I missed graduation, in both senses of the word; I was missing from it and I missed out, on an event, on a celebration of achievement, and, on closure. I tried to erase the upcoming event from memory, but countless Facebook posts of my peers, their proud parents and Ralph Fiennes were not letting me get away that easily. Jealousy and regret ensue.
The truth is I couldn't afford to go, not only the costs of hiring a gown, tickets and travel, but the added expenses of further time away from work. Yes my parents offered to pay but I already owe them so much as the costs of University life stretch much further than the current student loan.
So I questioned: Who was the ceremony for?
Not for me.
And now what? Take an unpaid internship? A minimum wage job? Or carve out my own career?
Current Salary: £8.00 per hour.
Travel Costs: Nil.
Rent: £1000 per month (divided by two)
Bills: Oh who knows anymore.
Debt: Infinite.
Lesson Learnt: Yes. Perhaps.
London 2015: Where the streets are paved in gold, just not yours.
Sunday, 19 July 2015
Tuesday, 23 June 2015
Friday, 29 May 2015
Review and Analysis
Possible titles: Do Not Disturb or The Red Carpet
Experimental film and installation.
First draft complete, although needs consistency and build up, however when it works it works well.
Part 1:
Initial travelling house scene and abstract number narrative sets up nicely, interesting visuals that flow well, the difficulty being in when to have silence / no visual. The visuals will at times bring you back to the installed room and it's important references relate from film fantasy to experienced reality for the viewer although the difficulty at this stage is not being able to review the work in spacial context, although at this stage I'm confident that I will have enough time to review this aspect before the deadline. Dolls house footage could be added here although to what effect I don't know. I feel that I want to enforce the roles of personal / social as going back and forth between the personal belonging to the room and the social as viewed experience through the film.
Part 2:
The tension is building but must remain consistent with visual / audio references to part 1. I have experimented with adding other sourced narratives from interviews etc but as yet have not found anything that quite fits, however I think this will fall into place in time.
Ads:
I enjoy the vagueness of the first constructed ad. Cleansing and ritual are important and I feel the ads add a further layer to narrative. Could possibly end / begin (loop) the plane footage and audio to add a sense of arriving / leaving and a sense of the elsewhere.
Shots to film:
Dolls house
long wide slow moving pathways as per locations sited. Maze like.
Still moments, although these could be converted to moments of stillness within the installed room and may not be necessary. Also these could be interpreted as too Chantal Ackerman Hotel Monterey.
Installation notes:
Dado rail, dark bottom light top for screening. False wall, door refurb, back of door map and red carpet. Also possibly a wash basin depending on discreetness.
Experimental film and installation.
First draft complete, although needs consistency and build up, however when it works it works well.
Part 1:
Initial travelling house scene and abstract number narrative sets up nicely, interesting visuals that flow well, the difficulty being in when to have silence / no visual. The visuals will at times bring you back to the installed room and it's important references relate from film fantasy to experienced reality for the viewer although the difficulty at this stage is not being able to review the work in spacial context, although at this stage I'm confident that I will have enough time to review this aspect before the deadline. Dolls house footage could be added here although to what effect I don't know. I feel that I want to enforce the roles of personal / social as going back and forth between the personal belonging to the room and the social as viewed experience through the film.
Part 2:
The tension is building but must remain consistent with visual / audio references to part 1. I have experimented with adding other sourced narratives from interviews etc but as yet have not found anything that quite fits, however I think this will fall into place in time.
Ads:
I enjoy the vagueness of the first constructed ad. Cleansing and ritual are important and I feel the ads add a further layer to narrative. Could possibly end / begin (loop) the plane footage and audio to add a sense of arriving / leaving and a sense of the elsewhere.
Shots to film:
Dolls house
long wide slow moving pathways as per locations sited. Maze like.
Still moments, although these could be converted to moments of stillness within the installed room and may not be necessary. Also these could be interpreted as too Chantal Ackerman Hotel Monterey.
Installation notes:
Dado rail, dark bottom light top for screening. False wall, door refurb, back of door map and red carpet. Also possibly a wash basin depending on discreetness.
Monday, 25 May 2015
Room 237 - Symbolism, Interpretation and Intention in Kubrick's Shining
Theories that the true sense of horror generated by The Shining in fact stems from the intended subliminal imagery meticulously placed by Kubrick throughout the film referencing the genocide of the American Indians and the Holocaust. If it is true that direct reconstructions of historical monstrosity become in someway a parody and lean towards fabled production, devoid of any authentic terror connection, then The Shining is a true masterpiece in that it is able to replicate the individual experience of the horror of war.
