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Contextual Studies, Research

Roni Horn – You Are The Weather

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“I photograph this woman, Margrét, in the water. This optic matrix was very important, as water is a true key phenomenon in Iceland. It was a quite easy relation. I did not say anything about what she had to do. She simply got into the water and I began to take photographs. In sunlight or under a stormy, cloudy sky – the water surrounded her, was on her and her hair was sometimes wet and sometimes tousled by the wind (…) You do not look at this woman in the traditional manner of nude photography. You look at this woman, who is also looking at you (…) Through her relation to the weather, the light or the wind, she takes on these different personalities.”

Horn’s photographic series ‘ You are the Weather’ show a young woman emerging from a geothermal pool in Iceland. Each photo taken milliseconds apart show minute and subtle differences in character almost indistinguishable from image to image.

The series beautifully demonstrate that due to small differences in circumstance and weather, we are not the same from moment to moment, mutated by environments and by others. 
 
 
 
 
Since the late 1970s, Roni Horn has produced drawings, photography, sculpture and installations, as well as works involving words and writing. Horn’s work, which has an emotional and psychological dimension, can be seen as an engagement with post-Minimalist forms as containers for affective perception. She talks about her work being ‘moody’ and ‘site-dependent’. Her attention to the specific qualities of certain materials spans all mediums, from the textured pigment drawings, to the use solid gold or cast glass, and rubber. Nature and humankind, the weather, literature and poetry are central to her art. 

‘Big enough to get lost on. Small enough to find yourself. That’s how to use the island. I come here to place myself in the world. Iceland is a verb and its action is to center.’-Roni Horn on Iceland

Image Analysis

‘These photographs were taken in July and August of 1994. For a six-week period I traveled with Margrét throughout Iceland. Using the naturally heated waters that are commonplace there, we went from pool to pool.’

Horn uses the natural lighting of Iceland to light up the model.

The image appears saturated as the red colour in the woman’s face stands out, however this may just be due to the cold weather of Iceland. The images also feels cold due to the blue background and the blue undertones in the skin.

The images are Close-Up as they are focusing on the differences in the woman’s expressions. A Shallow Depth Of Field is gained by using a larger aperture. Amongst the series, the composition changes to have the woman facing slightly to the right, or in this case, to the left. The use of negative space around her, presenting what is around her, helps to emphasize how her expressions change with the weather.

The series reflects aspects of Minimalism, which Roni is apart of. The series puts a big focus on the relationship between all images rather than as individual images. By offering many perspectives, Horn opens the possibility for infinite mutability and denies the viewer the satisfaction of “knowing” a subject through film.

Contextual Studies

Colour Meaning and Symbolism

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Colour has the power to portray feelings, being used in all forms of media, from literature to film. It has the ability to influence emotion and is a common technique in Marketing to reflect how a business wants their customers to feel about a product – 90% of snap judgments made about products can be based on color alone.

Colour meanings can reflect personal mentality’s, demonstrating one’s past experience or culture. For instance, while the colour white is often used in many Western countries to represent purity and innocence, it is seen as a symbol of mourning in many Eastern European countries. However, Colour also has international meaning.

RED: Danger, Passion, Excitement & Energy 

Red is a very strong and noticeable colour that is often used on signs for signaling caution or warning. It is a warm colour that evokes a strong sense of passion, lust, sex, energy, blood and war. On the negative side, it represents revenge and anger.

The colour red can increase enthusiasm and confidence as well as
raising blood pressure and heart rate.

YELLOW: Optimistic, Cheerful, Playful & Happy

Yellow is the brightest color that the human eye can see. It represents youth, fun, joy, sunshine and other happy feelings. It is a cheerful and energetic colour hence its use in children’s toys and clothes. Darker shades of yellow are used in life vests, police cordoning tape and hazardous areas as a cautionary colour, as well as representing jealousy, decay and disease.

The colour yellow  sharpens memory and concentration, making it easier to take decisions, yet can also be anxiety-provoking as it moves rapidly forward in life.

