urban cityscape.  By presenting people with this feedback loop of the image and the site, I would hope to bring aesthetic reflection into everyday urban environments.

I’ve always been fascinated by perspective, from fish-eye cameras to aerial views, so for IVP2, I decided to select an ordinary space and make it art using perspective. I picked an ordinary, typically-pointless corner of my dorm’s common room. I marked a specific location as my point of view and from that point of view, envisioned the letter “A” on the wall. The choice of “A” was entirely arbitrary – I actually just started taping the wall and it turned out that it could easily be turned into an “A.” I basically eyeballed the “A” in the wall from my designated point of view and went back and forth until the “A” was perfectly aligned. I then went to each previously selected alternate points of views that I had taken before pictures of, and took a picture of the “A” from those perspectives. From the designated point of view, the design would be complete; from any other point of view, it would look random and fragmented, but also beautiful.

Following this success, I wanted to try an outdoor version. I had envisioned selecting the point of view from a staircase looking up, and while this seemed like a good idea in theory, in reality the staircase I used was too thin to be effective. After testing out a few designs, I eventually settled for using the bend to the roof as part of the design, but it ultimately turned out to be less than spectacular. Nevertheless, it was a good effort, and this project really opened my mind to the space I passed by every day. I would walk to a class or from my dorm and see all these angles and points of view that it would be so great to project a design onto. The beauty of perspective is that it can be applied anywhere. It could even be so subtle that you could walk by it every day and not realize or appreciate it, until one day you looked from the exact spot and then it would all be clear.

After completing my project, a friend suggested I take a look at Felice Varini‘s work, and I literally sat in awe. A favorite of mine is this one, which looks amazing from both the vantage point and anywhere else. I had not known that this type of work was called anamorphic art, but I took a look at George Rousse’s Project Durham, as Bill suggested, and it is fantastic! It’s amazing that it was in Durham.

The site I chose to turn into art was the West Campus bus stop. My goal was to turn it into art by altering the way people interact with the site, and using visual codes and social constructions inherent to the bus stop to do so. The initial plan was to slowly cover the benches of the bus stop, one per day, with fliers of a person’s face. I chose one that was intentionally a little goofy, but not blatantly so. My inspiration came from the fact that when there is a flier on a bench, people tend to sit around it. I wondered what would happen if there were fliers covering the entire bench. I had visions of the fliers spreading across the benches, from the leftmost to the rightmost, like a virus. Each night, another bench would be taken over. This would also introduce a temporal aesthetic aspect to the project. We could watch the project develop and change over time, as benches that got fliered earlier would have fliers ripped off through normal wear and tear, or get waterlogged through rain, and so on. Ideally the final product would have been a time lapse film of the six day process, but that technology wasn’t available to me.

