Snapshot Fiction

Stranger than fiction...

2011-03-02T22:44:00.002Z

Last November after seeing a request for art pieces to celebrate International Woman's Day in Cardiff Art spaces I decided to enter the three that I had created during the summer.

You must keep in mind that I only started painting in August 2010 after at least twenty years of turning my back on acrylics and canvas.

I didn't hear anything so I thought the work hadn't made the cut, until I received an email in January...

'Hi there,

Just to let you know you have been selected to show in Off the Wall for IWD. Please contact ...... a.s.a.p

She would like some more images, the show starts on 24th February'

My inital reaction to this was AARRGGHH! Withing ten minutes of receiving the message I was planning the three paintings I would create that weekend. A trip to The Range and many long arduous nights sketching and painting whilst watching the Sopranos back to back paid off. Ironically it was these three paintings that the gallery were interested in and selected for the exhibition.

The opening night was held on Thursday 24th February. It was a fantastic experience and worthwhile to make new contacts in the Welsh Art world. Brilliant for the ethnography work I need to do.

The WAA were interested in my PhD research so this could be useful at a later date.

New Year - New Ideas for PhD

2010-10-14T21:14:00.002+01:00

Nat Tate

2010-07-01T19:01:00.000+01:00

Finally got my hands on a copy of Boyd's novel!
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Nat-Tate-American-Artist-1928-1960/dp/1901785017

2nd June Supervisor Meeting

2010-06-14T22:10:00.003+01:00

Strangeland - Tracey Emin

2010-04-26T13:30:00.000+01:00

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Strangeland-Tracey-Emin/dp/0340769467/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1272284968&sr=1-1

An artist's biography

2010-04-23T12:06:00.002+01:00

Recreating the past - Seren Rhys' background

Practice - Creating a retrospective exhibition

2010-04-20T22:05:00.001+01:00

With the blog taking shape for Seren Rhys the idea is to start creating credible art projects that would make up her work over the last twenty years.

The photographs I have been recently doing for Backroom proved to be an interesting starting point. Going through the last two events I could see some kind of project taking shape - i was drawn to the way women presented themsleves and the freedom of their dancing as they were caught up in the moment.

A chance reading of greek mythology brought me across the term 'maenad'. The direct translation - 'raving ones' which I thought was apt for this first project.

http://www.maicar.com/GML/MAENADS.html

The plan is continue with this series and perhaps travel further afield. It woudl perhaps be useful to collect stories from subjects to enhance the reading of the project.
I have had quite a positive response to the Seren Rhys website from Facebook friends. it is perhaps time to reflect on how to create a 'buzz' about the project.

The birth of an Artist - Creating Seren Rhys

2010-04-18T20:04:00.001+01:00

To begin to create an artist I thought it would be useful to create a blog persona for her and her art.

http://serenrhys.blogspot.com/2010/04/httpwww_18.html

I thought it would be important to develop some background detail regarding her life as well as imply her role in British art and the rise of digital photography during the last twenty years.

From my research it was important that she studied at Goldsmiths since many of the YBAs studied at this London Art school. I wanted to give the character quite a bohemian upbringing and thought Ibiza an ideal setting since it has a history during the sixties and seventies of attracting artists.

The idea that Seren Rhys has spent her life in front and behind a camera I thought this would allow me to explore how women are photographed as well as examine the history of women photographers such as Diane Arbus, Sally Mann, Jesse Mann, Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin and Corinne Day. Other artists that will need to be explore are Sophie Calle, Tracey Emin, Sam Taylor Wood.

Through this persona I will be able to explore:

The rise of the YBA
Wales and the artist
The impact of digital photography on the art world
The female gaze - representation of women by women

Supervisor meeting - Planning the Practice

2010-04-13T10:59:00.002+01:00

Sophie Calle - The Reader

2010-04-08T10:54:00.003+01:00

http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/shop/index.php/fuseaction/shop.product/product_id/416

I picked up a copy of Sophie Calle: The Reader at Whitchapel Gallery whilst visiting the exhibition. It has proved to be extremely useful since it provides a critical tool for navigating Calle's image and text work from 1979 to the present. The book brings together interviews with the artist, critical commentaries by an international range of critics, curators, artists and art historians and a most useful index summarising recurrent themes in her work.

