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Dana Hoey

Dana is an artist I looked at closely this semester. She works primarily in photography but her work is transcendent in that it can’t be tied down to a medium. She explores what its like to be a woman including daily life, struggles, culture, sexuality, etc. Her work is candid but also very precisely composed and shot. She has inspired my final critique in being honest and bold with yourself. Talking about private, hard things but in a delicate way.

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Jennifer Levonian

I really enjoy Jennifer’s cut-paper and water animation technique. She takes the what we know about animation to be a digital process and brings it to analogous roots much like William Kentridge. Jennifer’s work covers the mundane moments of ordinary day-to-day moments and gives them a new life. I enjoy this reinvention of moments, scenes, feelings, etc. She really has a hand when it comes to keeping the audiences attention with things that would be otherwise under our noses. It’s that quality in artists that I really enjoy and aspire after.

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Informative Readings

1. Experimental and Expanded Cinema

1. Focusing on non-generic, non narrative animation

2. In pursuit of aesthetic enquiry

3. Is experimental, using medium and tools that relate to and enhance subject matter

2. The Animator’s Survival Kit by Richard Williams

3. Figures of Motion by Len Lye

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Final Critique References:

1. Bill Viola

2. Heather Cassils (CUTS: A traditional sculpture)

1. About gender, body, desire,

3. Sadie Benning

1. Gender, ambiguity, identity

4. Dave Andrew Skinner

1. Male image, sexuality, relationship, identity

5. Tony Oursler

1. Vulgar and blatant imagery

2. Compiled, layered, manipulated

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Excerpt from Final Piece. Thinking about the body, sexuality, and identity in an immersive installation experience. Ideally this would be projected on a large screen in a dark room with surround sound capabilities.

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For my next project I want to use negatives, slow motion, and soft ambient sound to create a dreamscape full of lust, desire, sensuality.

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This is the scene for my new animation im working on. I’m using photographs and digital media to create an abstract narrative centered around disillusionment, loneliness, and the intensity of one with oneself.

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Tony Oursler

Oursler’s work has been in my head for awhile now. I first heard about his work last semester (F’2020) in class and I was really kind of shocked by his work because it’s so intense and so visually engaging that it’s kind of impossible to not be stunned at first glance. Once you dive into his practice and career you begin to understand his exploration of life and culture, touching on anything from sex, love, loneliness, death, identity. He traces these themes really successfully and uses such surreal iconography to deliver his message. His work is vulgar, explicit, and unforgiving. This is one of the reasons I’m really drawn to Oursler’s work. He’s not afraid to cross lines. His piece, Influence Machine, has been one of my ongoing favorite. In this installation, Oursler projects animated faces with paire audio. The scene is set in Madison Square Park, NYC. Oursler’s face projections are intense colors like red and green and are set upon a bed of smoke from a nearby fog machine. Oursler is really successful in setting up a fully immersive installation and the thing I respect is that he’s very adaptive to his environment. Whether he’s showing in a gallery or public park, the strength in his work remains consistent.

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Animation - Cranium Cryosurgery

Voices. Faces. Consciousnesses, melding into one.

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Tony Cokes

Tony Cokes is an American visual artist working with notions related to pop culture and mass entertainment. Coke’s work serves as a critique and speculation of society and culture and employs collage, archival material, and theory. Coke’s 2018 work, On Non-Visibility, cleverly uses bold colors and large texts to draw the viewer in. Then once you’re drawn in he presents a field of information extracted and taken out of context. The work becomes a mind puzzle, a deciphering game, a maze. He uses the screen as a vehicle to deliver his information.

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Jon Rafman

Rafman is a Canadian artist and filmmaker. His works deals with the idea of technology and how it can effect contemporary life. I found his work to be very visually compelling. He uses strong colors and large scale compositions to attract the viewers eye. His work is almost hypnotic in a way because it doesn’t let the eye slip away, it retains its hold through constant feed of new information. Most of the works I saw were very fast paced with images coming and flying away within seconds. It can be a little frustrating because you feel as if you have no time to process before something new shows up. In this piece, SHADOWBANNED, Rafman employs layered images, camera shifts, and intense colors to create an enthralling compilation of culture and technology. Rafman takes things you know, twists them in bizarre ways, and try’s to feed it back to you. He almost creates these eerie landscape of our own fears, desires, and constructions, revealing to us what we couldn’t see before.

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Sadie Benning

Benning works in experimental film where she covers themes including but not limited to surveillance, gender, ambiguity, and identity. I looked at some of her films and I was really interested in the way she employs the B&W screen. Her first works made when she was a child with a Fisher Price toy camera explore intimacy and private space. Benning filmed her thoughts and possessions to create a portrait of a developing identity. The B&W screen and pulled in shots work in muting the piece down, allowing the viewer to focus on intimate moments. Overall I think her work is successful because it traces the psychological upbringing of a young girl through adulthood. Her overarching practice melds into a life long piece in and of itself.

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Emma Hart’s Skin Film (2003-2007)

Hart created this animation using her own skin which she documented using transfer tape. It is a pivotal piece that exists at the intersection of Expanded Cinema and Experimental Animation. The compiled abstract terrain of crossing lines and unique marks creates a portrait of the artist in a way that’s eerie, surreal, and intimate all at once.

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The animations in this video are looped sequences of different scenes. I am really in awe of the analogous, hand-made style. Something that definitely has inspired me and will be in the back of my head moving forward in the next project(s).

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William Kentridge

The way Kentridge represents history and culture through collecting, dismembering, and reordering pieces of information is an interesting process that I enjoyed looking into. In terms of Kentridge’s animations, I am really enthralled with how he meticulously combines his expressionist style with a paired-down process, using tools like erasure, layering, and color choice. He creates lively and culturally rich pieces of work with a simple mark-making tool and paper. I find his work so successful because he doesn’t attempt to fool the viewer through an elaborately invented medium but rather is transparent with his process while letting the content of the work speak for itself. Looking at Kentridge’s work has me inspired and thinking about the way I can enhance my work through decisions made about my processes. How can simple choices made about color and medium effect the process? Does using creative constraints (working within only two colors or only analogous materials) give the work more room to exist as a concept? Does it hinder the viewing experience or the formalities of the piece? Aside from that, I am envious of Kentridge’s ability to represent culture and history in an abstract manner while retaining the legitimacy of the information and events depicted.