This didn’t actually develop though, as the bus stop is a more complex location than I initially thought. There is apparently a rule of some sort that fliers can’t be on the bus stop benches. I learned this the next morning, when every single one of the fliers had been torn off. I noticed the night before, while I was fliering, that my actions greatly affected those of the few people in the immediate area. So I decided to adjust my plan. Instead of fliering during the night, and observing during the day, my IVP became less aesthetically and temporally concerned, and more about performance art and people’s reactions when presented with an unusual situation in a usual place. I went to the bus stop during the busiest time of day, and fliered an entire bench. I then sat back and observed how people reacted to the covered bench. Because there was a performance aspect to it (it takes about an hour to cover one of those benches), I had to decide how I was going to react to the people that were there. I decided that whenever asked what I was doing, I would simply say performance art. If they pried deeper, I would answer every question honestly, but not volunteer any information. I wanted their reactions to be as unbiased as possible. And, whenever I needed to flier a spot that someone was sitting, I’d simply go around them. The results of this part of the project were fascinating. I was approached by at least twenty people, most of whom wanted to know who the girl was. They were seemed relieved, but in many cases also somewhat disappointed, to learn she wasn’t a Duke student. One guy told me that he thought most people would assume she was my ex-girlfriend, and another said he was concerned it was a missing person. I think most people were hoping to be either entertained or offended by what I was doing, and they didn’t particularly like the fact that they weren’t. The more interesting finding was that over the hour I was doing this, only eight people sat down despite the fact that the other benches would regularly fill up every five minutes. Of those eight, I knew three. All but one asked permission before they sat down. I found this very intriguing, since I was being sort of a jerk by interrupting their day to day experience, but they still asked me for PERMISSION to use a public space. Only one person was willing to stay until he interrupted my fliering, but he asked me to tell him when I wanted him to move, and I assured him that I would. As soon as I left, things changed slightly. All the other benches would still fill up to the maximum amount of people that can sit on a bench before it seems like an invasion of personal space (from my observations, this tends to be three). Then someone would finally be willing to attempt to sit down on the covered bench. The first person would always do it the same way. They’d walk up to it, look at the fliers for a few seconds, look both ways to make sure they weren’t missing something, and then they’d sit down. As soon as one person did it, two more would quickly follow. Once every bench was at comfortable carrying capacity, it then became ok to fill in the gaps that remained between those three people. Still, despite the fact that trailblazers had already proven it was allowed to sit on the covered bench, all the other spots would fill up before that one did. Once it became further away from class time, the amount of people declined. When I came back an hour later, around the time more classes were letting out, the fliers had once again been removed.

This got me thinking about my ability to control people at the site. If I went and fliered a bench every day, I would force a maintenance worker to remove them every day. By covering a bench with fliers, I was forcing bus users to fill in other benches before they could sit on that one. I wanted to take control in a more blatant way. When a group is advertising for a party or other event, they often tape fliers to the ground in an arrow shape. I wanted to see if I could get people to follow a path made by those arrows that led to nothing, just from the end of the bus stop that people usually got off at to the other. My hope was that I would see people waiting for buses follow the path to the end, realize there was nothing there, and turn around, or maybe even go off in search of the other arrow. What I found was a little different, but still interesting. Many, many people would encounter the arrows, look down at them, and then follow the arrows with their eyes. This was especially common with people coming from the direction the arrows pointed, perhaps because they were trying to figure out what it was they had missed. People that were walking in that direction almost always walked the exact path that was laid out by the arrows. I have no idea if this was a conscious or unconscious decision. No one followed the path unless they were already going that way though. The social and locational conventions and codes were apparently strong enough to direct their gaze, and their path, but not enough to actually physically move someone.

NOTE: I’m having  difficulties uploading images to the blog right now. Images to come later.

Fliered bench at night:

Fliered bench during day:

Arrows:

David Mayer

Identified Site: The breakfast table.  I chose to modify breakfast foods because for the most part their role is purely functional. Breakfast is coined “the most important meal of the day” not for its social associations, as the family dinner or networking lunch, but rather for the physiological benefits.

Modifying the Site: Adding color or arranging foods in such a pattern as to create the iconic “rainbow” symbolic of the LGBT advocacy movement.

In creating these three sample compositions, I wanted to explore the concept of intention regarding symbolism. Is everything we see always symbolic and attached to an agenda?

With the increasing presence of visual culture in the world today (internet, television, incessant advertising), does subtlety still exist? Can an image have a quiet message? Can visual depictions still be appreciated singularly for their aesthetic quality or is there a need for an associated conceptualization?

Can a cereal bowl filled with Fruit Loops just be an arrangement of different sugared oat puffs that creates an aesthetically pleasing arrangement or is the cereal bowl a symbol of pride and friendship for the LGBT community?

Examining the titles of the three images, one can observe the words “selection”, “dumped”, and “assorted”. This points to the fact that each of these rainbow-prominent images could easily be created without any intent of making a statement about LGBT opinions or concepts. In a way, this piece questions visual culture and our overly sensitized.

(I am having problems getting my images to load onto the website).

