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✹ ✹ ✹ Aleksandra Czudżak

Text for exhibition at Harrow Degree Show

Seda de Plata (Silver Ink)

Photogravure on silk

“Like repeating a word over and over until it sense drains away” ( Arden Reed)

A distortion of the photographic surface that invites the viewer to actively consider the act of looking. With the intentional confusion of perspectival representation as its subject matter, its ethereal textile surface and unusual pigmentation Silver Silk is a picture that looks nothing like it.

Inés Flórez

BA Photographic Arts

SYNOPSIS (2nd Semester)

Seda de Plata (Silver Silk)

Despite (or perhaps consequently) the current ubiquitousness of photography, our visual culture has developed an urgency for instant gratification. As a result, our contemporary experience of the medium has been numbed, limited and fallen into habit.

The project Seda de Plata (Silver Silk) tries to counteract the utopia of this systematic order in favor of “a thinking based on fragments, openness, and contradiction” (Jean-Françoise Chevrier).

Through a distortion of the concept of photography the project invites the viewer to actively consider the act of looking. With the intentional confusion of perspectival representation as its subject matter, its ethereal textile surface, and unusual pigmentation, Silver Silk is a picture that looks nothing like it.

“Like repeating a word over and over until it sense drains away” ( Arden Reed)

Reed’s quote suggests a semantic satiation similar to the one evoked by this project through the redundant effect of its subject, a picture of silk printed onto silk.

Another important aspect of it is its tacit and layered expression, which was inspired by Thomas Demand’s idea that the image should only show “what’s necessary for a thought and not the thought itself”. A concept takes us back again to the idea that by allowing the viewers to consider their personal reading of the work we can begin to question and open up the endless possibilities within photography.

The photogravure technique, a 19th Century process, was chosen as the printing process due to its haptic quality, but most importantly because, unlike most of the conventional printing processes these days, it bears a special kind of human agency to it.

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RESEARCH REPORT

(PLEASE DOWNLOAD WORD DOCUMENT, PREVIEW MODE FAILS TO DISPLAY THE FILE CORRECTLY)

Contemporary Art Photography

VISUAL RESEARCH

Sculptural photography

Angelika Loderer

The Silk Project

Silk.

Like repeating a word over and over until it sense drains away.

*Note. Subject matter: a picture of crumpled silk, printed using the photogravure process, onto the same, now flattened, piece of silk.

By dividing the title of my project into two seemingly disconnected sentences I am hoping to slow down the experience of looking at the picture as the person tries to find her own interpretation of what the connection may be. The first part, “Silk." is purely descriptive; it refers to the haptic visual experience of looking at silk. The second one suggests a “semantic satiation”, which works as a metaphor of to the confusion between perception and observation that the viewer may experience by looking at this anamorphic representation of silk.

The aim is to upset the unconscious coherence we tend to project into pictures. I am not interested in creating work for the visual culture of instant gratification, instead, this project invites the viewer to actively consider the act of looking (propelled by the confusion of perspectival representation) and take a calm look at the picture.

Technical Notes

For the pilot project, due to the high cost of photogravure and a lack of time before the deadline, I decided to print the image that I took of silk digitally onto silk just to try whether the effect would be the one of confusion between flatness and volume that I'm hoping to achieve and it did. I printed one image in colour and the other in black and white since I will also be trying out both with photogravure. Although the photogravure process has a totally different materiality I think that the pictorial quality of this process can only enhance this confusion even more so I'm quite confident it will all work out in the end.

Noémie Goudal. Visual Research

French artists Noémie Goudal has been a huge inspirationfor this projecgt. Her poetic and constructed visual typology play with the confusion between perspective and perception. She inspired me to reflect on the act of looking and to create work which deceives our perspectival vision. Another reason why I think her work is so special is due to the imperfections that she purposely leaves traces off as some kind of trail of human agency. Her images are not just a moment in time but instead a space between fiction and reality that the viewer can inhabit.

Budget list

PHOTOGRAVURE

Reasons why I choose to print my FMP with photogravure:

-Permanent image: the materials are not photosensitive which means the lifespan of a photogravure process is 10x more than the usual darkroom print

-Limited edition: each plate can only produce a few copies and each print varies slightly from one another

-Soft and subtle tonal range: the photogravure process has a pictorial quality that differs from any other photographic printing process. The ink gives the image a unique material quality.

Notes:

Instead of using a copper plate I’ll be using a photopolymer plate as it is less chemically hazardous and it's cheaper too.

I’m planning to print not only b&w but also try to create a two or three colour image which is not an usual thing to do with photogravure due to the difficulty of the color separated plates, specially when its hand-pulled as it will also become even more difficult to align the impressions on top of each other correctly. However, I’d still like to try the “error” may give the image the odd look I'm looking for.

Info

Sources:

Online: https://www.getty.edu/conservation/publications_resources/pdf_publications/pdf/atlas_photogravure.pdf

Book: Spirits of Salts

The 125 Fund gives you the chance to develop that project you’ve dreamed of trying out, buy that piece of equipment that will help your future career prospects or take advantage of a professional development opportunity.

