Third Year Thoughts

Sara Deeming - University of Waterloo - Fine 303 - Winter 2014

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Amie Dicke - Collecting Alibis, Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, 2013

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Portrait drawing demo by Lucas Graciano

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I really appreciate the soft quality of this photograph. It's on the line between candid and posed. It's simple yet manages to express meaning through the embrace of the subjects.

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odditiesoflife:

Victorian Postmortem Photography

Painting the dead was a common occurrence for centuries, so it’s no surprise that in the Victorian era, postmortem photography became standard practice. 

The beginnings of memento mori photography can be traced back to the invention of photography. During the 19th century, postmortem portraits were used to announce and mourn the death of a loved one, especially a baby or child. All social classes engaged in the practice, which became more widespread after the introduction of the daguerreotype photo in 1839. The subjects of the photos were generally arranged to appear as if asleep or even in standing positions. 

For the poor during this era, many peoples only photograph was taken after they died. Families would scrape together enough money to have a memorial photo of the deceased family member with surviving members. For many, these staged photos were the only family portraits ever taken. These photos were kept in the family’s memorial album.

sources 1, 2, 3

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"The self is the essence of human existence"

Tom Lublock

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Love the feeling of this photograph - the faces of the subjects aren't relevant, nor is the background - they're almost separate from it. The background (and context) isn't relevant here in drawing out emotion from and personifying the subjects. The placement of the figure in itself tells a story. 

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Studio Update

The past few weeks I have been working away in the studio at cranking out drawings. The direction they have taken is detailed tonal drawings using the crosshatching approach to rendering shadows of the clothing and body, and a more stylized approach to more organic details such as flowers and hair. 

I made the decision to render the subjects without faces and without backgrounds. The goal of the removal of the background was to come close to completely taking the figures out of context, as context tends to take the back burner to the person when sharing stories about a family member - the background and context, to me, seems unimportant, and distracts from the intended meaning of the piece. The complete removal of the faces seemed right, as the face is so reflective of one's identity. I've experimented with various ways of filling the faces with something that refers to my personal cultural identity, but nothing seems to fit without being to kitschy or literal. 

I am currently thinking of just leaving the faces blank. This may cause the problem with too much flat space between leaving both the faces and the background untouched. Once I have the series together, it may work. There is potentially a disconnect between the amount of detail in the figures and lack of it in the background. Finding a way to resolve these drawings is proving to be difficult!

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"The Uncanny"

The Uncanny by Sigmund Freud

The uncanny is described as something evoking the sense of estrangement within the home, the presence of something threatening, tempting or unknown that lies within the bounds of the intimate - something new that exists in something that is already known. A good example is the concept of a mannequin: the human figure is familiar, though it is completely lifeless - there is the moment of not knowing if it is a living being, or a plastic figure. 

My body of work employs this idea... taking the familiar (that of the old family photograph), and altering it by removing the context and the faces - so they are these surreal depictions of people. Apart from the clothing the subjects are wearing, it is difficult to place them within history (place and/or time) therefore distancing the intimate and the familiar.

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Artist Statement Draft

The piece (title) in its basic form developed from a curiosity with old family photographs. This interest lead to the questioning of personal identity based on culture, family history, heritage, religion and expectations. There is an air of mystery associated with identity based on the stories we hear of our families based on memory, as there is inherently a lack of concrete truth.

Memory is a complicated notion – memories are always formed based on perspective, situation, bias, and so forth. They are altered over time, by passing from person to person and by interpretation. Photographs can give us an insight, and help to link the disconnect of the deceased and our family history, but these too lack an ultimate truth. Our society is heavily reliant on images, but despite this fact, we are still skeptical of their origins and content. Time impacts the memory – over the course of years, decades, and so on, memory can be altered and pieces can be lost and forgotten. Forming a sense of a person and their life story can be attained through memories from others and through images, though can one ever fully grasp the essence of the person? How truthful is the human memory? How truthful are photographic images?

Oliver Saks’ writing discusses the idea that we as humans have a need for inner-narratives, or in other words, biographies about ourselves that we unconsciously construct that form our identities. An important influence on our inner-narrative are our spoken narratives, whether that be our own, or hearing those of others. One has the ability to form their perception of those around them based on photographs and spoken word; we can gain a sense of a person through their oral history and connect it to a face, but we cannot gain the experience of being in their presence, and having a physical, human connection.     

