Joel Peter Witkin

Witkin is a photographer who likes to shock and unnerve people with his visual themes of life and death. He is certainly not afraid of using images that will shock people and they are certainly not the everyday sort of photos you might see on someone's walls. What I like about his work is I bet anyone you showed it to would have an opinion, whether they thought it was grotesque or intriguing and I think it's important for art to evoke strong feelings within people. He also uses dwarves, transsexuals and hermaphrodites a lot in his work which is always going to be a subject of taboo for some peoples as there's still a lot of people out there who would feel uncomfortable and put out to look at some or all of these images because it is not something most people face everyday so that are not used to it which links back to the uncanny and people being afraid of things that are different. These people that he depicts are all people but because there is something a bit different about them people are unsure of it.

I chose to put these few images on my blog because for me these were all close to the feeling of uncanny with the dolls head and what looks like an older mans' head on a young girls body I think is very strange.

 

I quite like the image below which is a woman's face that has been made to look like vase holding flowers.

Sources:

http://www.zonezero.com/exposiciones/fotografos/witkin2/state.html

http://www.edelmangallery.com/witkin.htm

Uncanny Art

This is taken from the article listed below, I didn't want to re-write it as I thought it was already explained really well. These two pieces of work are from the Ronchini Gallery, the cloud suspended in the room called 'Nimbus D'Aspremont was created by Berndnaut Smilde and the 'Hairy Eye Ball' by Adeline de Monseignat. I really like the cloud one because I think clouds are quite interesting things to observe anyway and seeing one within a room I think is visually very interesting but at the same time there's also something a bit strange about it, I guess that's why they describe their work as 'creating a sense of unease by using familiar out of context.' The fur in the ball I find less striking but in the article it mentions that these 'Creaptures' (creatures and sculptures) 'elicit in the spectator an unfulfilled desire to touch them' and when looking at it I did actually think I'd like to touch it even though I know what glass and fur both feel like.

"The Uncanny draws on each artist’s relationship with their materials and the ways in which they create a sense of unease for the viewer by using the familiar out of context.

The exhibition’s theme is partly inspired by Sigmund Freud’s celebrated 1919 essay of the same title. Based on the notion that the strange could not exist without the non-strange, Freud’s study pioneered the distinctive nature of the uncanny as a feeling of something not simply weird or mysterious but, more specifically, as something strangely familiar. Freud’s concept of the uncanny and his interpretation of dreams had a significant influence on the Surrealist movement and their depiction of the unnatural and strange."

Berndnaut Smilde
Nimbus D’Aspremont
2012
Cloud in room
Lambda print on Dibond
125 x 184 cm
Courtesy the artist and Ronchini Gallery
Photo Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk

These clouds suspended within a room are created using a fog machine and adjusting the temperature and humidity of the room so the clouds remain there long enough to be photographed and capture the short moment before they disappear. 

These sculptures or 'creaptures are creating using organic materials, in the case below fur, 'a material suspended between life and death' and the fur is encased within glass. She aims to create uncertainty within the spectator as to whether they are animate or inanimate objects.


Adeline de Monseignat
Hairy Eye Ball
2011
Vintage Fur, pillow filler and glass
30 x 30 x 26 cm
Courtesy the artist and Ronchini Galley












Source:

Yareah [Internet] - http://yareah.com/ronchini-gallery-adeline-de-monseignat-and-berndnaut-smilde-0276/  - Accessed 25/2/2013

Uncanny Masks

When thinking about uncanny I thought about what things scare me the most and I think one of the things would have to be masks and I think it’s something about not being able to see the persons eyes or face that makes me feel a bit uneasy. I’m not sure why that is but there’s something about humans and that we like to be able to look into people eyes and see their faces and maybe that’s something to do with a trust issue because we make a lot of assumptions about someone’s character or personality e.g. whether we think they’re a nice person or not, just by looking at their face.

One mask that particularly creeps me out a bit is gas masks and I’m not sure if it’s because the way they look with the big eye pieces or whether it’s what they’re associated with e.g. danger, poisonous gas etc. Linking to that I’ve found that when I watch films that have creepy miners or people dressed up as miners that I find that a bit scary because they usually have on gas masks, overall (sometimes rubber) that cover them completely and then big rubber gloves so not one part of them is exposed.

The film Silent Hill (2006, Christophe Gans) has creepy miners in it and also these weird people that called Pyramid heads, they too are just people like the miners as you can see their bodies are human but because their heads are covered with this strange object it makes them seem a lot scarier. I think it’s clever how you can take something quite normal like just a simple triangle but when applied to something you don’t normally associate or see it with it suddenly because weird and not right.

   

It’s the same case with this realistic baby mask I found, no one is really scared of babies as people think of them as cute innocent beings but by making a realistic uncanny copy of a babies face and then applying it to something else, for example here an adults body, it does not compute as normal to us and therefore we have trouble accepting it.