It will be most useful to refer to this as I develop Seren Rhys’ retrospective exhibition and it will be a starting point to develop the exhibition catalogue.

As I research this book in more depth I will refer to it on the blog at a later date.

PhD Practice Piece - planning

2010-02-19T22:00:00.003Z

Nat Tate

2010-02-11T19:45:00.001Z

The Stone Diaries - Carol Shields

2010-02-05T14:11:00.000Z

Supervisor meeting

2010-01-15T09:50:00.000Z

11th January meeting

We discussed my first draft of the lit review. We then went on to discuss areas that I need to now develop:

The Female Gaze – an area to explore in more depth

You also recommended that I return to WG Sebald since there is very little work on his use of photography and the positioning of the photos within his novels. You suggested Rings of Saturn.

Other writers/photographers to explore were:

William Boyd – Nat Tate

Johnnie Shand Kydd – Crash

Stephen Bull – Meeting Hazel Stokes

Andy Warhol – Photography

Alvar Gullichsen - Bonk Business Inc

I discussed some of the ideas I have been working on to develop the practice piece. I want to create a fictional female YBA who is Welsh and present a retrospective exhibition and book of her life’s work. We discussed the possibility of contacting real artists and art critics to respond to her work in some way with them being aware that the project is not a hoax but a celebration of the British conceptual art movement of the last twenty years. The practical would be made up of narratives reflecting on the work of the artist by ‘friends’. This could be a combination of digital stories, a series of photographs and an accompanying book.

You suggested the following things to work on:

Polish my Lit review and develop it in light of our discussion during the meeting:

• Write a one page proposal for the practice. Key things to consider would be to clarify the central idea

• Consider possible artists and art critics to contribute to the practical piece

Reflection - Sophie Calle Exhibition Whitechapel

2010-01-14T12:03:00.004Z

http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/sophie-calle-talking-to-strangers

In December I decided to visit a friend with the ulterior motive of going to the Whitechapel Gallery to see Sophie Calle’s exhibition ‘Talking to Strangers’. I discovered Calle a few years ago whilst researching conceptual artists for a project. I returned to her during my research on women artists using text and photography earlier this year.

My friend did not have any knowledge of her work so I was excited to take her.

The Whitechapel exhibition is the first retrospective of the French conceptualist Calle's work in the UK. 'Talking to Strangers' is a journey time-travelling back to 1979 with 'Sleepers', where she invited twenty nine people to sleep in her bed as she watched. This perhaps is a good indication of her the work that follows - she's been following, investigating into and exposing, the lives of herself and others ever since.

Whitechapel Gallery is beautiful.

Calle’s exhibition is everything I expected. It is like reading a postmodern and innovative novel. Photographs embedded with text. Calle creates art that an audience must read. The giant photographs that dominate the walls in the most spectacular installation, Take Care of Yourself, are only a part of the final piece. It is the words that constitute the work's fiercely beating heart.

Take Care of Yourself is particularly striking and holds a great fascination for my friend as I as women. The narrative of the installation works on many levels. Calle received an email from a lover, dumping her. Something the Bridget Jones generation can clearly understand in a world full of metrosexuals. Calle, rather than getting plastered on wine and listening to bad love songs like Fielding’s heroine she took control of the situation and asked a team of women – all experts in their professional fields – to respond to it. This is what is so fascinating about the installation – it is choir of women finely tuned to a singular pain.

The powerful roar at the eye of the storm – Calle’s rage and bewilderment at the man's cruel email – becomes louder and more resonant with each new variant on the text. There is a sisterhood in their understanding of the letter. Each woman interprets the letter from her point of view: a jurist analyses it as the termination of a contract, a translator examines its grammar and a composer turns it into music. Each creates beauty out of the misery reflecting the strength and fortitude of women in contemporary society. With each reinterpretation, the pain is added to each woman. Standing in the gallery it felt easy to remember upsetting break ups of my own. As an audience Calle allows us to make narratives of our own to explore and relive the pain of a break up.

This exhibition leads you into the fictions of other lives, other emotions. It allows you to create a narrative path of your own.