GREEN: Natural, Vitality, Prestige & Wealth

Green is the colour of nature and health. It represents growth, fertility and safety. Darker shades are associated with ambition, greed and jealousy.

The colour green provides both mental and physical relaxation
as well as a sense of renewal, freedom, self-control and harmony.

BLUE: Communicative, Trustworthy, Calming & Depressed

Blue is a colour that symbolizes loyalty, strength, wisdom and trust. Being the colour of the sky and the sea, it is a colour known to have a calming effect on the psyche hence its use in hospitals and airlines. However, being associated with the emotional feeling of being ‘blue’, it is also used to express sadness or depression.

PURPLE: Royalty, Majesty, Spiritual & Mysterious

Darker purple shades are traditionally associated with royalty, representing luxury and opulence whilst lighter shades are quite feminine, sentimental and even nostalgic.

The colour purple encourages creativity and imagination being used to represent the future and dreams. It inspires our psychic abilities and spiritual awareness as well as ensuring that we stay grounded and down to earth.

ORANGE: Fresh, Youthful, Creative & Adventurous

Orange is an optimistic and uplifting colour that promotes risk-taking, physical confidence, competition and independence. It is often associated as a colour of youth.

However, darker shades of orange can mean deceit and lack of confidence.

PINK: Feminine, Sentimental, Romantic & Exciting

Soft pinks are stereotypically associated with feminine qualities as  they represent sweetness, playfulness and cuteness. However, other shades can be considered sentimental and romantic, being used as the universal colour of love of oneself and of others. At the other end of the scale, hot pink indicates youthfulness, energy, fun and excitement.

BROWN: Organic, Wholesome, Simple & Honest

Brown is associated with healthy, natural and organic things, and everything related to the outdoors. The colour calls for high priority, a strong need for security, belonging to a family and having lots of good friends. Of colour meanings, brown stands for material security and acquirement of material possessions.

From a negative perspective, the colour brown may also give the impression of stinginess or dirtiness.

WHITE: Purity, Simplicity, Innocence & Minimalism

White is a simplistic colour, often used by charity and non-profit organizations, as it symbolizes positivity and innocence. Hollywood often depicts their actors in white as being good, using such imagery as white horses or cowboys with white hats.

In colour psychology, white is the colour of new beginnings – wiping the slate clean.

The white colour is also used in many medical practices such as dental clinics, doctor’s waiting rooms and operating rooms, as an indication of cleanliness and efficiency.

Although there are very few negative aspects of the colour white, ‘too much’ white can seem cold, isolated and empty. White can give a sense of sterility, distance and lack of interest.

BLACK: Sophisticated, Formal, Luxurious & Sorrowful

Black is most commonly viewed as a colour that portrays something evil, depressing, scary and deadly. The black colour meaning is often negatively charged, as in “blackmail”, “blacklist” and “black hole” etc.

Black is the absorption of all colours and the absence of all light. This makes it popular in hiding ourselves from the world around us. Some use it to hide their weight, while others use it to hide emotions, fear and insecurity.

Black is also a very powerful colour that symbolizes class, elegance and wealth. Stylish clothing is often designed in black, everything from suits, to sexy black dresses, to formal black tie outfits. From formality to mourning to power, black is bold, classic and not to be fooled with.

Websites used:

https://www.color-meanings.com/

https://www.canva.com/learn/color-meanings-symbolism/

Developing, Experimenting

Half Term Tasks – done but not posted

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Everyday

To help form ideas, I filmed myself everyday for 5 days carrying out the daily repetitive task of brushing my teeth.

I was inspired by the minimalist style of artists such as Marina Abramovic.