The classroom space acts with us. It is ontologically marked as a site of pedagogy with a strict hierarchy and a competitive impulse: teacher-student, a grading curve, a fight for the 4.0, etc. Egoism, selfishness, socially fracturing: these are the conditions of the classroom, the site of pedagogy.

But is this the best environment to learn?

We want to break down the site and start it anew. The classroom can be a space of trust. The classroom can be a space of mutual dependency and learning. The classroom can be a social space, not one of digesting pedagogical vomit, but one of conversing. But this must happen through a reinvention. We take the tea party as our site of departure from the established classroom space. The tea party conjures images of a lady’s garden luncheon, a mad hatter’s chaotic unbirthday, a place of revolution, a nihilistic hypernationalist movement. All of this history informs our party, but we create our own party. Haphazard, open, free to all who choose to come. We host this party only as suppliers. There is no obligation to join. Not joining and joining have their own markings, and we make no judgments on these decisions. In fact, these decisions create the piece. We only hope to set the stage for a new learning. Learning that takes individuals and binds them to one another through difference, through preference. There must be a grounding, but this is only a site of departure for an alternative future. An opening up and breaking down of the classroom, of the student, of the teacher, of the tea party for something to transform and transgress.

When faced with the challenge of changing a space to create art, I thought first, what space do I have the most right to change, and second, how can I change a “place,” physical space, into art. Nature art and site-specific art seemed to make the most sense as a starting point, but I wanted to truly take ownership of my own space, and the struggle to do so lead me to a consideration of the film and photos I’ve created here at Duke. I wanted to find some way to connect all the different spaces (narrative film, digital photography, friendship, fraternity, athletics, partying, studying, etc.) that are important in my life into a meaningful work of art, and collage seemed to make the most sense. I compiled all the film, video, and photography I’ve completed since coming to school, then trimmed and trimmed until I believed everything was represented in its proper proportion. The end result is a somewhat abstract digital narrative that I believe embodies the experience I have had of Duke University.  I understand this re-creation and re-imagination of my Dukescapes to be both deeply personally and emphatically art.  The experience of both making and presenting this work was very meaningful to me, and, for the first time in a long time, I was nervous to show my work to the class.  I consider this an accomplishment.

For my project I googled “art intervention” and after looking at many of the images listed under that name I decided that I kind of wanted to do some sort of installation, some sort of sculpture-ish thing in a place and I wanted that place to be Duke’s campus. With a little influence from one of my favorite artists, Barbara Kruger and her recent involvement with W magazine in their latest issue which happened to be the “Art Issue” I decided to do this project. It was really important for me to feel like I was making a commentary about something at Duke, about Duke, relating to Duke life and I think that a major part of my life here at Duke and many students’ lives here is appearance.  I think not only with the media news and issues that Duke has created for its public image lately (scandals, leaked fake theses, etc) and just the type of student social life that we promote or at least lead here on campus that appearance and perception is very very important.  Duke is very much about social life, social climbing, appearance, social classes and norms, the greek life has something to do with this as well.  I think that its easy to get stuck in the Duke bubble and not realize that all that is within these walls, within the privacy of this elite institution, this private campus, the seemingly infinite resources and tools and opportunities, the golden atmosphere where we might feel like because we go here we’re special, invincible almost, all that —isn’t all that’s out there in reality, in the real world, in the world outside that only encompasses Duke as a very small piece of the entire puzzle.  So I thought to expose the hierarchy on campus, the social structure that is somewhat corrupt or skewed or just a little bit sketchy, I wanted to install large mirrors in strategic places on campus.  Mirrors that are maybe like 4 feet wide and 8 feet tall that could stand upright like in a doorway in the middle of the bus stop, on the main quad, in the Bryan Center, in the middle of east campus, on the plaza, and Perkins.  That way students would have to run into these huge mirrors and would probably stop to look in it, look at themselves, and maybe, look into themselves. And even if they don’t it just shows the mentality on campus, how we don’t have the time to stop and look at ourselves, what we’re wearing, who we are, what we’re doing, what we are PROJECTING.  And I wasn’t really sure that that would get the point across completely so I thought, with the Barbara Kruger reference, that I could put some sayings, some text on the top of the mirrors or around the edges of the mirrors, text like

“LOOK AT ME”
“Who’s the fairest of them all?”
“Things aren’t always as they seem”
“What do you desire?”
“How do I look?”