First Year Presentation

2009-12-07T22:20:00.000Z

As the first semester draws to a close, I presented my research to my peers and the faculty.

Clubbed to Death (Lola) Yoland Zauberman 1996

2009-10-28T18:34:00.000Z

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tLJKyGZpEU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sk-KJJfqTTg

When I first saw this film at Chapter Cardiff it reminded me of the old rave days. The music was spot on and the jerky camera angles and movement was real. You feel the crowd. When you look at the club scene you understand it is directed by a woman. She catches the way people interact. Elodie Bouchez's performance of the innocent protagonist stumbling across the Parisian dance scene reflects many first experiences of rave culture. It is gritty and amusing at the same time. The music sound track is a character in itself because of the familiar recognition of the tracks. Its ironic that the tracks have been used in Hollywood films when this film has been forgotten. (Not even available on dvd!)

Research - Reading List

2009-10-28T12:04:00.000Z

Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: 100 Years of the Disc Jockey - Frank Broughton (2006)

Raving '89 - Neville and Gavin Watson (2009)

Night Fever: Club Writing in the "Face", 1980-96 - Richard Benson

Adventures in Wonderland: Decade of Club Culture - Sheryl Garrett (1999)

Lastnightsparty: "Where Were You Last Night?" by Merlin Bronques (2006)

EDMC

2009-10-28T11:46:00.000Z

Last week I joined Dancecult - Journal of Electronic Dance Music and Culture
http://www.dancecult.net/

Dancecult is is a peer-reviewed, open-access e-journal for the study of electronic dance music culture. In the next few months I will begin contacting other graduate students and scholars with similar interests to support my study and research.

Photographs, Narratives and Subcultures - A context for Practice based PhD

2009-10-14T14:34:00.000+01:00

‘Everything is a self-portrait.’ (Palahniuk, 2000, p132 – 133)

‘To photograph is to violate them (the sitters), by seeing them as they never can see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.’ (Sontag, 1977, p81)

‘The photograph is an incomplete utterance, a message that depends on some external matrix of conditions and presuppositions for its readibility.’ (Sekula, 1982)

‘There is a popular notion that the photographer is by nature a voyeur, the last one invited to the party. But I’m not crashing; this is my party. This is my family, my history.’ (Goldin,1986, p6)

The contemporary world is continually in motion where new forms of art mediums are on the rise. In recent years artists and writers seem to be experimenting more with embedding photographs within their works of prose fiction and vice versa. As a result, the emergence of multimodal works of art are now reflecting how people experience everyday life, popular culture and the visual media of television and film by producing not just one story line for the reader/viewer to follow but also multiple narratives to analyse through image and words. This marks the increasing need for critical analysis that can manoeuvre such print multiple narratives. For this reason, photo diaries, multimodal texts and popular culture’s influence on them need to be considered in academic discussion in more depth.

Texts that have had a major impact on me

2009-10-14T14:15:00.001+01:00

Photographers

Nan Goldin

Corinne Day

Cindy Sherman

Valerie Phillips

Elaine Constantine

Artists

Vanessa Beecroft

Sophie Calle

Tracey Emin

Tamara de Lempicka

Sam Taylor Wood

Tracey Moffatt

Gillian Wearing

Literature

Margaret Atwood – The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin

Angela Carter – Nights at the Circus, Love

Brett Easton Ellis – Less than Zero, Rules of Attraction, Glamorama

Scarlet Thomas – Popco, Bright Young Things,

Douglas Coupland - J-Pod, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, Girlfriend in a Coma, Eleanor Rigby,

Ian McEwan – The Cement Garden, Atonement, Enduring love

F Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby, The Beautiful and damned, Tender is the Night

Tama Janowitz – Slaves of New York, Peyton Amberg, A Certain Age

Rebecca Miller – The Private Lives of Pippa Lee

Andre Breton – Nadja

W.G. Sebald – Rings of Saturn

Carol Shields – The Stone Diaries

Jeffrey Eugenides – The Virgin Suicides

Magazines

I-D

The Face

Dazed and Confused

Film

Rules of Attraction (Roger Avary 2002)

The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson 2001)

The Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson 2007)

Rushmore (Wes Anderson 1998)

Timecode (Mike Figgis 2000)

Clubbed to Death (Yolande Zauberman 1996)