Since the beginning of her career in Belgrade during the early 1970s, Marina Abramović has pioneered performance as a visual art form. She created some of the most important early works in this practice, including Rhythm 0 (1974), in which she offered herself as an object of experimentation for the audience, as well as Rhythm 5 (1974), where she lay in the centre of a burning five-point star to the point of losing consciousness. These performances married concept with physicality, endurance with empathy, complicity with loss of control, passivity with danger. They pushed the boundaries of self-discovery, both of herself and her audience. They also marked her first engagements with time, stillness, energy, pain, and the resulting heightened consciousness generated by long durational performance. The body has always been both her subject and medium. Exploring her physical and mental limits in works that ritualise the simple actions of everyday life, she has withstood pain, exhaustion and danger in her quest for emotional and spiritual transformation. From 1975-88, Abramović and the German artist Ulay performed together, dealing with relations of duality. She returned to solo performances in 1989 and for The Artist Is Present (2010) she sat motionless for at least eight hours per day over three months, engaged in silent eye-contact with hundreds of strangers one by one.

In my response, I used red lighting as I wanna explore colour further in my project. All videos are cropped to just the face and played alongside each other to make the variation more distinct.

Repetition

Based on the idea of emotion, I took photos of multiple people wearing a balaclava. The balaclava served as an emotional barrier between the person and the viewer, blocking off most of the face. I consider the mouth and eyes to be the strongest features in presenting how someone feels. People often call the eyes the “windows to the soul”.

For this response, I took inspiration from early 1920s typologies by artists such as August Sander. The movement titled the ‘New Objectivity’ served as a reaction to expressionism.

Planning

Specification:

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Over my project, I want to portray the eight basic emotions shown by Robert Plutchik in his psychoevolutionary theory, the ‘wheel of emotions’.

I will aim to use colour representations and symbolic metaphors that I believe represent the essence of each emotion, in a range of images from portraits to still life inspired images.

In order to portray a chosen emotion, many of my images will need to be staged.

Some of the basic emotions have relations to the 7 deadly sins, which I will research to develop inspirations. The 7 deadly sins are:

  • Lust
  • Gluttony
  • Greed
  • Sloth
  • Wrath
  • Envy
  • Pride

Two photographers that I will look at in the course of my project are Niall Mcdiarmid (Above) and Martin Parr (Below) as they both show a strong use of colour in their images to help portray a narrative.

Experimenting

Experimentation with Repetition

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My first experiment consisted of creating a GIF that presented the eye region of 8 of my peers. This shows the variation in eye colour specifically.

GIF, Graphics Interchange Format, is an image file format that is animated by combining several other images or frames into a single file.

I set each image to 0.1 seconds as I wanted them to merge quickly.

I chose to showcase the eye region in my GIF as the saying goes, “eyes are the windows to the soul”.

Experimenting

John Baldessari Experimentation

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In the early 1970s, John Baldessari made a promise “I will not make any more boring art”. The lithograph image demonstrates his thinking at the time as his interest in Conceptual art developed. The work was created at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in conjunction with an unconventional exhibition. Baldessari was not present at the “exhibition,” nor at the workshop where the print was made. He simply sent a handwritten page to the students to be reproduced and made a videotape of himself writing the sentence. Prior to the creation of this work, Baldessari, together with friends and students from University of California at San Diego, gathered paintings he had made as a young artist and drove them to a crematorium where they were burnt.

His participation in the conceptual movement lead him to create ‘Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts)’ in 1973. The images represent Baldessari’s interest in language and games as structures following both mandatory and arbitrary rules. He attempts to fulfill a simple yet arbitrary goal, following rules in a similar manner to a game as structured by the title of his book. There are thirty-six documented attempts in the book–the typical number of exposures on a roll of 35mm film. The resultant images are documentation of Baldessari’s game, but they also border on abstract imagery and bear a resemblance to his later works.

In other works, Baldessari takes archival images, using colourful price stickers to obstruct the viewer from seeing the faces of the people in the image. The viewer is encouraged to analyse other aspects of the image, that would otherwise not catch their attention, such as the clothing of the figures, wealth, era, etc.

“I just got so tired of looking at these faces” – John Baldessari

Responses:

In response to ‘Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts)’, we took 1 larger ball and 3 tennis balls and took turns throwing them in the air to get a straight line. This was harder than it seemed. The balls were coloured bright yellow or green in order to stand out against the white/grey sky. I found that it was difficult to maintain that the moving items were in focus.