For the physical project I did my original procedure on a smaller scale and this is how it turned out.

As a chocolate lover, my inspiration to use chocolate in this art project with a political aspect came from reading an article about the origin of the cocoa present in most of the chocolate candies we eat in the United States.  A region of West Africa, Cote d I’voire (Ivory Coast), produces 70% of the world’s cocoa. Hershey’s, Nestle, and M&Ms amongst others, are all brand names, that make products with this cocoa.  There has been a lot of controversy that these countries are using child slave labor that the Western countries are buying. Such issues are relevant to the entire national community and present  a challenging task since we as consumers are all involved in this global distribution of cocoa from the Ivory Coast.
The site that I chose was the wall under the bridge on East campus, where students are able to freely express thoughts, emotions, ideas, inspirations, advertisements, and events at Duke and also around the world.  To me it was a symbolic place of an area where ideas are expressed, and for this reason, I thought it would be interesting to portray an artistic statement that related to the child slave labor on the West Coast by creating a wall drawing made entirely of chocolate…something that has never been on the wall before. This use of chocolate in a place that is traditionally spray-painted or painted illuminates displacement, and creates a break in the continuous painted nature of the wall. The chocolate art is itself composed of the political message it stems from-the child labor involved in the process of cocoa production. There is a contribution of many workers to produce the cocoa. Now, in a sense, the artist- me, is the worker who is working to create a product made from the cocoa product incorporated in so many different candies around the world. Ironically, many people associate the bright colors of M&Ms with happiness and pleasure from a food they enjoy eating.
The introduction of the film opens with normal color and saturation as it appears in real life; however, as it transitions into the artwork, the clip becomes saturated in colors that are very different from the natural setting. This reflects that the artwork itself is very different from the materials and textures seen on the wall, showing a displacement in order to illuminate placement. I scattered M&Ms on the floor in order to show that the cocoa itself stems from a material made on the Earth; the placement of the M&Ms at the base of the wall is not something common; and thus strongly evokes something is wrong or not in its proper place. The film also shows a tree structure right above the pool of candies; symbolizing the global dispersal of this cocoa to all parts of the world. Also a chocolate ‘globe’, made of blue and green crushed M&Ms, is positioned to the left of the tree to symbolize this global network.
In conclusion, a small statement about the Ivory Coast cocoa production is placed on a ‘wall-mural’, my  chosen site, that illuminates many different issues, whether they are political, economic, or social. The strange splattering of chocolate (seen near the end of the clip) was made from splatters of Hershey’s chocolate syrup (another American product that uses imports of the cocoa from the West African cocoa supply). This project was interesting to me because it was the first time I used film (iMovie) and edited the film and tried out various dream-like effects. I also was able to attach music to the clips, something new that I experimented with, and I have never used chocolate before to make art.

For my project I chose to take a very bland space and alter the way it was presented to make it into art.  I did this by taking around 90 pictures of my apartment.  I stood in the same place, slowing panning up and down, side to side, to make sure I had  180 degrees of my apartment represented in the photographs.  I then opened these photos in photoshop and arranged them to create a panorama of my apartment.  It was impossible, however, to get a completely exact representation.  (Like what one would have gotten had they used a panoramic camera.) There are many areas that are represented multiple times in the image.  The viewer is confused, but the space also has a strange way of making sense.

A classroom is a space that has a given ret of rules and conventions tied to it before we ever pass through its doors. There is a strict hierarchy between teacher and student, a system of grading or evaluation, and the drive of students to perform better than their peers.  Upon entering the classroom the space compels us to enact these hierarchies, leading to an egoist and socially fracturing environment. Our classroom, with its stark décor and lack of windows contributed an extra degree to the already oppressive nature of the space and creates an environment when the student exists as a completely isolated individual.

