FIN 230 Unit 2

Critique Presentation: BODY (for November 16, 2021) – a selection and a bit of a narrative of my process for this unit.

At the centre of my consciousness for this unit was the representation of my father in his dying hours. I had wanted to move on to something else in terms of what I was thinking about, but I was not able to until last week (November 10), when in the photo studio I felt suddenly “done” with this body, and all the entities that surrounded him. In the photo studio that day, where I was set up to take another series of photographs, I was unable even to pick up the sculpture, and was relieved that I had another small project that I wanted to experiment with. I hope to capture the progress in the next series of photographs.

The “body” unit quite literally centred around this body, a small representative sculpture based on a water colour drawing I had done of my father in his dying hours.
In the first photo shoot session with all the figures, many of which I refer to as entities, I arranged them in a tableau, where they each had their place in relation to the body. In this session, I also recorded a 45 minute video of myself talking about the entities, and how I had made them, and why I had made them, and what some of the elements of each was referencing.
My favourite shot from that shoot are these three “bodies” shown from the back of the tableau and facing the lighting. This is where the narrative starts to emerge.
The following week, I focused the photo shoot on the entities interacting in groups of two, three, and four. I created a narrative of a number of shots that I annotated and posted on my 230 wordpress site (see below).

At the same time as I was preparing for and doing the photo shoots during class time and during afternoon studio time, I was also making a few more “bodies” to add to the collection of entities.

I made “Jive Body” which I quickly photographed and then gave away, instructing the recipient that the wire is to be attached to or running towards anything that she thinks will give or receive energy.
I also made Cat Body, which will remain with the collection of entities until I decide it is time to disperse them.
I took Cat Body to the photo studio for my final photo shoot for this unit, for which I set up the light table. While I was unhappy and restless during the photoshoot because of the dark lines that were showing up across the light table (lines that didn’t show up in my viewer), when I got home and looked at the photographs on my computer screen, I started to like them.

After “Cat Body”, and after the last photo shoot, during which I realized I was “finished” with the direction I had been taking, I sat down and made three “Baby Bodies”. “Cat Body” is a transitional figure that transitioned me from using acrylic paint to using water colour paint on the small sculptures I have been making.

The Cat Body is also transitioning me away from the tableau that is centred around the figure in the final hours of his death. It was time to leave that body alone.

I knew that the baby bodies would be completely watercolour. What I didn’t know was that while I had intended to make a baby with its mother, both from clay, but…

Mother and Child

and then I made two more “baby bodies”

I tried to make a fourth Baby Body, but it didn’t work. It demanded a tail and some ears.

As I was making and completing this piece, I knew I was “finished” with these figures. My fingers no long cooperated with my mind’s eye, and that part of my maker-self started to resist making. I’m not sure what is next, but maybe for the third unit I will make a 180 degrees into something else.
“Avarice”

A final piece about “body” and Yoko Ono

In her current exhibit at the VAG in Vancouver, Yoko Ono is asking women to send photographs of their eyes, accompanied by stories about how they have been harmed by others, just because they are women.

I took photographs of my friend’s eyes, and she was going to write a piece.

She was struggling with the writing piece, so I brought her into the photo studio and while sitting in the dark with my camera on “silent” and able to take photos by pressing the screen, I talked to her about the project, and I took about sixty photographs of her.

I had not intended this to be part of this unit, but three photos in particular, which keep her identity private, are included below. And this side project feels relevant.

End of Presentation on “body” unit 2
critique notes

I reviewed some of the comments and tracked down Rosalind’s Krauss’s essay on the expanded field of sculpture, seen first in modernist sculptures and continuing into postmodern sculptures. Using a field model from mathematics called a Klein model, Krauss demonstrates that sculpture, which through a modernist lens was generally a commemorative monument designed to sit in a specific place, and in the Klein model was described as “not-landscape and not-architecture”, as sculpture slipped into postmodernism, it started to integrate or itself become part of the landscape and/or part of the architecture. (re-read the article to understand this better)

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