Sunday Artist, A Selbe,11.01.09 stacy searcy

My work is starting to push towards analyzing time and how it goes by so fast. So searching for new artists and inspiration my goal was to find artists that worked with the concept of "Time."

I was looking at the 1708 Gallery websites and I saw a past exhibition that was held there. It was called RAIN OR SHINE. It featured four artists that created work every single day.

"The artists in the exhibition insist on the daily act of art making. These four artists are adamant about the cyclic habit and its necessity to the context of their work. Moreover, each artist intends their work to be viewed in series or multiples because the form of production demands context. Like journaling, it is a self imposed regiment with no compromise. It is definitive and resolute about the necessity of routine. The limits of the day demand inventiveness. These perpetual devotions universalize the creative habit. These four workaholics are addicted."

This is the description of the exhibition for the 1708 Gallery website.

Stacy Searcy was one of the artists from the exhibition, she uses her "camera to capture the ever changing sky." The idea of taking pictures of the same thing, that appears different everyday seems so interesting to me. In my work, I am currently trying to find ways to represent the everyday. These photographs of the clouds each represent a different day.

I became very frustrated by searching for Stacy Searcy because she doesn't seem to exist on the internet. I relied on other's blogs to figure out more about her work, but unfortunately i got more of people critical critiques than descriptions of the work. But I have a few facts about her. She is from Cincinnati and she has a BFA from College of Mount St. Joesph and an MFA from University of Cincinnati.

In one blog, I found a description of her work, her "photographs search for acknowledgement, a geographical place and a precise time. I really wish i could find more about this artist because I am interested in hearing her reasoning for photographing the sky everyday. She documents the changes in something that is permanent, it is interesting how it changes. It really represents for me the way that life changes everyday. I feel this work relates a lot to the work i am creating now, and i am going to keep searching for this artist. Hopefully she is still creating!

Random thought post. A Selbe

I just wanted to post my plans for my next shoot, since my last post was a little brief. I want to accomplish with this shoot an image that represents time and days passing without the blockiness (made up word) that my critique pieces had.

I am going to shoot on a rectangular table instead of a round one so i can more easily create a never ending horizon line. The lighting will be very important for this because if it uneven it will make it very hard to stitch the images together. I might need to purchases two equal lights... $$.

I am planning on using eggs again and pingpong balls in another shoot. I want to see if the breaking of the egg is an important part to this working.

This shoot will happen on sunday! HURRAY!

Thursday Thoughts A Selbe 10.29.09

At this point of the semester we have just gotten through the mid point. The work that i created and showed for the mid term crit went over well, but in comparison to the idea that i am trying to share, the imagery, i feel, is not providing what i want it to.

So I have some idea for my next steps for this project. I am going to go along that same lines of have the contact sheets from these shoots, but I am going to try to blend it all together into one seamless image. I want to eliminate the problem of the optical illusion that was in the work that i presented as well as the problem of not being able to comprehend the imagery as a whole as at once because there was so much detail.

This will be my first step to work on changing this project for the end of the semester. I don't want to plan ahead too much and have too many different ideas or having a image in my head for the final. I dont want to limit my self.

Thursday Thought A Selbe 10.22.09 Post crit thoughts

2008, 2009, 2010, Each 9x 61 inches, Ashley Selbe, Fall 2009

Where do I go from here ? I had my mid term critique on tuesday and i got a lot of feed back about my work. So right now i am trying to figure out what it all means to my work. These three pieces that i created above feel very much done to me. I do not plan on reshooting this or working with these anymore because i feel i can show this same concept better in different visual ways.

So in my crit people seem to feel that it was overwhelming, busy and like seeing life in fast forward. I never thought that about my work until it was up on the wall. It is impossible to see all the tiny images and it challenges you to look at all of them. This is not what i wanted people to see. I want this work to communicate the idea of days passing by and the challenges that we face everyday become minimal to life as a whole.

I am going to try a different way of manifesting this work. I am going to shoot in the same style of trying to capture an image, but i am going to try this first with a pingpong ball. It is very different because the ball will bounce. so this might be very different from using eggs or water drops. But visually i want to create a long never ending image and photoshop all of these dropping balls as one long panoramic scene. I feel this might communicate the idea of time passes and gliding by in a different way but it will retain the visual rhythm that the pieces above have.

So that is my next step, along with artist research and writing about what i am thinking.

ARTIST LECTURE A Selbe, 10.15.09 Brain Ulrich

"Value City", Photography, Brian Ulrich, 2008

(woman with product) From Series "retail", Photography, Brain Ulrich, 2002

Brian Ulrich is a photographer who was at VCU yesterday giving a lecture about his work. His work revolves around an idea of "consumer- dominated culture." I don't think I truely understand because I don't want to admit that I am one of those "therapy" shoppers. Ulrich talked about how people use shopping as compensation for something or to make themselves feel better. People get so used to this culture of constantly buying things and seeing stores and advertisements telling us to buy things. It seems to become a routine for people to shop whether they need anything or not.