Though our project we sought to break down the conventions of this site and create a new space, a space where dialogue flows freely, where students are not intimidated by participation, and the environment becomes one of mutual dependency rather than individualism.  We chose the tea party as our vehicle to depart from the established norm of the classroom because of its historical and present tie to change and subversion.  Historically it is ties to revolution through the Boston Tea Party. It references the absurd from Allison in Wonderland and today caries connotations of radical social and political change through the Tea Party Movement.  Tea is inexplicably tied to ritual in many eastern countries as well as those of the west, specifically Great Britain and its former territories.  Because of these multiple associations the tea party was a prime means of provoking conversation and intellectual dialogue in our class space.

Our tea party makes reference to all of these historical ties, especially since it was staged on Election Day, but also recognizes personal differences. We each designed out open table settings to reflect our own interpretations of tea parties, while ultimately creating an overarching aesthetic that created an aesthetic that everyone in the room could find relatable.  The event was meant to be chaotic, and open to all, reversing the typical nature of the classroom.  We presented ourselves as merely a jumping off point. Our peers were invited to join in, interact with their fellow classmates and in doing so help subvert the norms of the classroom.  Through this opening up and subsequent breaking down of the space and its inhabitants (the student and teacher) we created a forum for something new to transform, transgress and transpire. It was up to the class to determine what that would be.

Below are some photos of the process leading up to the tea party performed in class, including sketches and photographs of my personal tea set up:

After our tea party on Tuesday, we set up a Google doc to discuss different aspects of the project. The Google doc format allowed us to individually express our thoughts (we realize that it would be inappropriate to turn in one tiny paragraph for all five of us) and to react to each other.

Will:

Although I was rather disappointed that a large amount of the class did not get to taste my delicious Cantonese tea, the fact that many chose not to participate speaks volumes. Perhaps, as Bill said, it would take an even bigger disruption (with better staging, directions, costumes and music) to entice more tea drinkers. The environment of our classroom, where everyone is out for his or her grade and generally chooses not to interact with others unless it benefits his or her utility, proved incredibly hard to disrupt.  This characterization is true about the Duke undergraduate environment as a whole. As Andrew and I said later on Tuesday evening, Duke is a place so entrenched in egoism that it might take an action as drastic as burning down the Chapel to get people to change behaviors.

Andrew:

One thing I noticed and spoke to Will about was how in spite of our critique of the hierarchic structure of the classroom, Bill and Pedro still articulated the terms of the tea party — when it began, how the conversation transpired, when it ended (1 hour later!?!?). Likewise, some people still refused to participate in the project, again reinforcing the egoism and unwillingness of the classroom.
Will and I were talking about some of the failures, one of which suggests that the transformation we want to gesture toward is maybe not possible in a physical space but must deeply intervene in the culture at large. Similarly, we agreed with Bill’s criticism that aesthetically our work was limited.
Ultimately though, the work was successful as a consciousness-raising exercise. I await your thoughts!

Laura:

I agree with what Andrew wrote. While we did break certain conventions of the classroom (i.e. food in a computer lab, open movement and discussion), we still were very much constrained by the space. I think one of this ways this was clearly articulated was in the fact that, in most cases, those who chose to participate in the tea party were the students who sat at the tables with us. Others that were sitting on the periphery of the room seemed to be those that were more skeptical of the project and declined the invitation to take part.  I think to some degree this was a misstep on out part. While we did control the aesthetic of the 5 central tables, we did nothing to engage the entirety of the room. Had we created some sort of arrangement in which all students were on an equal level (all at covered tables) I think they would have been more inclined to participate.
Bill and Pedro did ultimately control the course of the tea party. An interesting aspect though is that they chose to alter the entire structure of that days class to accommodate our project. In this regard the tea party was successful to some degree in subverting the predetermined schedule of the room. The class was supposed to split into two and then have critiques but this ended up being impossible due to the fact that most projects were visual and because our group spanned the alphabetic range of both groups.  I think the project successfully provoked the sort of discussion we hoped for, one that engaged the majority of the class and brought up this idea of ritual, engagement/disengagement, and egoism, among others.  Ultimately, in the end I felt that we were successful in our endeavor but it felt as if we could have gone a bit further to radically effect the classroom space (perhaps by engaging the entire physical room in the tea party?).