Points to review:
Mythology: The Labyrinth and The Minotaur
Nomos and Polis: The nomad and the state, Moon landings and secrecy.
The Grid, The Hotel and Psychoanalysis: Zizek.
Intention and Interpretation: The gaze of the object.
Monday, 11 May 2015
Horror, Architecture and the Sublime
Source: Horror in Architecture
Joshua Comaroff and Ong Ker-Shing
An exploration of horror in the visual. Often the horror aspect is achieved through the supplementary audio of soundtrack, or audio alone as in the old time radio suspense hour editions. Is it imperfection or the perfection of image that is seen as horrific? The sublime and abject lie in the fantastical horror, it is able to present the world as it might be by bringing to light evidence of things previously unseen. The double, the perfect twin or clone identifies with the horrific, the mirror being the frequented fictional catalyst in many a horror fable. The room left untouched and exactly as it was after it's inhabitants have departed becomes a double in that the possessions belong to another time, the domesticity a parody of itself, the objects becoming ghosts themselves, incontinent and hollow.
Repetition follows the double closely, in the sense that there can only be one authentic original. A street of perfectly duplicated houses comes to mind, Stepford Wives style. As we move through such a place, time becomes redundant, the street becomes a labyrinth with no landmarks, no beginning, no end. Groundhog Day. Place cannot exist convincingly without it's reference in time, without time, it becomes a void, somewhere lost in the laminal, like a dreamscape or nightmare, an abyss.
Joshua Comaroff and Ong Ker-Shing
An exploration of horror in the visual. Often the horror aspect is achieved through the supplementary audio of soundtrack, or audio alone as in the old time radio suspense hour editions. Is it imperfection or the perfection of image that is seen as horrific? The sublime and abject lie in the fantastical horror, it is able to present the world as it might be by bringing to light evidence of things previously unseen. The double, the perfect twin or clone identifies with the horrific, the mirror being the frequented fictional catalyst in many a horror fable. The room left untouched and exactly as it was after it's inhabitants have departed becomes a double in that the possessions belong to another time, the domesticity a parody of itself, the objects becoming ghosts themselves, incontinent and hollow.
Repetition follows the double closely, in the sense that there can only be one authentic original. A street of perfectly duplicated houses comes to mind, Stepford Wives style. As we move through such a place, time becomes redundant, the street becomes a labyrinth with no landmarks, no beginning, no end. Groundhog Day. Place cannot exist convincingly without it's reference in time, without time, it becomes a void, somewhere lost in the laminal, like a dreamscape or nightmare, an abyss.
Thursday, 7 May 2015
Video Art and the Home Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36WUgFMDY-M
Gillian Wearing
2 into 1
1997
Home video, Wearing creates a audio / visual swap of a mother talking about her two sons and vice versa, a piece which has been linked to the process of the ethnographer within the artist. The result is something very disturbing, the mixed narratives being presented by mismatched blank faces, violent undertones coming from the words being spoken. The role of the mother within the family alludes to an inferior, almost victimised task, the opinion of which seems inherited from their father. The audio of actual interview over script proves compelling and conclusive.
Gillian Wearing
2 into 1
1997
Home video, Wearing creates a audio / visual swap of a mother talking about her two sons and vice versa, a piece which has been linked to the process of the ethnographer within the artist. The result is something very disturbing, the mixed narratives being presented by mismatched blank faces, violent undertones coming from the words being spoken. The role of the mother within the family alludes to an inferior, almost victimised task, the opinion of which seems inherited from their father. The audio of actual interview over script proves compelling and conclusive.
Wednesday, 6 May 2015
Thursday, 12 March 2015
Links
 |
| 'Projection 27', Rosie Keane, 2012, digital collage / installation. |
Reduced to it's very basics the structure of the grid has appeared somewhat unintentionally in my work for years and for me, I think somewhere subconsciously it must represent some kind of personal association with interior vs exterior, internal vs external and fixed space vs transient. To be within the grid offers shelter and protection, but also enclosure and imprisonment. Just as a prison cell, a hotel room, a bedroom or a house conforms to my obsession with 'The Grid'.
 | ||||
| 'Ornaments', Rosie Keane, 2012, photograph of installation. |
A vacancy, the uninhabited, also refers to a hotel room or a property which is waiting for something, for inhabitancy, so in that way the vacant and empty can lie on either side of the grid. What this grid means in terms of my practice I still don't know, but somehow I feel as if it is important. It is now that I release that the three figures in Bacon's triptych are also enclosed in the grid. Perhaps this was something I was aware of all along. Not only compartmentalized by their arrangement within their frames, but also by the lines within each separate painting, the figures exist within the enclosed.