 

I also think the more realistic the mask (as close to the real thing as what we know it to be) the weirder we think it is because it looks so real and yet it's not so it's not doing or behaving how we expect it to and how we're used to it behaving. We also find things strange if they look like they could be real but something's not quite right for example the mask above looks very realistic with the usual coloured skin, 2 eyes in the right place, nose, ears, mouth etc but there's something slightly off about some of these things and because of that it takes on a whole new form to us. Due to the fact the eyes don't look the normal colour and the teeth are yellow and missing most people would automatically think the thing, in this case the masks, is evil or supposed to be portraying something that is evil or bad.

When looking for scary images I came across this image of 'White eyes' and with it there was a story about miners being trapped and no one saving them and when they finally got out they wanted revenge for this and went around killing the people that didn't help and anyone else after that who happened to cross their path. The story behind the 'white eye's was that apparently they were down in the dark mine for so long that their eyes eventually adapted to this so they could see better or maybe because they weren't needed as much and when they emerged they were sensitive to the sunlight. 

The story is obviously not true but what I like about it is that it is not so far fetched so that you know it has or would never happen, there's something in the back of your mind that thinks this is possible and believable enough that it might just happen and I think that's what makes it scarier because the facts exist on their own - miners exist, mines exist, mines do collapse, people were uncaring enough to not do anything about it in the past, and we know that people can adapt to things (although not sure it would happen that quickly). 

I think the more we understand the prospect that something could happen the scarier it makes it

[Internet] http://www.scaryforkids.com/white-eyes/ - Accessed 13/3/2013

Group Project Moodboard - Uncanny

This is a quick moodboard I put together when thinking of our group project - this is for the bedroom bit which we will have to build and dress. The group have decided for it to have a gentleman's club sort of feel to it with dark rich colours like reds and greens, with paintings on the walls in wooden frames. We also know we have a fireplace to use in it and some other furniture. We also have some taxidermy animals to use so I have included some weird looking ones in the moodboard.

The moodboard doesn't show how the room will look but just some of the things we could use in it to put in it either as pictures or objects to help evoke a sense of the uncanny in the room.

One idea that I had myself before we came up with the final idea was about having objects dangling from the ceiling and I thought about having body parts like arms, legs, heads etc from different sized dolls as I thought it would tie in with the scene in which the man who wakes up from sleeping sees a smaller doll like version of himself on the fireplace. As well as taxidermy animals I also like the idea of crossing animals with the human form and also crossing animals with different species of animals like the weird hampster/crab image I found. There's also a picture I put in there purely because of it strangeness it's a painting and it looks like human body parts merged together and there also seems to be an animal, maybe a birds eye in there.

So the main theme of this board is the merging of quite normal things to re-create something that's not normal.

 
 


These are a few images I picked out of a typical old fashion Gentleman's club, I think these are useful for looking at in terms of colour and feel because they all look very similar and you can see that red is a very dominant colour and other very rich dark colours like greens and dark browns for the wood. They all have a very cluttered feel with lots of books and things on the walls like paintings and a deer head. They all seem a bit stuffy as well, with all the dark colours, heavy furniture and ample things on every bit of bare space.

Sandy Skoglund

Sandy Skoglund is a photographer and installation artist who creates very surreal pieces of work by building sets that are very elaborate and take a long time to make.
From looking at her work from her earliest stuff to her more recent I can see that there a few running themes the most striking one is repetitiveness, a lot of her work includes repeating patterns or objects, her work most of the time will contain either people, animals and sometimes food and sometimes more than one of these things at a time. Most of her images or sets are usually very bright in colouring and a lot of the time she uses a bright colour in contrast with another or other bright colours or a bright colour against a more plain or monochrome background. I've also noticed that in some of her installations she will have people that are made completely of a material or covered in a pattern and then she will have real people as well and this is all part of her merging the real with the unreal. 

I think it links to the uncanny in the way she makes things in the image of real things but by creating them out of non real or living objects. Particularly in one of her recent works 'Fresh Hybrid' (2008) From a distance if you look at the picture, apart from the colours, everything looks quite normal but on closer inspection you can see that the sky or background is made from thousands of pipe cleaners bunched together, the leaves on the trees are yellow chicks. She has also merged nature with people because the tree stumps are made to look like a persons legs. Again she has real people in there which for me creates an interesting contrast against the sculpted and made up people. For the photographs she uses real people and for the installations she uses mannequins. 
I think her sets look very inviting, like a magical world you just want to step into and I think you would get a very different perspective of her work if you were standing within it because you would be able to see all the details up close when from the picture all you see is everything merged together to create one view. I think you would be able to create some interesting films or film ideas from them as well as they do stir up the imagination.

 
 


I find her work really creative and interesting and admire how much painstaking time and effort she must have put into creating each piece. I like all the elements she uses as well, the bright colours are very appealing and grab you're attention, the weirdness of the pieces is very captivating and I like how she uses animals as well.