Run Lola Run (Tom Tykwer 1998)

Amelie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet 2001)

Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Blake Edwards 1961)

American Beauty (Sam Mendes 1999)

Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly 2001)

Juno (Jason Reitman 2007)

Go (Doug Liman 1999)

Drugstore Cowboy (Gus Van Sant 1989)

Trainspotting (Danny Boyle 1996)

Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (Guy Ritchie 1998)

My Summer of Love (Pawel Pawlikowski 2004)

Atonement (Joe Wright 2007)

Lords of Dogtown (Catherine Hardwicke 2005)

Dazed and Confused (Richard Linklater 1993)

Kids (Larry Clark 1995)

The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola 1999)

Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola 2003)

Plays

Neil LaBute – In the Company of Men, The Shape of Things

Music

Joy Division

Air

Daft Punk

Mylo

Massive Attack

Zero 7

The Shins

Depeche Mode

Sia

Editors

New Order

Beloved

Soul II Soul

Stone Roses

Cocteau Twins

P J Harvey

Leftfield

Groove Armada

Primal Scream

Stars

Goldfrapp

Blondie

The Future Sound of London

Bent

Festivals

The Big Chill Eastnor castle

The Garden Festival Zadar Croatia

Snapshot Fiction - A creative journey through a practice based PhD

2009-10-14T14:13:00.000+01:00

My love for photography began when I first picked up a camera at nine years old. Since that first photograph I have been using this medium to create a visual diary of my world. I started by taking photographs of my friends and family. This developed into a more detailed visual record of my life and the world I lived in as I grew older. At university I began creating visual diaries which involved photographs as well as text and various mementoes such as ticket stubs, beer mats, notes etc. The idea of photography embedded with text has always interested me. Through my art work, my personal visual diaries and my work as a Media and Film studies practitioner I have been drawn back time and time again to photographs and narratives.

Books have always been important to me. I read a lot of books for my job and for fun. Although I enjoy a variety of genres I particularly enjoy reading novels that explore popular culture and relationships. I like to read about youth culture and sub cultures. From F Scott Fitzgerald who captured the zeitgeist of the Jazz age and the bright young things to Douglas Coupland who spoke for Generation X. I enjoy the mindless narcisstic hedonism of Brett Easton Ellis' early work - Less than Zero and Rules of Attraction and the cruel gritty realism of Irvine Welsh. Although Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oats, Tama Janowitz and Angela Carter have offered a feminist perspective of women in the last thirty years I feel that there are very few women writers exploring popular culture in the same way as Coupland, Ellis and Welsh. Are there contemporary women writers exploring subcultures and popular culture?

My fascination with media and film texts led me to study journalism film and broadcasting at university. I was mainly interested in modules that explored photography and film that addressed social trends, issues and problems.

The first time I looked at Nan Goldin’s and Corinne Day’s work made me realise my interest in people and in particular subcultures. Her work made sense to me. I understood that the narrative running through her work deals with some of the issues that I want to explore - dancing, flirting, friendship and music. In a similar way to Day and Goldin a very big source of inspiration for me is music. I think underground parties as a subculture is an important and complex social experience that merits further investigation. Photographing subcultures throws new light upon the way in which our lives are constructed, experienced and lived as we head further into the twenty–first century. Goldin’s ballad examines dancing, music, sex, dressing–up and drugs and how each of these aspects feeds into and creates the unique social group, which makes them radically different from other more socially accepted groups.

Underground parties are a profoundly visceral and corporeal phenomenon, it is a leisure activity that allows individuals to shake off their everyday world identity and subsequently recreate their experience of the world. Like Day and Goldin, the tribe or family I am interested also live their lives at the edge of society. My interest in capturing people and the lives they lead has developed as my expertise and knowledge of photography as a medium has grown. This has in part been because of my use of my Canon Rebel EOS and the various compact digital cameras over the years. My interest and understanding of Photography through Foto gallery courses introduced me to a more theoretical understanding of the medium. The courses allowed me to begin to question photographic images and their ambiguous but potent force in the modern consciousness and to consider whether photography is an art or a tool.

To conclude, my journey through my study has ultimately confirmed to me, that photography is a way to explore the world and myself.