I’m actually really going to miss emac.
My wisdom teeth had a big day.
I’m having a lot of fun with stop motion, I think the meticulous nature of it appeals to a compulsive, masochistic part of me. I made something crafty and silly driven largely by colors and textures — it’s not heavily narrative, more just eyecandy.
Here it is.
The doors were shut and all the TVs were off and I thought, well dammit. Then I took some exceedingly grainy camera phone pictures of the Sangiamo show and decided I’d talk about that instead — I figured I could draw some sort of emac-type connections.
What interested me most were the portraits — Sangiamo had said he’d wanted to make one of every student. I haven’t decided if I think he ever meant that literally, but it doesn’t really matter — the collection of portraits in Fox is a very intimate cross-section of MICA. They feel almost like an anthropological study, as they are not labeled with names, but rather with class years or jobs or distinguishing physical traits. In terms of compositions, they are almost like mug-shots, painfully simple busts on either blank or solid backgrounds. This creates a very graphic, almost digital-art feel, which makes for a nice juxtaposition with the very gritty and painterly coloring and rendering of the figures. The portraits that have tattoos and accessories worked into them later also have this graphic quality to them, at times feeling almost as though colorized or layered on top of with Photoshop, furthering the tension between a clean and modern feeling and an iconic, gritty and tangible feeling. I could stare at these for hours, they are so beautiful and feel so honest.
For fun, and I suppose also in preparation for the animation assignment, my friend and I made two little claymations.
Trying to make something cool and interesting was stressing me out (and I am already sick). SO INSTEAD, i made something stupid.
Still images from a D40. Would like to have it loop, I think.
So. I definitely lost some more rad, way too long shots of things in gentle motion in the process of editing. So this is, you know, something.
I exited Five Guys, backpack full of fries and stinking of grease and walked with Kate across the street and into a small white space, fully prepared to hate everything in front of me. My friends have raised me a purist — paintings and sculptures and prints of figures — and it’s made me shamefully closed-minded about everything else. But Kianga Ford’s work rather quickly side-stepped these reservations, piquing my interest with her adeptness at creating moods and spaces. The issue of place that I felt all of Ford’s work addressed is something I’ve taken a recent interest in, having been away from home for a year and now coming back to it. A boy in my drawing class said he hated place, that he didn’t want to draw it and he didn’t much think about it, and this is something I’ve not been wholly able to understand. I spent my break in transit, stopping off in Brooklyn and in Annandale on Hudson, and each dorm room and train station and chinatown bus i occupied had such a different feeling to it, a sensation I feel Ford represents in her room with the headphones and large inflatables.
The change in music and tone and content for each cushion made for a marked shift in location. Ford’s own experiences with each of the three places were not made obvious, but the prose she recorded clearly showed that they were varied and meaningful. The audio being presented as a loop also aided in this sense of moving between worlds, each of which was already in motion before your arrival, and continued as such when you moved on — even the rumpled clothes and hair we all got up from the cushions with were indicative of travel. This piece was completely captivating — I felt I could’ve spent hours lying on these cushions and listening to Ford speak.
