Judy said my photographs are not static. They are off kilter, enigmatic, mysterious, and almost seem
to be evaporating. They are very
lurking, and cinematic. Judy said
when you look at William Christenberry’s photographs of houses they embody a
sense of the iconography of “houseness”.
Judy said my photographs are very different than Christenberry’s. The images feel more glimpsed than
composed. They are not self
consciously constructed, and have an intuitive sense of the psychological.
Judy asked if I’d considered creating a narrative with my
photographs. We talked of that
quite a bit, and how and why I liked certain images paired together. She said I should be conscious of what
kinds of things I want to be recognized for in order to control the
conversation when presenting my work.
And I need to know what language I want to embrace.
With that thread in mind she said
right now my sculptures and photographs are living in two different worlds, and
do not at present function as a group of work. She said the sculptures feel playful, while the photographs
create a visceral response. She
said I had to push their languages towards each other. She said when you look at Beverly
Buchannan or William Christenberry’s sculptures you don’t think of ‘birdhouse’
or ‘dollhouss’. Rather you think
of ‘house’, despite their small size.
She said my photographs of my sculptures were more successful. And she liked the way they tricked the
viewer as to their actual scale, making the viewer believe the sculptures are
much larger. Although she said I
should photograph my sculptures the way I photograph actual buildings, creating
a feeling that the sculptures are looming.
Judy said my recent Memory House was pushing closer to my photographs. She spent quite a bit of time looking
at it and discussing it. She said
she like the idea of fragmented images on the house sides, but they all
appeared too composed to get my meaning across. She suggested printing the image on a transparent surface
like glass or Plexiglas or acetate.
She said then I could actually shatter the glass and reassemble it, or
burn the acetate and melt it. She
also suggested making the house lean more, or perhaps be just a broken section
of house. She said I needed to find
a way to make it more artful than forced.
Judy said I needed to also consider other ways of working with a
structure. She asked how would it
be different working with clay, or differences in scale, and how should it be
displayed: should it be floating from the ceiling, or poking out of the wall? She also said I should also
consider other ways of representing ‘house’ than with an entire structure. She said I should consider just part of
a structure, or separations and dislocations or rupture as part of the
architecture. She said because my
photographs are so visceral I need to make my sculptures feel more
phenomenological. She said to
consider constructing a very physical moment in space that was just an
abstraction of torn elements of wood.
She said to think outside of the box with a broader sense of
possibilities.
Judy liked my experiment with torn and reassembled images. She said she enjoyed the concept of two
different broken things coming together to create a third whole thing. She also liked the size of them. She said it would be interesting to
create a series of them that ran along the wall in a narrative. I said I had an idea along that line
with the fire images. I will try
and bring that one next time I see her.
She did suggest that I take black watercolor and paint the bare white
tears in the paper. I have since
done that, and it is interesting how it changed the images.
Judy said that I needed to know that I have a very successful body of
work just in my photographs. And
what I am trying to do, create a combined body of work with photographs and
sculptures that speak in concert is a very difficult thing to do. But she said she thought I could do it,
and was glad that I am open to experimentation. We meet again in two weeks, so I better get to work!
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