The photography of the woman buying flowers illustrates the idea of going through the "routine" perfectly. It is as if she isn't looking at or thinking about the flowers, but she is buying them because of habit.

He carries out this them of a shopping culture through a few different series of thrift stores, retail spaces and abandoned stores.

Thursday Thoughts, A Selbe 10.15.09 Artist statemen rough draft

Another week has flown by in a wink, and midterm crits are right around the bend! I present on this tuesday, so i am stretching myself a little thin trying to get everything ready for the printers.. and finding a good price for my long prints.

In the past week, I boiled down and defined the reasoning behind the pieces that will be presented on Tuesday. I did a lot of thinking, and questioning of myself and my work trying to figure out all the questions i might be asked and how to answer them clearly.

I hope that my pieces will be visually intriguing, i know that they are to me i just hope that others find some meaning behind them. I wrote a rambling rough draft of an artist statement:

Artist Statement

Rough Draft

Time is a strange thing. We cannot rewind or freeze as much as we may want to. We do not get redo’s in life, there is no pause or erase. Every decision we make is concrete in that second. Children always seem to wish for something different. To be finished with school, to be in college, to get out of their parents house; and their elders are always telling them to slow down and enjoy it because it only gets harder from here. Well I am still that child, wishing to speed up time and be somewhere else.

While creating this project I happened on an idea that reconstructed visually and ideally the concept I am working on. I started out with making comparisons between the “chaos” and “calm” in people’s everyday lives. I had my heart set of taking a picture of an egg just as it is breaking when it hits the hard floor. I wanted to show the chaos of the viewer not being able to stop the breakage and compare it to a similar image that represented calm. As I was working and stressing over getting the perfect image of this egg, I didn’t realize what I had stumbled upon until my teacher Jeff pointed out the visual significance of the contact sheets I had made. This is where the whole project is flipped around.

The contact sheets of the eggs created this greater picture. It is almost the evidence of failure, the visual strive for perfection falling short; each individual image is a failure, not capturing the exact moment I wanted to find in this shoot. Even if I had found that perfect image, no matter how perfect if might be, would it be as compelling and interesting as seeing all 1,000 failures at once. It is a metaphor for the journey in life. You have to fail a million time to get where you want to be and have the things you want to have; so in the long run what is more important, the individual goal or the journey that gets you there. Ultimately it is up to the individual what is more important. Some people might be ok for suffering for 20 years to get to one point. For me, everyday is a blessing and it is important to have goals, but it is more important to me for everyday to important.

This is what is project is, it may have started out trying to achieve something that is almost impossible, the end result…… is the journey. Does it matter that the goal was not accomplished? Maybe, maybe not. But the beauty in it is the journey it created. So it’s not the egg anymore it is the everyday... Some days fly by like nothing happened. Some crash and burn, and others are a perfect moment.

I know this statement is nothing near to perfect but this is how i write to figure things out. I am going to boil this down to a few sentences for an easy to understand explanation for the critique and i will develop this idea into my real artist statement for my power point.

Sunday Artist, A Selbe, Linda Montano and Teching Hsieh

I believe that most people will already know who Linda Montano and Teching Hsieh are. Maybe not from their individual works but for their collaboration piece together.

I am bring up this well know artist because I have know about their work for a while but I have never been able to relate it to my work. Now with the project i am working on now I am focusing on the process and documenting a process and that is what makes up my piece visually.

For Linda Montano and teching Hsieh, these two artist were looking for a partner to collaborate with. In 1983, they started a project in which they were tied together with an 8ft rope for one year. They were combining their lives and art into one. Writing it down in words really makes it seem so simple but when you really think about being tied to another person for 365 days in a row, none stop. There is no alone time, no privacy. They describe how there isn't a point to being private, they had to be honest with each other entirely for this to work.

This work is so relivant to the work that i am trying to create now because it is all about the process, there really is no end product. For my images there will be a final images to go with the processes but the process entirely makes up the final image. For their performance piece there was no goal for a final image or result. It is more the enlightenment that comes with completing the task. it is about the challenge.

Thursday Thoughts, A Selbe, 10.8.09

SO Critique is in less than two weeks and my project has significantly changed!! So it makes me a little nervous. My project is still focused around calm and chaos, my first intentions for this project was to create diptychs from images that reflect each other with formal qualities but each one was to be very different in feeling.

As I was working on this idea, I starting doing exactly what I told myself not to do... And that is plan out what i wanted to see on the wall, but subconsciously I ended up doing just that. This brought my production to a stand still because I was trying all too hard to fit the images I was creating to my predetermined frame.