The complexity of human memory and the difficulty of forming a sense of cultural identity as a result are intended to transcend through this series of drawings. The series aims to both celebrate the intimate connection one has with their family photographs, as well as a personal search for clarity and identity in relation to family history. As result, the rejection of faces, background and clear context refer to the difficulty that is memory, and the passing of stories through generations. The facelessness of the subjects play on the saying ‘putting a name to the face’, where in this case the disconnect between the person’s story, personality and essence are lost over time.  The surreal imagery and soft line emphasizes ideas of remembrance of events and people of the past. 

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"You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all... Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing..."

Luis Buñuel

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Tutorial on a simple approach to quickly map out the basic structure and approximate proportions of an image containing multiple figures.

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"Identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves in, the narratives of the past"

Stuart Hall

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Annotated Bibliography

Basualdo, Carlos. pressPLAY: Contemporary Artists in Conversation. New York: Phaidon Press Limited, 2005. Print. 

Interview between artist Doris Salcedo and author Carlos Basualdo discussing her work, its origins and the development of her art practice. Salcedo’s work is very politically charged, relating back to missing persons in Colombia. Her work is heavily based on the notions of memory, discussing one of her pieces “Atrabiliarios”, a piece that attempts to transpose the family’s feelings in regards to a lost member, taking these emotions out of the anonymity of private experience. With this piece she made the personal, general.

Doy, Gen. Picturing the Self: Changing Views of the Subject in Visual Culture. New York: I.B. Tauris & Co, 2005. Print.

Offers the differing perspectives of the self, and how artists approach and portray the complex notion of self, or human subject. Discusses how it is hard to truly define what the self really is, as there are many contrasting views – in addition, the idea of self has been theorized in many ways and has morphed over time. Brief discussion about the work of Tracey Emin – her work serves as a ‘tell all’ of herself – creating a link between the individual self of the artist and the wider human experiences of self.

Guerin, Frances, and Roger Hallas . The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture. London: Wallflower Press, 2007. Print.

Discusses the truth of images – whether they represent a truth, or are untruthful – how they are constructed and how we can form opinions and meanings based on images. Our society relies on images, but despite this fact, we are still often skeptical and never fully trust them; the image is given authority despite our distrust in their content. History that is revealed through images has limitations – they play a role in the transformations that memory goes through over time; they don’t just depict the historical world.

Hoffman, Katherine. Concepts of Identity: Historical and Contemporary Images of Self and Family. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1996. Print. 

Part II, section five summarizes the time period of the forties and fifties, in which the work of Jean Paul Lemieux is discussed. His paintings deal with the issue of memory – specifically his piece “1910 Remembered”, which employs colour to emphasize ideas of remembrance. Lemieux works with notions of ‘psychological emptiness’ and an inner search for meaning.  

Huyssen, Andreas. Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. New York: Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, 1995. Print.

 The introductory essay (“Time and Culture Memory at Our Fin de Siècle”) speaks of memory and its complications. It discusses how memory has carriers, and how it changes and is lost over time as a result – the forms that memories can take are contingent and can often change, in addition, there is a fissure between experiencing an event and remembering it.  Huyssen identifies how all representation is based on some form of memory.

Sacks, Oliver. ID: An International survey on the notion of identity in contemporary art. Eindhoven: Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, 1996. Print.

Through story-telling, Sacks discusses the idea of a person’s need for a narrative, in which the man lacks an inner narrative so he is driven to create stories about himself, and his world around him (more specifically, pseudo-narratives). This man needs to create meaning in his life, through narrative, to carry on. It is discussed how we all as humans have a biography, or a singular narrative that we construct unconsciously, which forms and is our identity. 

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"Images are not just a particular kind of sign, but something like an actor on the historical stage, a presence or character endowed with legendary status, a history that parallels and participates in the stories we tell ourselves about our own evolution from creatures 'made in the image' of a creator, to creatures who make themselves an their world in their own image."

W. J. T. Mitchell

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"When a beloved person disappears, everything becomes impregnated with the person's presence. Every single object but also every space is a reminder of his or her absence, as if absence were stronger than presence"

Doris Salcedo

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John Baldessari - Two Whales (with People), 2010, screenprint on heavy wove paper, #36 of 50

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John Baldessari