The interim gave me a lot to think about in terms of display - especially when I've taken some risks and experimented with projection and photographic works - very new and exciting. Both tutors have given me good critical feedback especially in terms of display. they said that
-for my personal statement: worth updating that includes this topic, and the specifics - put in online portfolio... 'section of no-place which is excellent' - eco philosophy, alter modern brouillard, (very broad realm of no-place to look into)
-video footage: seamless diorama but also 'holographic' the lightning effects etc...
-different mediums in the effort to put together this kind of world,
-use the amusement ride not just as subject, but methodology... audience faced with artefacts in cabinets... might not need to do it a lot, maybe some little case, draws the work together,
-cause right now the work is drawn together by subject, starting to separate...and yet the texture/thematics/world is totally linked..feels like the subject is really cohered through MCP, the danger is that the works are slightly competing with each other, not working together.. the photographs, like sugimoto, the postcards, humorous, and painting, dream-like... all of them together could slightly fight..maybe these undermine the painting if they're next to it vice versa. not to say the works themselves are not good, got to go one of two ways: a) take out either the painting or the photographs or b) really intense installation, victorian curiosity shop.. have everything all at once.
-so we don't get lost in the space between them, wonder if I'm almost there, because the space in the photograph reads fantastically in the image, gift to installation, if I have something like that incredibly large I could hang them in the spaces, and you've got these posters of worlds within which my paintings hang, if I only worked with what I have here, I could have a fantastic degree show,
-the postcards/captions, is hilarious, very simple, instructions, sense of nowhere place,
-monster chetwynd's show at Sadie Coles, big prints, taken photographs of historic artworks like Bosch, Henry fuseli, victorian era, blows them up massive, almost wallpaper, printed in one tone, lilac or green or, tones of that colour, fall back a bit but can still see the image, and puppets on top of that, and another show of Chetwynd's called Hell Mouth at Eastside projects, as an example of how, she is working with those different elements. it means you don't need to disrupt what you've already done, allowing them to accommodate and reach into the space that each image is presenting to us,
-Zoe: the beaver painting; became fascinated; when real animals in zoos have come quite far form where they were living, in order to make them feel at home, they repaint landscape of where they come from onto the walls of the enclosure, but animals can't read paintings, otherwise they'd be art critics, the flattening of the environment..;this beaver enclosure, somewhere like Wisconsin, got this landscape painted around the beavers that doesn't have any relationship in scale or tone to the original landscape, really badly painted and even painted beavers in it, can see online that someones done an exploration of the beaver eye, to see what it is that they would see, and it's nothing like that at all. and the people take their photographs and the beavers look giant and the landscape looks like its really far away,
-so I think some of what you're doing relates to taxonomy obviously, but there's also something about the live animal that is also imported in the work as well, the fakescape, the zoo isn't far away,
-tom: a show I've thought about in terms of putting these things together is the Lucy McKenzie show at cabinet, the way she had all those different works that refer to each other, the cabinet, vitrines, table, paintings, which have things in them that are in the installations, so there's an interconnection between those works which I thought worked really really well, but its almost something on paper that you wouldn't think would work...
-Zoe: its quite hard working like that, you have to be terribly organised, everything that you have then has to map onto the environment that it's then put in; the gallery itself very much becomes another kind of cabinet. it might be that you literally change the scale of what you have.
-there's a voice isn't there, that's really familiar, the voice of Disney, they're actually telling you what to do, its all behavioural but its all entertainment, 'you are about to have fun'.. if that's isolated, there's a bit in the dark, where you just hear the instructions of getting out safely, there's something about how it dislocates form the fun, and you just understand your position, your position is remote, you just have to sit still, the audio is quite valuable as well, I don't know if I'd lose any of it, work out how those work together
-its one of the most fascinating paintings you made, it shouldn't work, in a way, its sort of impossible,
-do you know the word Heterotopia? a term that's very much used by Michel Foucault, is an ever-reflective unfolding environment that comes out of the real. so a cemetery is a Heterotopia, because everybody that is buried there as their own life, memories, people that care for them, and a set of references that fold into the environment. libraries are Heterotopias, because every book opens up another world, theyre the kind of spaces... and your paintings feel heterotypic and the diorama would be heterotopic.. one of the things that Foucault says about that is that it holds up a mirror to the real, might be useful to know and read around that,
-Synecdoche New York' - a Charlie Kauffman film, its terribly creepy, tom: found it really hard to watch, it unfolds and unfolds and unfolds and makes you feel deeply uncomfortable but there's a character played by Samantha morton, and she lives in a house that's perpetually on fire, it never burns down, and it never gets put out. and those kinds of things, those kind of environments... Heterotopics they're quite difficult conceptually, I made it too easy but if you read the Foucault...
-Elise: reminds me of Darren aronofsky's first film Pi, really strange. was a book as well?
-what about scale? Zoe: I feel I've been asked to go into the space, sometimes its good to ask because sometimes students make paintings smaller practically in the studios, but the paintings feel like they're somewhat head size, I guess I'm making the assumption that I'm supposed to have a more intimate experience,
-I do want to make more cinematic ratio formats like last year; tom: those worked really well...
-for the post cards I was thinking a lot about Susan stewarts ideas; Zoe: one of the things that she attaches is a kind of fetish..
-there's something textural that's happening with the painting, you left one in the studio (the box one) that's very textural, it also has that sensorial, slightly, sort of calls to you, into the space,
-a British artist who photographed diorama, they were quite full frontal, and you were supposed to think they are real environments, they were noticeably hyper produced, and I think that that angle that you've got, that just-offness seems to really create the shift,
-its weird isn't it when you enter a natural history museum, and you've got animals next to each other that would never, are impossible, that seems to become really important as to how you manage this. its funny, they always have the 'best' of the species, you must have looked at that, there's something funny imaging this diorama with these flailing failed half dying beasts, it'd just be awful.
-when I go into the natural history museum I feel an overwhelming fear because of the power of the diorama. Zoe: is there an attempt to unravel the ties through the fakery?
-disney and intellectual property: you can put on youtube without too much happening cause someone could just take them down, but you're not actually allowed to film at Disneyland on the rides, and so if you were going to reshow it, we wouldn't have a problem with it in the degree show, but it would affect future sales, so you'd have to take it out of it, somehow make it disappear, having been filmed live at Disneyland, cause they're incredible instigators, in the intellectual property talk, Disney characters off limits..
-I also use a lot of film references as well.. Zoe: but they dissipate, seem to become part of your own language, and this is different. feels very much like the ride.
-tom: I guess the postcards would be printed or mounted on something that's not curved. would be quite lovely on aluminium.. might be expensive.. Zoe: god they'd be brilliant on aluminium wouldn't they. and then they'd provoke that rhetorical kind of shininess/glass.
-wonder about the titles on the images/fonts , could be embedded in the labelling you might find in certain places. how much it could become part of the same language you might find in the museum. just in terms of graphic nature, what you say is fantastic, where we're supposed to be in terms of that font, postcard. even printing them like postcards would change that ..theres these stands in the office for postcards. you can play around with.
-it is very exciting to see works where, contextually, we know where we are. just figuring out how to display it. what the uninformed audience is going to do with all these different kinds of things.