I’m applying to the 125 Fund Awards which a few words are a Westminster funded award which gives full-time students the possibility to apply for an amount between 150-1500 pounds that would help them develop their ongoing projects. The application process requires the student to submit a 500 words max. supporting statement where there’s a short introduction to the project’s idea and a specified list of the production costs.

In my case, I will apply to hopefully fund the expenses of ‘the silk project’, such as large format films, developing costs, A2 photopolymer plates, printmaking ink, and 3-5 metres of silk fabric.

Statement:

The subject of this photographic project is the representation of silk onto silk using the photogravure technique as the printing process. The idea behind it is that the means of representation become active agents in the confusion between perception and observation. The intention is to distort the perspectival coherence that we unconsciously project into pictures.

The fund would cover the cost of producing the final print for my final major project. The costs are:

-Large format film (5x4) Foma Retropan (b&w) £32 kodad Portra (colour) £40 -Silk, 4-5 metres: £30-50

-Development b&w/color: £1.75 per film x 20-Photopolymer plates: A4 Toyobo Solar plate £9 x 6 600x500mm Toyobo Solar plate £36 x 2 1065x790mm Toyobo Solar plate £95 x 2 -Ink, 1 black and 1 colour tub: £10-20

Total cost: about £650

The London Textile Fair is the UK’s premier platform for fashion fabrics, clothing accessories, print studios and vintage garments.

To be able to get the look I’ve pictured for ‘the silk project’, I need to try out different types of silks to print onto with the photogravure process. Pretty much like doing tests strips in the darkroom, only a slightly more convoluted process.  

While doing research on the silk retailers in the area of London I came across the London Textile Fair. This fair is the biggest textile fair in London and students can attend for free. I’m hoping that when I attend I’ll be able to find out more about silk and select a few samples.

#time plan

Product photography- visual research

These are a few examples of silk product photography from the online catalogue https://eastandsilk.com/

I would like to recreate a similar aesthetic on my picture.

#visual research

SILK- visual research

Silk Rope, Elad Lassry.

This picture inspired the idea of photographing silk. I came across it while looking at the catalogue of an exhibition on contemporary photography called “The Anxiety of Photography”(2011).

#visual research

VISUAL RESEARCH: DISRUPTING THE PERSPECTIVAL SYSTEM OF REPRESENTATION.

I'm interested in the effects of confusing and deforming space as we usually understand it, perspectival space. In the pictures above, their reinterpretation of space draws a redundant flatness that frees them from the threadbare criteria of reality. In the former example, the photography of Dekkers is usually presented as a succession of pictures which present an event with a dynamic tempo where space, or rather the lack of it, is constructed step by step. This idea of space is that of...“ the psychological space of slow art [which] differs from ordinary physical space. It’s the space we inhabit or create when we bring ourselves before a work and hold ourselves open to it. This space is subtle; it unfolds the more we present ourselves to a work whose contours we slowly learn to navigate- a process without closure.”(Arden Reed, 2017)

“New Republic art critic Jed Perl “artists have to find a way to pull the audience in, for only when people come to understand that within a painting or a sculpture they can find a time that is outside of time will they want to keep looking” (Ibid)

Subject Matter nº2

Another aspect of the tableaux picture that calls my attention is the idea of confusion as a way to slow down the process of looking. This confusion can come in the form suspension, the in-betweeness, the gestural, the off-frame. This confusion is a typology of seduction that transforms the viewer into the spectator. In this situation, as a result of the fixed quality of the image and its explicit or subtle seduction, the viewer may feel excited and overwhelmed by it.

IDEA

I want to photograph a piece of silk rumpled, in a way that there is no context to the image whatsoever, a simple close up the piece of fabric, and reiterate its materiality while confusing our perception by printing it with the photogravure technique onto that same piece of silk that will lay flat when presented on the wall on the contrary to the one pictured. The oxymoron at stake in this picture would be that of flatness and depth. I’ve chosen silk as the subject matter due to its stereotypical relationship to ideas of seduction, fetish, desire and pleasure. The aim of printing a picture of silk onto silk with photogravure is to disrupt the act of looking, in an era characterized by the need for instant visual pleasure, while confusing perception as a way to slow down the spectator.

“Mindfulness occurs in the moment when time stops”(Csezlaw Milosz, 1999)

The Photographic Tableau 2- Visual Research

The study of the rhetoric applied by the tableau form has been pivotal to the conceptualization of this project and has enriched and given shape to my artistic interests on visual forms of representation.

For the interest of this post I’ve come up with a simple definition of the tableau as being: any picture in which, whether abstract or figurative, there is a representation of some kind where an action unfolds yet is not resolved and it usually has a theatrical/performative character of enactment. In the portrayal, we may find ourselves confused by the uncertainty of an oppositional co-existence of affairs such as; stasis and motion, illusion and reality, likeness and difference, flatness and depth, past and present, time and space, representation and presence, theatricality and absorption, vulgarity and regiments, art and life. Formally or conceptually, these manifest through their paradoxical relationship that conforms dense layers of visual information.

“Watching a tableau means knowing and not knowing, self-consciously sustaining the illusion in a willing suspension of disbelief, which leas to a further step in this process, a third kind of reality” (Arden Reed,2017)

Visual research: the oxymoron between motion and stasis:

2 de Mayo. Goya

The Death of Sardanapalus. Delacroix

Burnt Canvas. Miró

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