Anne:
The goal of our project was to intervene on the hierarchical, egoistic classroom setting and foster a more inclusive community experience in which the learning process could take place. Some people willingly joined us at our five tea party tables before we explained the project, yet few actually partook of tea and snacks, or of a conversation with their tablemates. It was not until Pedro asked, “Can we start?” that the tea party really was allowed to begin. At that point people began drinking and eating.
I do not think that people’s hesitation to participate marks a lack of success on our part. As we said in class, people’s decisions to join or not join are what help make the piece. Watching how the tea party transpired was research, even, about how such a rigidly utilized space, with its unspoken rules of behavior and etiquette, can be very hard to change. The altered space had little effect on those who chose to reject it and instead attend to their laptops or cell phones.
Creating a true difference in classroom interaction may not be possible simply through changing the way the room looks and where one subsequently sits. It would be interesting to attempt different kinds of interventions to see which had the greatest effect on behavior. Setting the room up as a living room with sofas, easy chairs, and lamps would force people to be closer to one another, but would it change their behaviors?
I agree with Bill’s comment that we could have done more with the work aesthetically. It would have looked better if each table had a more fleshed out “theme” or environment to it, rather than a collection of cups and snacks on a tablecloth.
The project provoked a discussion that ended up consuming almost an hour of class time, and overall I think it was a success because it challenged students to not only behave differently, but to think and talk about why they do certain things in certain environments.

Sam:
In my opinion, the tea party accurately reflected the egotistical environment of the class.  While some students chose to participate, many abstained, indicating existing tensions between students unwilling or unable to branch out and communicate with one another.  In terms of the aesthetic of the piece, I feel that each tea setting reflected our individual tea rituals.  Some settings were more elaborate, and some were minimalist, but the point of the exercise was to provide a forum for communication within the classroom, and in this, it was successful.  I talked to two students whom I had never met.  I believe that with a few more tries, this exercise could lead to a more relaxed, comfortable classroom environment that would cater to deeper individual expression.

Andrew:

First, I don’t think it is useful for us to look at our project in this success/failure binary. I know I have contributed to some of the rhetoric, but the project is too multifaceted to be summarized in a totality.
I do agree with Anne that some student’s failures to participate mark a point we were suggesting, as does Bill and Pedro’s articulation of the project. In this sense, we cannot judge these aspects as necessary failures or successes but research interests and hypotheses proven or not proved (in this case, proved) (but even this binary is too strict). If we view our project as research, then it was a process of discovery. But obviously our different approaches to this help frame our understanding of the project and we should all be careful to note our differences in approaching the project.

Will:

Andrew is exactly right. Just because not everyone participated does not make our project a failure. In fact, the result is arguably more interesting because so many students chose to not take part in our ritual. This project is just the tip of the iceberg, really. To further our research (as Andrew put it), we could conduct similar rituals in our different classes (Economics 51, anyone?) or even better articulate our vision for a tea party in our class.