Sources:

My Modern Met [Internet] http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/incredibly-elaborate-non-photoshopped-scenes - Accessed 7/3/2013
Sandy Skoglund [Internet] http://www.sandyskoglund.com/ - Accessed 7/3/2013

Set Building and Dressing Session

In this session we carried on with the set, the main frame of it had been finished last week so this week it was a case of finishing off the walls with any more paint they needed which wasn't much though as we decided they didn't all need painting as the curtains and bed and other dressings would cover any unpapered/painted bits. This meant that most of the lesson we could concentrate on dressing it.

The curtains got put up first around the fireplace as they were a big feature and would be covering lot of unfinished wall. Everyone had different tasks to do during the lesson, we had people in the back making the fake hand, I was helping out with putting weird pictures into frames and me and Alli went to the library to print out some pictures that we liked and thought looked uncanny as they were animals with human bodies, I particularly wanted to use the shark as there was something quite striking about it. There were also people working on dressing the set with props we already had like the stuffed animals and other bric a brac that was weird or unusual.





We made use of the materials as well using them to dress the walls to help give this cluttered and sort of old fashioned feel which went well with all the old looking pictures and frames on the wall. We also used them to make a small part of the bed as only the top part where the pillow will be is going to be in the shot just so we can get a feel for what is going on and see the top part of the body floating up and going over to the little man they've just spotted on the fireplace.

 By the time we got towards the end of the session I started to see how effective all the details of dressing the set are because once all the pictures and materials were up and all the furniture like the fireplace and corner shelves it looked so much better and different. You couldn't notice how messy the walls were behind and I think it had a real cluttered and something not quite right feel to it because of the strange pictures and stuffed animals and animal heads that were everywhere. Despite that only a small part of the group had turned up I think we did well and really made a lot of headway with the set. There's only one part of the set me and Luke weren't sure about and that was the horses head that had been wrapped up in white material and our reason was because it looked to white and pristine against the backdrop of the rest of the set so I suggested we need to paint it a more murky yellowy colour and Alice suggested using tea to stain it which I thought would be a good way of doing it.

Next week we are filming on the set for 6 hours and the cinematographers are going to be in there with us for the first 3 hours to help us film it. I thought it would've perhaps been better if they were there for the second part as that would have given us time to get the set finished and get ourselves all prepared so they could come in and film it but I guess that is when they must be timetabled for their lesson perhaps. Due to this I think it is necessary that whoever of the group is free should try and meet up beforehand to finish the last bits of the set and all discuss how it's going to pan out so we can be as prepared as can be for when the others are there otherwise I think it might get a bit hectic. Me, Luke and now Paul are mainly in charge of the bedroom scene with the floating character and book squashing the little man and then the door so we need to think about the shots for that (about 4 I think has been discussed). I am directing, Luke is Art director and Paul producer but I think we will all be helping each other out anyway but it's good to give people roles as it gives everyone something to concentrate on and stops it being a free for all on the day. I am looking forward to next week and hoping that it goes well as it will be interesting to watch it back after it's been filmed to see if it looks anything how we've all envisioned.

Chiharu Shiota & Tomoko Shioyasu

Chiharu Shiota

This is a piece of work made by Shiota, I picked this one out because I like the contrast of the pure white dress hanging within the dark web-like design of the wool. Even though it is just wool it has quite a menacing effect like you shouldn't go in there and it makes the dress seem more precious, like it's protected and shouldn't be touched or something bad will happen. I then found what the artist thinks about her work and its quite interesting because describes the strings of wool intertwining looking like lace which isn't really that scary but I thought it reminded me more of a spiders web so it just shows how everyone can interpret pieces of art in such different ways.

Below are two quotes about what the artist says about her work:

.how lace is significant to their work

“I am more interested in the lines, which are often represented
in my work through black string. These strings are woven into each other, which can make it look a bit like lace, which is also intricately woven. The difference is that my strings are in a random pattern, whilst lace follows set designs and patterns”.

...the ideas behind the work

“My installations with clothes always refer to the clothes as a second skin, which carry the memories of the people who wore these clothes”

Tomoko Shioyasu

Tomoko Shioyasu is a Japanese artist who specialises in sculpture, in particular paper tapestries. Shioyasu makes the giant floor to ceiling tapestries out of nothing but paper and uses tools such as utility knives and soldering irons. Her designs are normally very intricate and seem to show natural and organic things like 'the flow of water', 'forces of wind' or 'patterns of cells'. I think her work is amazing how something so seemingly flimsy can hang without ripping which I guess is down to the fact that the incisions she makes to create the patterns are very delicate and small so it still leaves a significant amount of paper in order for it to support itself. I like this one above as it looks like swirling water or a wave. It's remarkable how she has made it look so realistic just by using one medium or material as well, just by creating a sense of texture and different tones it actually looks quite life-like.

Sources:

Lost In Lace [Internet] - http://lostinlace.org.uk/artists/chiharu-shiota - Accessed 1/3/2013

This is Colossal [Internet] http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2011/03/immense-paper-cut-tapestries-by-tomoko-shioyasu/ - accessed 1/3/2013