So on my last meeting with Jeff we got totally sidetracked paying all of our 20 mins to laying out all of my contact sheets across the table. We were examining and admiring the way the contact sheets themselves looked. The contact sheets were from a shoot that I did where I was trying to capture the images of an egg just as it is breaking on a surface as if someone had dropped it. The contact sheets made a story line, a musical composition, and a record of the struggle of achieve that perfect image. Some of the individual images had the egg smashed on the table and many of the images had nothing at all in them. Visually I feel that this image really expresses some idea of chaos and calm that I was originally working with but it is definitely going to be a change in my artist statement. For me this imagery is more interesting, but concern lies in the subject matter within the individual photographs. Some people were confused to why there was an egg falling, why an egg.

So I have decided that I am going to approach this material in a few different ways. I have only about a week before I have to go to the printers so it is very little time to get critiques on this new imagery so i will try multiple things to discuss and show off.

First of all I got to this imagery by simply trying to create a "perfect image." It is probably an image I have seen in different places or in my head multiple times. During creation, I ran into different challenges, such as, my camera not being fast enough, the giant mess it created and the challenge of simply capturing this image. So for this first experiment I am going to pick three stock photography images where something is falling and breaking and the photographer gets the exact right moment. I am going to try to recreate this imagery in the similar way that I approached the egg shoot. My reasoning behind this will end up being more about the process than the end product. I think this really expressing my ideas of calm and chaos because it is the cycle of the life we live, there will always be ups and downs.

Secondly, I have just discovered all of the ideas that the world is going to end and that multiple groups of ancient civilizations predicted the same exact date of this happening. I feel that the egg is fragile like the earth. I need to research more about this subject to make it work but I think it might be a stretch and me trying to inject more meaning into something that doesn't really need it. So scratch this idea..... for now.

Ill be sticking with the first idea that I explaining and trying to represent it as many different ways as possible. I am not dropping the ideas i started with either. I am going to continue growing the idea and sketching of the original images i had to develop this idea so maybe i can go back to it next semester.

Sunday Artist, A Selb,e Penelope Umbrico

Embarrassing books, Penelope Umbrico

Doors, Penelope Umbrico

Penelope Umbrico is an artist that will be coming to VCU tomorrow but i will not be able to see her speak so i looked at her work on my own. Umbrico attended Ontario College of Art and School of the Visual Art in New York.

I admire her work because it is visually interesting, but there is a reason for every choice she makes in her pieces. The message behind the images are not always clear to the audience but the formal aspects of compositions will keep the viewer engaging with the piece.

Most of her work on her website is based on, what i would call, an idea of repetition. She finds images on the internet or in catalogs, details of images that people rarely pay attention to and brings them to the foreground.

In the first image there is bookshelves with the books turned backwards. All of these images are taken from catalogs. She is making the point that it is just silly to have books on a self with the spines not showing, you cannot see the books. She also says that of a person actually put their books like that that they must be ashamed of the book's content. She brings these "embarrassing" books to the forefront of people's attention and begs the question, "Why are these books backwards?" It really presents an odd thing for the viewer.

The second image is the views out of doors that are just opened a little bit. She wants to show the viewer the perfect suburban neighborhoods that are portrayed in catalogs. She takes the images from the catalog and enlarges it to match the scale of the door being advertised in the catalog.

I think that the way she has reasons for everything in her images is great. I think that the mystery behind them at first glance is a positive thing for this work because it seems this kind of work can be too straightforward very easily.

This work, and her process behind them seems a lot like the work that i am working on and i am disappointed that i will not make it to the lecture tomorrow.

Thursday thoughts A Selbe 10.1.09

Untitled Experiment, Contact Sheets, Photography, A Selbe, fall 2009.

SO I cannot believe that it is october today. I had a meeting with Jeff today and he really threw me for a loop. I'm going to write through my thoughts here before I write on the class blog so I do not confuse everyone with my thoughts. Anyways, I had a set plan for going about making these diptych images, I am at the point where I am gathering potential images for them and I am going to draw on top of them for practice. I want to turn the image from chaos to calm, or form calm to chaos by drawing on them. I am doing this to help me figure out what to pair the images with, but I think it really has the potential to be really interesting.

But I was thrown for a loop when Jeff was more interested in my contact sheets than anything else. We ended up spreading out the images on the table and looking at the crazy pattern it made. Above the images are just a small example of what we have laid out on the table. We discussed the formal aspects of composition that were strong in this unknown piece. It become a story line, music notes on a page. It is the struggle for the perfect image. It is the process of shooting for the most simple stock image. I know that if i pursue this idea it needs to be totally clear and it needs to have intent for every aspect of it. I think this kind of approach to my idea of calm and chaos really shows what i was trying to show through my diptychs. I am going to continue on both paths until i figure out what will work or if i can incorporate them both together somehow.

So i have few new artists to check out that jeff gave me, and i am going to shoot a new sequence set and i am going to draw and sketch on the images that i already have. Another busy week ahead!