Studio Activity- Impossible Task
“Remember everything”
Memory Game (2019)
Stills
sheepfilms
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
$LAYYYTER
Stranger Things

JVL

No title available

tannertan36
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her

#extradirty
d e v o n
Monterey Bay Aquarium
Mike Driver
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Janaina Medeiros
cherry valley forever

roma★

Origami Around

titsay
h
will byers stan first human second
seen from Mexico

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seen from United States
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seen from United States

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seen from Malaysia

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@thaidoesart
Studio Activity- Impossible Task
“Remember everything”
Memory Game (2019)
Stills
Case Study: Martín Ramírez
I’d never heard of the term ‘Outsider Art’ until I began researching Martin Ramirez. It’s loosely defined as “art produced by untrained artists, for example children or mentally ill people”. It never occurred to me that untrained artists would be in a different category from trained artists; isn’t all art, art?
Ramirez was diagnosed as manic-depressive and schizophrenic in his adulthood and spent the majority of his adult life in various mental institutions. His collages were usually made from what he had on hand, and sometimes held together with mashed potato or his own spit. (Source)
His work appeals to me because it’s somewhat surreal and I’m intrigued by the idea of creating new worlds or environments. This is what I want to work on in my own assessment projects.
Both untitled, from 1954. (Source)
Brainstorming the ideas linked to collage, hoping I can incorporate some of these ideas into my work.
Assessment 1: A Success
After my last failure (see post below) I wanted to try something completely different. My goal was to make ‘worlds’ or environments by collaging different materials.
The first ‘world’ was made from rubbish that my dog had pulled out of the bin and strewn across my bedroom floor. Most of it is from food packaging. My constraint here was my materials and the theme of made environments. I think the result is somewhat surreal.
The second piece was made at work. I work in the retail stores at a zoo so there were plenty of animal-themed reference pictures for me to use. The individual drawings are done on pieces of receipt roll using a ballpoint pen as that’s what I had access to behind the counter. I then quickly stuck them down with a gluestick and scribbled in some background elements. My constraints here were the theme of ‘worlds’, using the materials I had at work (with the exception of the background piece of paper), completing the work on my 5 hour shift, serving customers in between drawings and not getting caught drawing on shift by my boss! Overall, I think this piece looks a bit unfinished but that’s to be expected given my constraints.
The third environment was created using a random word generator online. I set it to generate 10 random nouns and tried to incorporate them into my ‘world’ (the 10 words are in a screenshot below). One I’d finished drawing, I asked my youngest brother to pick a colour (pink!) and used this as my background colour by ripping up some pink scrap paper I had around my house. Here my constraints were that I had to incorporate every word that was generated into an environment, I had to make a pink background and I had to create the background after the drawing. This one is quite similar to the first in how surreal and almost dream-like it is.
Overall I really enjoyed this project and would like to continue it further to make a series of ‘worlds’ someday.
Assessment 1: A Failure
I started out by trying to take photos during Vivid. I decided to use 35mm film because to me that is very constraining. By using purely manual methods (with the exception of getting my frames scanned on a USB so I could print them) I wasn’t allowing myself any cropping, editing or even viewing before they were developed. I also wanted to focus on the lights at Vivid as another constraint (only taking photographs with temporary installments for Vivid as a main component).
The failure came for 2 reasons: Firstly because I only had 400 iso film and no flash for my camera. This meant I knew the images were all going to be quite dark and so I had to open up the aperture all the way and have quite a slow shutter speed just to obtain an image. The second reason is to do with the development- I didn’t bother reading the Google reviews of the place I took my film to for development. This proved to be a mistake as they have a LOT of 1 star or 2 star reviews saying that they often develop the film incorrectly and I think that may have happened with my film. At any rate, the scans they did for me are far too small and compressed to be used for any major project.
Here are my top 6 images out of 2 rolls of film.