Iris van der Zee

Trying to make sense of my sketchbook, camera roll, notes and bookmarks here.

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(2019) Statue menhirs are the tangible proof that people in the early days of civilization had an urge for their own representation. There is much uncertainty about what their precise function is. They could be war monuments or resemble fertility, but the chance that they're just an image of a beautiful woman is also very likely. A sculpture, preserved so well for such a long time is very precious within the history of our civilization. But is it righteous to count these stones to our intellectual and cultural heritage, while we might be looking at an image of the hottest girl in town? For most millennials "Kim Kardashian Crying” will make them think of the meme with the same title. This meme, no matter how basic, belongs to the collective memory of my generation. Giving an anthropomorphic papermache shape the same title, enables me to make a modern menhir out of the crying Kim Kardashian. By placing this object next to two context-stripped images of menhirs, I shift 4000 years of history to the background to initiate a comparison between the two. Why do we value the one as culture and the other as entertainment? And if we find modern entertainment so basic, is it right to see a sculpture without a clear representation as intellectual, just because it has been around for 4000 years? #kimkardashiancrying

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Virtual sculptures - ongoing series. Clay, medium format film, Photoshop. #kubaparissubmission

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A post shared by Iris van der Zee (@iris.vanderzee) on Sep 3, 2020 at 11:31pm PDT

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Four Attempts to Make an Artwork.  1. Motion Blur 2. Lost Negatives 3. Light Leak 4. Defective Scanner Lamp

Clay, photography, digital collage, Hahnemuhle Photo Rag print, handmade walnut frame with museum glass. 31 x 35,5 cm, 2020.

On show at Een Museum voor Jezelf at Optie B in Den Haag until the 27th of september.

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A selection of residual shapes in my ongoing project of virtual sculptures. In these images the ‘sculpture’ seems to consist out of the cut out part of the image. 

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Finally got to see The Absence of Mark Manders 🤍💟

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A post shared by Iris van der Zee (@iris.vanderzee) on Aug 14, 2020 at 2:25pm PDT

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Try-outs for a new series of deconstructable flat sculptures, consisting out of reproductions of a photo of just one single pack of clay, its clear background and magnets. Shown here are shitty inkjet prints on copy paper and cut-outs of a bus ticket starring as magnets 🐢

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A post shared by Iris van der Zee (@iris.vanderzee) on Jul 9, 2020 at 4:15am PDT

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A.R. Penck in Kunstmuseum Den Haag.

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Presentatietestjes in de studio.

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Een deel van een interview met Erin Shirreff in Border Crossings:

You have said that the photograph of Tony Smith’s New Piece from 1966 was more powerful than when you saw the actual sculpture at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Have you figured out why?

I think what’s really compelling for me is the not-knowing that is always inherent in a photograph—that you’ll never have a full sense of an object when it’s pictured. There are all those gaps and all that missing information. The photograph of New Piece you’re talking about was taken in the ’60s, and there’s this cool-looking couple standing next to it, chatting. I like thinking about how they experienced that form, because it’s something we can’t know ourselves. We’re not bodies in the ’60s; we have completely different relationships to physical objects now from what people had then. This feels like a confession—and from talking to friends I’m not alone in this—but if I’m making something three-dimensional in the studio, I sometimes take a picture and look at it on my phone. It gives me this other experience of the thing I’m working on that feels really useful. It’s not another vantage point, I’m not seeing more, but the image creates this other relationship by taking it out of your physical space. It dials down the intensity of what it asks of you as a body and allows you the space to regard it. Like I said, I find it useful, but it feels fucked up to do, and to admit to. Anyhow, I’m sure on one level the dynamic at play is simple and related to the psychological sense of capturing something, or stilling something, but it feels more complicated and consequential than that. When I’m documenting things it’s always surprising to see which work I make in the studio that falls apart as an image, just deflates. And then which things come alive when they’re flattened and set apart on the wall. That translation—image into object and object into image—feels very layered and charged to me and really has formed the basis of my practice and my work for the past several years.

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Erin Shirreff

B. 1975, KELOWNA, BRITISH COLUMBIA

Erin Shirreff was born in 1975 in Kelowna, British Columbia. She earned a BFA in visual arts from the University of Victoria, British Columbia, in 1998, and an MFA in sculpture from Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, in 2005. Shirreff’s work in photography, video, and sculpture reflects on the distance between an object and its representation, exploring the capacities of photography in conveying a sculptural experience.

Since scale and presence were central concerns of much mid-century abstract sculpture, Shirreff often draws on images of such works as she explores the disjunction between photographs and their subjects. Sculpture Park (Tony Smith) (2006), Shirreff’s first video work, features small cardboard maquettes the artist made of five Tony Smith sculptures. Filmed against a black background, their dark forms become discernible only as “snow” (Styrofoam) slowly accumulates on their surfaces. For subsequent video works, including Ansel Adams, RCA Building, circa 1940 (2009), Roden Crater (2009), and UN 2010 (2010), Shirreff photographed printed pictures of her subjects—often landscapes or iconic modernist buildings—under varying lighting conditions in the studio, inputting the resultant images into video editing software. These videos appear at first to be long, static shots of the subjects pictured, but eventually belie their own artifice as the viewer becomes gradually aware of the texture of the image surface. Shirreff’s interest in the photographic representation of large-scale abstract sculpture is further reflected in her A.P. series (2012–14). These photographs conjoin two half-images of miniature sculptures Shirreff crafted to echo the visual vocabulary of artists such as Alexander Calder, Anthony Caro, or Tony Smith. The prints are folded at the seam of two images, suggesting a double-page spread of a book.

Bron: https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/erin-shirreff

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Tony Smith (American, 1912–1980) was a Minimalist sculptor, architect, and painter known for his large-scale modular sculptural works.

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Antropomorph

‘Antropomorph’ plays with the idea of antropomorphism: the human need to project human qualities to non-human entities. I used the subject of antropomorphism within a research on the possible role of photographic techniques within creating a sculpture.

By documenting the process of molding a human head in clay, the viewer joins the process of turning a piece of clay slowly into a form that we categorize as a human face. Once the face is finished, the deconstruction and reconstruction begins. First the face is abstracted, then combined into a collage with the same head in an earlier stage of the process. Every reproduction starts with a previous reproduction, until the imagery gets too abstract to be recognized as the originally intended image of the human figure.

The project challenges the idea of photography as a tool of reproduction by playing an active role in the making of a sculpture. The intention is not to document the sculpture, since the sculpture itself is not interesting to me as a maker. I am more interested in how the specific qualities of the medium of photography can be applied to the medium of sculpture.

There are certain rules when it comes to portrait photography, like the common use of a portrait lense, high diafragma, cropping of the buste, scale, etc. And then the portrayed subject: often a human being with 2 eyes, 2 ears, a nose, a mouth, a skin, a head and a neck. By using the rules of portrait photography while erasing some facial characteristics of the portrayed subject, I researched the border between an abstract shape that we still perceive as a human figure (antropomorph) and a totally abstract shape.

Because of the investigating character of the project, I show a big part of the process: from modeling the clay to deconstructing to reconstructing until the work becomes a reproduction without a recognizable source. All these steps were either witnessed or caused by photographic techniques. Therefor, the camera acts as a sculptural tool in this project. The sculptures’ purpose seems only justified once it is photographed and digitally edited. In this case, the reproduction proves to be the sculpture.