Another experiment we carried out involved dodging the camera. In many of the outcomes, the face of the subject is not clearly seen, reflecting the same ideas of Baldessari.

All images from both experiments were taken with varying shutter speeds of 1/100s to 1/200s to capture the movement of the subjects in different motions.

In a third experiment, we experimented with the use of archival imagery. We used a coin toss to determine where the circles should be cut out on the image.

In Photoshop, I edited circles of colour over the already cut out circles. I also painted lines of colour over certain areas where there was negative space.

In one image, I used the colours of the Jersey Flag, Red, White and Yellow, as the image depicts Jersey soldiers.

Developing

Artist References – Group Work – Making connections between Photography and Fine Art

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Stuart Pearson Wright

Wright plans a move away from portraiture, yet his projected subjects remain bound up with the enigma of his own identity and origins.

“People say I make my subjects look sad or old. I suppose I do instinctively either bring out of them, or project on to them, something rather melancholy.”

Wright explores identity of other people out of his own isolation. His obsession with portraiture formed out of never meeting his father, he was born as the result of artificial insemination.

Seydou Kaita

https://www.all-about-photo.com/photographers/photographer/125/seydou-keita

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/seydou-keita

‘Serving elite and middle-class patrons, his images often highlight the idealized or imagined socio-economic status of his sitters through the inclusion of props: cosmopolitan clothing and accessories, radios, telephones, bicycles, and sometimes his own car. To formalize the outdoor setting, Keïta regularly employed richly patterned backdrops that add movement and visual energy to his images and used a low vantage point and angular composition to highlight his clients’ confident facial expressions and relaxed postures. ‘

Rachel Whiteread

Rachel Whiteread, ‘100 Spaces’, Tate Britain, August 2017

https://www.theartstory.org/artist-whiteread-rachel.htm

https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/rachel-whiteread

‘One of Britain’s leading contemporary artists, Whiteread uses industrial materials such as plaster, concrete, resin, rubber and metal to cast everyday objects and architectural space. Her evocative sculptures range from the intimate to the monumental. ‘

Mike Disfarmer

(1884–1959) Portrait photographer from Arkansas in America, he captures harsh realism is rural parts of the country for 40 year. He lived a reclusive lifestyle only making human contact when taking hid photos. After leaving his family farm and changing his name to Disfarm as a form of rebellion he taught him self how to take and develop photos even building his own studio. He would charge 25-50 cent for a penny portrait which people from the community would buy as tokens to give to family and friends. He photographs, individuals sometimes groups generally with a natural expression not posing or overly smiling. The overall collection creates a sense of identity for the time, rural location and people who occupied it.

Developing

Variation & Similarity – Starting Points

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Definitions:

VARIATION
1. a change or slight difference in condition, amount, or level, typically within certain limits.
“regional variations in house prices” Synonyms: difference, dissimilarity, disparity, inequality, contrast, discrepancy, imbalance, dissimilitude, differential, distinction
2. a different or distinct form or version of something.
“hurling is an Irish variation of hockey” Synonyms: variant, form, alternative, alternative form, other form, different form, derived form, development, adaptation, alteration, modification, revision, revised version
“he was wearing a variation of court dress”

SIMILARITY
1. the state of being almost the same, or a particular way in which something is almost the same:
“the similarity of symptoms makes them hard to diagnose”
2. a similar feature or aspect.
“the similarities between people of different nationalities” Synonyms: resemblance, likeness, sameness, similar nature, similitude, comparability, correspondence, comparison, analogy, parallel, parallelism, equivalence; interchangeability, closeness, nearness, affinity, homogeneity, agreement, indistinguishability, uniformity; community, kinship, relatedness; archaicsemblance
“the similarity between him and his daughter was startling”

After reading the booklet, I instantly decided that I wanted to go down 1 of 3 pathways.

“Though we differ in the way we look and things we believe in, there’s something we all share: emotion. Human emotion is innate in all of us; it’s something we’re born with and something we die with. Happiness, sadness, love, hatred, worries, and indifference – these are things that constantly occur in our daily lives.”