Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Watching: A Finished Product



The time has finally come for our images to be displayed in a Mudd Gallery Art Show! The Mudd Gallery as a venue is unique. I feel that it is nice to have a space that allows students to show their work but also limits the artists to the space given to display work. It’s nice to have the Mudd Gallery as an introduction to gallery settings because if you become an artist, you will have to work with all different kinds of spaces with various size limits. The gallery works towards giving students a ‘sneak peek’ into the powerful art world. I do, however, wish the gallery was located somewhere more prominent. I feel the gallery would have more people interested in going to see artwork if it wasn’t on the third floor of the library.
Mary Ann Doane’s article: Indexicality and the Concept of Medium Specificity was a very challenging article for myself to read. I don’t feel I could wrap my head around everything presented in it, but I can comment on what I did understand. The full concepts of “medium specificity” have a way of not being relevant in today’s world because of the digital age and our way into the post-medium world. Digital technology and electronic reproduction in the digital media lean more towards immateriality. Technology is taking over the mediums of art and what use to be done with pen and paper can now be done faster and more effectively on a computer. Although some people still work as medium specificity artists, the numbers keep slowly decreasing year after year with as all the new advancements in technology keep appearing.

Monday, October 3, 2011

Watching Project: Round 2


MagCloud New Perfect Binding Option!
When editing the watching project, I took into consideration the comments given in class about The Neglect Of Hands series seeming to focus a lot on the metallic nail polish. I decided to continue with the wild nail polish look and contrasted it with the mundane hand tasks of everyday life. I re-shot the simple hand tasks but had the model's nails painted as bright blue or neon pink. The nails seem to almost take away from the tasks at hand and make a viewer focus directing on the nail polish.
            I found working with MagCloud to be such an easy process. I had positioned the photos in the order I wanted on Flickr and then just simply uploaded the Flickr set to the MagCloud website. The order became very critical for me because I wanted to start with bold nail photos, which ended up being the blue, and continued with the slightly less bold color of metallic. I divided up the metallic and did half before the neon pink nails and half after. I think this categorizing is what makes the MagCloud magazine powerful. The categorizing was just as important to Robert Frank in his book The Americans. Sarah Greenough really lets the reader know why Frank positioned photos in his book the way he did. I found it interesting that when I looked at the book the first time (before I read the article), I didn’t see any pattern. Looking at the photos after I had read the article, it made me really ponder the photos and figure out why he put photos in the places that he did.