Railway

My own - Railway, 2012

I love taking photos in the dark, the artificial lights give photos some unusual tones. There's also the element of mystery, of what you can't see. Other than the symmetrical railway, platforms and lights, you can just see a blue light on a train disappearing in to the distance, no people or movement.

Shilpa Gupta

Whilst at the Arnolfini gallerey we also saw a series of works by Shilpa Gupta. The first being 'Someone Else' a collection of steel cast books, the books have been selected due to the author, they're all authors who used a pseudonym, or wrote anonymously. The books contain their origonal titles, but then the reason for the authors anonymity. 

Shilpa Gupta - Singing Cloud

 This is the second piece of work on display, 'Singing Cloud'. It's an installation piece, made of 4000 microphones, but rather than the mics picking up the sound, they're emitting audio. The track made up of fragments of speech, designed to sound like singing. 

I

This next work was in the same room as 'Singing Cloud', he's a video I took of it, you can almost hear the soundtrack from 'Singing Cloud' in the video. It's been created using a flab-board. Lines of text were created every few seconds, this were then transformed by half the sentence changing, then the next half, or maybe just one individual word each time. 

Shilpa Gutpa - There Is No Border Here

Then there was this piece, a flag almost drawn on the wall of the gallery with yellow tape. Within the flag words were written with the tape, they read:

"I tried very hard to cut the sky in half, one for my lover and one

for me, but the sky kept moving and clouds from his territory

came into mine. I tried pushing it away, with both my hands,

harder and harder but the sky kept moving and clouds

from my territory went into his. I brought a sofa and placed

it in the middle, but the clouds kept floating over it. I

built a wall in the middle, but the sky started to flow

through it. I dug a trench, and then it rained and the sky

made clouds over the trench. I tried very hard to cut"

Shilpa Gupta - There Is No Border Here

The tape also had words on it, reading "THERE IS NO BORDER HERE". The flag is usually associated with counties, borders and nationality.

I really enjoyed seeing all these pieces together.

Photographs and video taken by me at the gallery, 2012.

Sophy Rickett - To The River

After we had been to Bath on Monday we then got back in the coach and drove to Bristol, to the Arnolfini gallery. Here we saw an exhibition by Sophy Rickett, called 'To The River'.

Sophy Rickett - To the River

This is a video installation piece with 12 channels of sound. It was filmed near the Riven Severn in 2010 during the spring equinox, crowds of people are gathered waiting for the Severn Bore to pass. The footage was projected onto three large screens, each screen showing clips of different men, woman, and even a dog, all waiting in the dark. As you stand in the dark you can hear the sound of the water throughout the room. There are then several audio tracks of people chatting whilst waiting, these were played one by one, rather than over the top of each other.As they wait you hear snippets of their conversations, some of these are about them waiting, other are completely unrelated. 

Sophy Rickett - Framed archive

When we went upstairs there was a room containing 55 archive framed works. This is Ricketts reserch that she's pulled together, including texts, diagrams and photographs. You can see how Rickett's looked into the Bore, and that she's used a lot of archival material to achieve this installation piece.

Sophy Rickett - Framed archives

Photographs: Top photo: scanned in off gallery leaflet, others: taken by me at the gallery, 2012

The Art of Arrangement

Leaflet from show - Art of Arrangement

On Monday we went to Bath to The Holburne Museum, to see 'Art of Arrangement- Photography and the Still Life Tradition'. Unfortunately we weren't able to use our DSLRs to take photographs, we were only allowed to use phone cameras. I don't have a camera on my phone, it's a phone, so I've scanned in the leaflet and the postcard I brought of Frederick G. Tutton's 'Dessert, 1923'.

Frederick G. Tutton - Dessert, 1923

When we got there we were shown a huge still life painting to consider before we started to look at the photography. It all started as black and white still life images, of things such as fruit, fish, skulls and flowers. It then went on to more modern and colour photographs. One that particularly stood out to me, is 'Dali Atomicus' a 1948 photograph by Philippe Halsman.

Philippe Halsman - Dali Atomicus, 1948

“On the count of three, his assistants threw three cats and a bucket of water into the air; and on the count of four, Dali jumped and Halsman snapped the picture” (Luhring, 2008)

This happened twenty eight times; after each photo had been taken Halsman would go into the dark room and develop the 5x4 negative to see if he had achieved the desired effect.  They counted each other in as a method of keeping things in time, each time. Dali jumps and the photo is taken just after the water and cats are thrown in. so that the water had time to make its way across the frame, and the cats would have had a chance to move slightly so they look a bit more natural and not like they had just been tossed in the air. In the instant the photo is taken I think you get a clear, honest shot of the subjects character.


Photo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Salvador_Dali_A_(Dali_Atomicus)_09633u.jpg

BRANDON LUHRING cited by ARCHIE TECHNE. (2008) “Dali Atomicus” by Philippe Halsman. Available: http://culturalshifts.com/archives/217. 

David Cotterrell - Monsters of the Id.

We went to David Cotterrell's exhibition at the John Hansard Gallery, on the Southampton Univerity site. We've been asked to wirte a 200 word review in the style of SOUCE Magazine. I read through some of there reviews before starting mine to get an idea of their review style, and the structure they've used.

David Cotterrell is an installation artist, who works with many different mediums, from photography, to audio, to interactive technology. The John Hansard Gallerey in Southampton held his exhibition ‘Monsters of the Id’. Cotterrell wanted to show art in a different way, a way that hasn’t been done often before, but through technology. ‘Monsters of the Id’ comes from the artists journeys to Afganistan.

The first piece of work is called ‘Observer Effect’, it’s a large curved wall with a projection shone on to it. As more people enter the exhibition space, more people appear in the projection. The area in which the people appear is representing Afghanistan. The next piece of work is called ‘Search Light 2’ In the middle of the room, a bumpy terrain like area is covered with little any like people, again this reacts to people viewing the exhibition, and as more people fill the space, move ants will appear, and move across the hilly terrain. The whole exhibition shows representations of war, but not what you expect when you think of war, but more so the way it makes people feel. 

Mars

I went back to Cornwall to see my older sister for her birthday, unlike Southampton you can see the stars in Cornwall, we have barely any light pollution. My dad had spotted both Mars and Venus in the sky over the past few days. So we went out at two am this morning with my tripod and things to see if I could get a photograph of it. My sister also has a telescope, the original plan was to set it up so my DSLR was looking through her telescope, to get a decent photo. Unfortunately she wasn't able to set it up properly, I think something was missing. 

My own - Mars, 2012

 I set my camera up on my tripod, with a standard lens, and used my remote so I didn't move the camera. It was tricky, as it was dark I needed to use a longer exposure, but then the planets and stars would leave a trail, I was surprised at how quickly you could see them move, considering. I managed to get a few photos, although it would have been better if I'd used the telescope. I'm just really happy with the fact I've got photos of Mars, even if they're not brilliant quality. 

Semiotics.

Today in our seminar we spoke about semiotics, the study of signs and symbols. Semiotics consist of the Signifier, what it is you can see/hear, and the Signified, the thing you think of or about, the mental meaning that goes with the signifier. It's not always a specific sign or shape that will create these mental links, colour coding also triggers thoughts, where you see red and blue, you automatically think of red being hot and blue to be cold, just because that's the way your brain has learnt those things.