Married to Misanthropy - absence & essence

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Well, today I had my 1-day installation at the School of Art. I titled it 'absence and essence,' for want of a better idea. I guess I'm satisfied with how it turned out, although things can always be better... It is still a work in progress, after all.

I ended up using 25W bulbs, each housed in an MDF box, with the glass slides fitted in the front. The images were projected onto free-hanging paper screens. I showed 5 images, all of my mother and sister, in a rough semi-circle.

It seemed like there were quite a few comments in my little envelope when I checked in at lunchtime - obviously I haven't looked at any of them yet. I hope some of them will be nice! ;) Tomorrow I'll be seeing Chris, and I hope he will be nice as well!

If you are interested, video footage of the installation is available on my facebook and Youtube. There are 2 on FB, one long pass over the whole exhibit and a shorter one showing the motion of the screens; but I've only got the longer one up on Youtube at the moment. There are also some still images on facebook, which should be viewable to everyone. I welcome questions and would very much appreciate any comments/suggestions!

absence & essence

My work has always dealt with issues of identity and memory. My current interest lies in the possibilities created for these by the metaphysics of light, explored through photography-based works using antique projection and optical technology previously used to illustrate these mystical ideas. I am examining photographs and memories as emanations of their referents, in order to question whether some glimmer of the original subject might remain – however dimmed, distorted, or diffused – still containing the immanent essence of that individual.

The source images for this work are drawn from my own archive of family photographs. They have been successively rephotographed: the originals were duplicated as slides, which were then projected and photographed again using a toy medium format camera, before being printed and transferred onto glass plates.

Tags: art, exhibition, mom, phd, photo, sister, video
Current Location: Aberystwyth
i feel: artistic
groovin' on: Tom Waits - Poor Edward

	From: rosabella	Date: April 29th, 2008 06:25 pm (UTC)		(Link)

I didn't leave a comment in the box 'cause I wanted to think about it for a while first. I really liked the final effect, the images on the screens, it was really haunting and beautiful. I found some of the set-up kind of distracting, but I guess that's hard to avoid. I guess I just feel it'd make more of an impact if you could concentrate on just the images - it comes across fantastically on your facebook video, 'cause the contrast removes all the background. I guess if you could make it more like that in person that would be ideal. I'm not sure how helpful this comment is, 'cause I can't say I'm too sure how to do that... I guess maybe if rather than getting up close, you could just view it through a slot in the sheet or something, so you can't see anything else? But then you'd have to put it on a revolving platform, which is probably way too complicated. Although I guess you could put them on separate platforms with separate viewing slots then, rather than in a circle, but that changes things quite a lot, and I don't know if that would change the effect you're going for. *shrugs* Sorry, don't know if this is very helpful at all.

	From: longpig	Date: April 29th, 2008 07:18 pm (UTC)		(Link)

No, I think understand what you're saying. The set up was less than ideal. In a perfect world I would have had a whole (very dark) room to myself rather than a room within a room with a bunch of light pollution. I would have liked to have a better thing to stand them on as well, but... I was only willing to spend so much money and such for one day. I consider it a sketch, I guess. ;)

Thanks for the feedback! :)

	From: elanya	Date: April 29th, 2008 07:55 pm (UTC)		(Link)

You know what you could do? hang a curtain around the outside of the exhibit maybe? Or around the images themselves, with holes cut to frame the paper... You could make it so that it would hang from the ceiling.

Although it would take Sewing so maybe its a bad idea ;)

	From: longpig	Date: April 29th, 2008 10:11 pm (UTC)		(Link)

There was a wall around it, which was left up from a previous exhibition, so the light around the actual pieces wasn't so much an issue (for me, anyway) as having to walk into a room and through a makeshift curtain to get to it.

I think that painting the boxes black, and having a black pedestal and black wires would go a long way to having the setup disappear inside the installation area. I don't want to hide the boxes; I want the projection apparatus to be somewhat visible, I just want it to be less intrusive... if that makes sense.

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Name: Witch Hazel