Appendix:

Supply list:

5 different colored tablecloths
2 teakettles (portable)
Oranges
Cranberry Orange Scones
Chocolate Macaroons
1 Cantonese tea set
Finger sandwiches (homemade)
Sweet tea
20 Cups
7 mugs
15 tea bags

Timeline:

10/31, 1.00 pm, Smith Warehouse: Rehearse tea party in classroom setting.
11/1, 2.00 pm, Super Target: Purchase any outstanding supplies
11/2, 2.30 pm, Smith Warehouse, Arrive early to set up tea party
11/2, 2.50 pm, Smith Warehouse, Begin tea party ritual

I was doing a lot of thinking about the readings last week and the idea of something being unique and not able to be reproduced. This led me to determine the human body as a site that is art. Our bodies are blank canvases that we can transform however we want.  For this project, I focused specifically on hands.  I examined the lines of various hands, observing how I could transform the site.  I traced interesting patterns that I found with a ballpoint pen.  Some of the lines immediately engendered shapes and images in my head, while others led to more abstract suggestions of an image.  I took pictures of my participants’ hands and compiled these stills in a short video clip.

I couldn’t upload the video, but here are some of the photographs I took:

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.

I participated in the collaborative work, The Tea Party in which each artist set up individual tea stations that reflected his or her respective tastes, inviting other members of the class to participate. In my opinion, the tea party accurately reflected the egotistical environment of the classroom space. While some students chose to participate, many abstained, indicating existing tensions between students unwilling or unable to branch out and communicate with one another. In terms of the aesthetic of the piece, I feel that each tea setting reflected our individual tea rituals. Some settings were more elaborate, and some were minimalist, but the point of the exercise was to provide a forum for communication within the classroom, and in this, it was successful. I talked to two students whom I had never met. I believe that with a few more tries, this exercise could lead to a more relaxed, comfortable classroom environment that would cater to deeper individual expression.

I began with the concept that I wanted to create a foodscape like those of Carl Warner, however I wanted to simplify it. I thought of the concept of food as art, and I found it to be slightly overdone. I wanted to do something new. My next idea was to take a picture of the meal at the end…the leftovers. I looked at the work of seiss artist Daniel Spoerri, and I loved what he did, but I was worried my idea was too similar. Then it came to mind that people are very engrossed with the bizarre and the grotesque. It’s that “train wreck concept,” where it’s impossible to look away even though the image is revolting. So I had the idea that I would take your traditional food picture and let it turn into the grotesque. I carefully made a sandwich complete with mustard, a salad with dressing, some baby carrots, and a glass of milk. I arranged the food so that all the elements would be showing, and then let time do the rest of the work. I let the atmosphere alter the food as it rotted away over the course of two weeks. I documented the progress throughout, but I found the beginning and ending pictures to be the most poignant, and the piece was better in person (although I had to dispose of it shortly after due to health concerns.

Before the deconstruction

After the deconstruction

Molded turkey and disintegrated cheese

For this project, I wanted to do something with the objects and spaces in my life. I also like playing with the idea of a site as something small, such as an interval between two books on a shelf, or even an object.

I wanted to see how two different kinds of spaces (the library and the museum), with two different kinds of standard behavioral modes, could be negotiated given the alteration of an object in the space. In the library stacks, people search for what they want, touch what’s on the shelf. In the museum, people don’t touch things, people observe and gain understanding from just looking at the surface.

I also wanted to play with the idea of the public and the private object. Library books are to be shared anonymously, clothing is not. The idea of having to touch something intimate to access a municipality.

For my project my goal was to turn Duke University into a form of artwork. My first goal was to create a time-span of the Duke chapel by taking pictures every five minutes over a five-hour span, creating a “day and night” effect similar to stop animation. Once completed, I then took several pictures around campus of different buildings and landmarks that fit into Duke’s culture. I then created a slide show in iMovie with music from the movie Inception in the background. This music enhances the effect of the slideshow and grabs the viewer’s attention. Overall, my project centers around the concept of multimedia, as it incorporates digital photography, cinematography, and music to create one piece of art. The video can be seen with the following link:

Duke to Art

East Campus Bus Stop

East Campus Pavilion Bus Stop

Smith Warehouse Bus Stop

West Cmapus Bus Stop

The place I declared as art is not one that can be traveled to by car, plane, or any other machine.  It can only be accessed through sleep.  This place is the world in which our dreams occur.

