NY Art Book Fair Response
I attended the NY Art Book Fair at PS1 on Friday September 20th. I was amazed at the amount of displays that featured the works of fine artist, graphic designers, and photographers. Not only was the work creative, but also the atmosphere and the fashion choices of the people who attended really inspired me. There were so many different books and art displays that it was hard to pick favorites, but a couple caught my eye.
I found the work of two graphic designers to be very interesting. The samples of art they had on display was bold and extremely colorful. One, Paul Shortt, worked with typography to create clever signage; the other,George Wietor, created risograph prints (a cross between printing and photocopying), to make bright vibrant illustrations. What struck me most about these two designers was how simple and clean their work was, but how much it said. In relation to my own work, the art work made me wonder about the way that I could include typography and bold color into my photographs to take a statement. I usually focus my work more on people or scenery, and these works of art opened my eyes to thinking about the subject matter of my photos in a different way. How could I focus more on simple images that told a story through type, color, and everyday signs? How could I use my photography to create or illustrate ideas? This is something I would like to work on during future assignments.
I saw the art of many of those people exhibiting at the Bookfair fitting into what we are learning in the Visual Thinking class, but these two artists in particular showed me that they were able to create simple designs that provided clear messages. They were able to take ideas and explain them through art and that’s what good visual thinking is about.
Line Drawing
I drew my inspiration for this project from the assigned reading “The Practice of Everyday Life: Walking in the City,” by Michel D. Certeau. The author discusses what it’s like to view New York City from the top of one of the World Trade Center Towers. He talks about streets, building, landmarks that are so large and detailed in our everyday lives, as becoming patterns and blocks of color from above. “Is the immense texturology spread out before one’s eyes anything more than a representation, an optical artifact? It is the analogue of the facsimile produced, through a project that is a way of keeping aloof by the space planner urbanist, city planner or cartographer."
Following the assignment instructions, I developed a series of line drawings that focused on my daily schedule of classes and how I get to them. I used different symbols to show my movements and my destinations. My project shows how even a small area of the city is designed to work in a logical way in order to organize space. The neat grids of streets on my cards show how organized the Washington Square area is and also how the park connects one area to another. “The City, like a proper name, thus provides a way of conceiving and constructing space on the basis of a finite number of stable, isolatable, and interconnected properties."
My line drawings focus on the paths that I walk every day, to and from class. My maps show that on many days, I take the same path, but I do have the ability to change direction, sometimes taking the longer way, or walking through the park. By walking I have the freedom to choose whichever path I like. As Certeau says, “Walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects, etc., the trajectories it speaks.”
I liked working on this projects because I got the translate an everyday action that I do into something more creative. Organizing the way I view my day and my travels gave me a different perspective on my everyday routine.
The Last Newspaper
The Last Newspaper Artist in Conversation is an interview about an exhibit at the New Museum that was on display from October 2010 to January 2011. This audio clip focuses on three artist who exibited in this exhibition—Aleksandra Mir, Nate Lowman, and Sandra Charlesworth. The interview is lead by the curator of the exibit Benjamin Godsill. Each of these artists grew up with newspapers around them. Each of them also discuss their memories of the stories they remember reading and seeing in the newspaper and how these stories reflected what was going on during the time. Each of these artists chose to interpret newspapers in diffrent ways as their contribution to the exhibit. Sarah Charlesworth, a visual artist and photographer, focused on how photography in newspapers helped to tell stories about current events. She took away all of the type on a newspaper page in The Herald Tribune, leaving only the photos in place and she was able to see that there were themes that repeated over and over again as she did this to more editions of the paper. "You take away this particular story and you can see something else is going on." Aleksandra Mir talks about a newspaper she created a year after 911, that was composed of all kinds of stories and drawings that people sent to her for her birthday, which was also on 911. For the Last Newspaper Exhibit, she focused on news items between 1986 and 2000, "I decided to frame a time period of 15 years, up until the end of the Millenium. It was 15 years that coincided with the time I lived in New York myself." Nat Lowman made a painting each week, that was a reaction to the stories from the previous week's news.
Each of the artists took a different approach to creatively interpret what they saw in the newspapers in new ways. Through their art, they were able to make statements about the news. In my project, I focused more on the most important stories in the news right now—Trump's impeachment, immigration issues, riots in Hong Kong, and protests about global warming. I used photos from a varety of newspapers combined with bold headlines that I pieceed together to make my own statement about these important topics. Like the artists who were interviewed, I was able to see beyond just the printed story in the paper. I interpreted the news in my own creative way by showing less type and by focusing on the graphics and minimal, but powerful text to tell the story and my feelings about it.
Color
I found the digital project titled "Color Goes Electric" by Claire Lehmann to be fascinating because i never realized how much color photography was frowned upon early in its use as an artistic vehicle. It had mainly been utlized for commercial purposes and many critics felt that color photography for anything but this use, was either garish, tacky or amateurish. Today color photography is everywhere. Electornic processes now allow us to mimic the bright colors that film stock, such as Kodachrome, were able to produce.
The photo that I chose to highlight, has a similar feeling to many of the bright colored photo desribed in "Color Goes Electric." is an image of holly berries, nestled in green shiny leaves. The scarlet-colored berries stand out against the glossy, forest green background. Scarlet red is one my favorite colors. According to Joshua Glenn, who wrote the Colors/Scarlet - Our drug of sex and death, on the cabinet.org website, scarlet is a vivid red color that is named for a Persian saqalat (a cloth that is dyed red). Scarlet is not subtle. It it intense, and throughout history has symbolized both sin and death. Glenn ties the color scarlet back to biblical times to illustrate this point. I also see this color to be an indication of danger and temptation. After doing some research, I realized that the scarlet berries I had photographed actually did have a symbolic connection to these two meanings. The bright color is quite tempting and one would think these beautiful, jewel-like berries would make a delicious treat, but, they are deadly poisonous. In this case the scarlet berries draw you in but at that same time, they warn you to stay away. Just like the opposite colors in the photo—the deep green and the scarlet red—the opposite ideas of temptation and danger make this image take on a new meaning.