Grand Masters - Rachel Reupke

Rachel Reupke focuses on the stock image - her films mocking the constant use of these commercial images that in no way represent reality. Her videos are ultimately staged and leave the viewer feeling empty and completely unconnected to the film. However, the images are so familiar that you find yourself realising that you are exposed to these empty meaningless images everyday whithout questioning them.

Containing Matters of no very peaceable colour

10 Seconds or Greater

These films have made me interested in using the media of film to reconstruct grand masters - and also made me think about encorporating stock image as well as poor image. I want to express the original artworks in a way that is as true to modern day society as possible. By combining these over used images and ways of recording I think this would create a bizarre effect combined with a unique, meaningful  original piece of art.

Grand Masters - Brass Art: The Imagining of Things

After a visit to Huddersfield Art Gallery, I found the Brass Art exhibition particularly fascinating. The exhibition consisted of a combination of victorian scenes and images converted into modern 3D kinetic technology. The juxtaposition of the old images with the technology was bizarre and slightly sinister; this was increased by the mysterious soundtrack put together by Alistair Macdonald, confused whispered narration and nostalgic noises.
This use of modern technology seemed to fit with my idea of using the poor image to illustrate historical images - the difference being Brass Art used the best technology whilst I am interested in using the worst.
However - I like the idea of exploring historical images through modern day technology, this is the kind of thing I am interested in doing for this project.

Grand Masters - Poor Image

After the visit to Huddersfield Art Gallery, I found that my main focus if I was to recreate the images was to change the quality of the images themselves or the media. 

Jack Butler Yeats - The Explorer Rebuffed. 1953

For example, with this painting I was particularly interested in his use of colour and the broad brushstrokes. The majority of modern day art uses digital processes and there is an obsession with making things looks as realistic as possible. To deconstruct this image I would like to convert it into a low res JPEG, pixelating the colours and flattening the image. 

This made me think about a previous lecture on "poor image", how society is brought up on compressed images that circulate the internet, videos recorded on mobile phones; simply low quality images.

In Defence of the Poor Image - Hito Steyerl

The Poor Image VS. The Stock Image 

After reading through these articles, I think I'm interested in this idea of a flat image that doesn't have any emotional meaning or relevance. I would like to convert these old pieces of work that express historical reality in the best way the artist could manage, into the careless style of the current poor image society.

Liminal Spaces - Video

After a meeting with Jill, she quickly saw a link between mine and an ex student Lia Hayes's work after looking at my nature photography. After taking a look at Hayes' work, our work seems to have a certain emptiness about it as we explores areas that would otherwise be overlooked and attempt to put a narration to them. In Hayes' work this is sometimes a spoken/written narration, or music she put over the top of a video. 

When I first started thinking about how I was going to capture nature's liminal spaces, I did think about doing a video with the sounds of the natural enviroment of the space but never did it. However, after looking at Hayes' work I decided to give it a go with my buildings liminal space exploration. 

Liminal Spaces - Barn video

With this video, I wanted to really pick apart the barns characteristics and find what it was that made it such an odd space. By isolating the sounds of the barn and playing them over the still images, it created a frozen in time effect; but when I played the song over the videos at the end, it seemed to bring the space to life and it was no longer a dead space. This is similar to what I was trying to achieve by putting images of life behind the tree/cave photos.

I really like the finished piece of this but I'm not sure how I would or will present it. I would quite like to project it onto a liminal space like previously mentioned Polly Stanton.

Liminal Spaces - Building Photography

I wanted to also look into liminal spaces in decrepit buildings so I went about it in a similar way to the spaces in nature.

I love this shot - I think it is to do with all the sharp, linear angles and then the wobbly red hand rail.

This shot is also interesting, the coat hanging on a pillar adds an almost eerie feel to the image and also prevents it from being too cluttered with all the items in the background. 

There are so many spaces to play with that I'm almost a little swamped with these images. I think I'll go about cutting them up with a craft knife as I did with the tree/cave images to highlight the spaces that really catch my eye. I also want to collage these but I also think it would be interesting to combine these very industrial man made liminal spaces with the liminal spaces I found in nature. 

I also want to start illustrating these with drawn characters although I'm not too sure how to do this just yet. 

Liminal Spaces - Sharon Kelly working through ideas

Sharon Kelly - Liminal Space of the Runner

I've posted this artist to show how she works through her ideas in quick sketches. This is how I liked working at the beginning of the project and think it would be beneficial to do it again just to get my ideas down on a page. You can see her figuring out what it is she finds interesting in the process of the runner and she flicks through different scenes, focusing on different aspects. 

Liminal Spaces - Pat Perry observational sketchbook

I couldn't quite believe it when I came across this artist. His images is almost the exact idea I had in mind for my own work , he perfectly combines figures with liminal spaces!

From his sketchbook you can see he gets all of his inspiration from observational drawing, this is something I really need to do more of. I did this at the beginning and could feel myself getting ideas and inspiration immediately yet I haven't continued to do this in the project.

Pat Perry Website

Pat Perry Tumblr