Although dreams cannot be shared simultaneously with other people (i.e. we cannot broadcast our dreams on a screen), the world(s) in which our dreams occur can be created from what we experience in our conscious mind. I see this world as a visual piece that has been “painted” from memory and a sort of imagination; we can control where our dreams occur, what happens, what things look like, etc. Evidence of this is the presence of fictional characters and creatures in our dreams. They do not occur in “the real world;” instead, they are imagined.

Like art, this world not only appeals to the senses, but also emotions and the mind. Both our emotions and our senses seem to be heightened in dreams. Often, we wake up still experiencing these same emotions and thinking about our dreams, sometimes even trying to analyze them for deeper meaning. This also happens with traditional forms of art; we analyze them for characteristics, such as arrangement, color, and light.

According to the Evans-Newman theory, our brain is similar to a computer.  Dreams are the brain’s way of clearing out unwanted information.  The information is either transferred to long-term memory or erased from short term memory.  Our unconscious brain randomly accesses these memories and places them into the scenarios that occur in our dreams.  They are influenced by hopes, fears, and sensory input during the night.

Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening

Scene from Alice in Wonderland

While thinking of ways to document the dream world, I came across the work on the left, a painting by Salvador Dali.  In the painting, he documents a dream in which Gala, the woman in the painting, reclines, oblivious to the events happening around her.  The bee, in the form of two tigers, hovers over the pomegranate, and all of the action is frozen in this dream-like image.  I also considered the images in Alice in Wonderland for their dream-like qualities.

My original plan was to wake myself up during REM sleep, since this is the time of highest recall, in order to document my own dreams over the period of one week.  However, I did not have enough control to do this, or did not realize I was dreaming at the time.  I was only able to document one dream.

Dream Recall: Thursday, October 28

In this dream, I was situated in an apartment.  I have seen this apartment before, but I cannot remember where.  It was similar to my apartment at Duke, but slightly different.  I was being interrogated by a police officer and made to fill out a questionnaire and a checklist.  I remember feeling some anxiety and fear, but wasn’t really sure why.  After reflecting on the dream, I think it may have been related to an incident earlier in the year when I witnessed a crime and had to fill out a police report.

Last summer, I was sightseeing in downtown Seattle when I came across a wall of chewing gum, literally. Over time, people had stuck used chewing gum (gross) on a stone wall in an alleyway, so that there was now brightly colored pieces of gum covering a huge wall. It looked really cool in person.

This is how I got my inspiration for my IVP #2 project. I really liked the idea of combining two ordinary elements (in this case, chewing gum and a wall) into something that created really cool site art. After some consideration, I decided my two ordinary elements would be Post-It notes and the desk in my dorm room. To transform my desk into a site of art, I covered it with randomly colored Post-It notes. However, to make it a little more interesting, I decided to make my project into a stop-motion video; thus, for each Post-It note I stuck on my desk, I took a picture so I could later put those pictures into a very sped-up video format. This sort of made a flip book of images, and it looked like the Post-It notes were moving of their own accord.

When I think of a Post-It note, I think of a to-do list. After all, that is what they’re meant to do. As Duke students, we are well-accustomed to having a long list of things to do, whether that list consists of finishing essays or fulfilling extracurricular duties or even just doing laundry. Of course, sometimes, that list of things to do can get to be quite overwhelming and stressful, which is what this video touches on, as you can check out for yourself below.

I wanted to play with the idea of nature as a means to transform a site into artwork.  I transformed a site, a box, into art by transforming it into my favorite site, my house in the fall.  I photographed my house decorated for the fall, and I painted it.  Then I put it in the box and placed pretty fall leaves inside with dead leaves at the bottom, transforming the box by placing pieces of the surrounding environment, pieces of the season of fall, into it.  I transformed the site, the box, into artwork by transforming it into my favorite site, transformed into artwork by the seasons.

In other words, I see fall as artistically transforming of my neighborhood.  So I was inspired by that transformation to transform something else into a representation of it.