Building
1949-1955: Hunstanton School and the Photography of Life and Art.
How to get to Bacon to building? I'm attracted to The Tate's current exhibit on The Hunstanton School, an architectural exhibit displaying the process of collaboration between sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, photographer Nigel Henderson and architects Alison and Peter Smithson to create, Parallel of Life and Art, an exhibition at the ICA. There is something reflective of my own work in these images, an absence of person within structures built for occupation, for purpose of human use. The images shown are of a school, the abject enters our senses in the unnameable jarring of a school without children, without teachers, without objects of use.
How then does this collaboration relate to my own practice? It relates in the way that it is concerned with the transient place. Not in the way of a place where people wait, in the liminal, like the Hotel or the airport, but in the way that these are places waiting for something of their own. To be fulfilled with the use of their design and intention. Also in the way that the large scale photographs move across the wall, across the space and drift into to distant when encountering the crease where to walls meet, the place in the wall which does not serve the purpose of wall, especially in terms of the white cube. The creases in the wall belong to Derrida's undecidables, both supplementary and absent of purpose simultaneously. Perhaps this is something that could be useful to think about during my practice. I'm told this process of the film moving into the distance at a certain point in this way is called a squeeze, or a grab, I need to look this up.
How then does this collaboration relate to my own practice? It relates in the way that it is concerned with the transient place. Not in the way of a place where people wait, in the liminal, like the Hotel or the airport, but in the way that these are places waiting for something of their own. To be fulfilled with the use of their design and intention. Also in the way that the large scale photographs move across the wall, across the space and drift into to distant when encountering the crease where to walls meet, the place in the wall which does not serve the purpose of wall, especially in terms of the white cube. The creases in the wall belong to Derrida's undecidables, both supplementary and absent of purpose simultaneously. Perhaps this is something that could be useful to think about during my practice. I'm told this process of the film moving into the distance at a certain point in this way is called a squeeze, or a grab, I need to look this up.
From Bacon to Building
Where to start? Start at the beginning, but then if you are starting
something you must already be at the beginning, so why worry about where
to start? What's important is that you are starting, that you have
started something, that you have put idea into action, at least that's
what I'm telling myself right now.
Writing for me is important. It is a way to assess and evaluate my thoughts, which without the act of writing never develop further than the chaotic transient. So now, after completing my thesis I have come to the realization that despite my unwillingness to sit, think, and write, I am capable of a deeper form of communication, through writing, than my often unfocused daily conversations would imply.
So without any further speculation I begin at the beginning, at the start, with Bacon, Francis Bacon.
Site: Tate Britain Date: 09/03/15
My intention for my visit was to find inspiration to kick start my writing and with that in mind I start with Francis Bacon's triptych, 'Three Studies for the Base of a Crucifixion' c.1944, a personal favourite in The Tate's permanent collection, however I do not intend this to be a review / critique on every famous piece of art out there but rather a vessel for connecting my research and interests with my own artistic practice.
How to connect a personal favourite with my own practice? Especially when the form of my own practice is still in the process of becoming? I could go into the context and intention of Bacon's triptych, but this will only serve to broaden and parade my knowledge of fact and speculation and would not inform the reader of anything new or original about Bacon that cannot already be read elsewhere. So I intend to review by comparison, with something that is closer to the form of my becoming practice, also to be found in The Tate, in one of their temporary exhibits:
1949-1955: Hunstanton School and the Photography of Life and Art.
Writing for me is important. It is a way to assess and evaluate my thoughts, which without the act of writing never develop further than the chaotic transient. So now, after completing my thesis I have come to the realization that despite my unwillingness to sit, think, and write, I am capable of a deeper form of communication, through writing, than my often unfocused daily conversations would imply.
So without any further speculation I begin at the beginning, at the start, with Bacon, Francis Bacon.
Site: Tate Britain Date: 09/03/15
My intention for my visit was to find inspiration to kick start my writing and with that in mind I start with Francis Bacon's triptych, 'Three Studies for the Base of a Crucifixion' c.1944, a personal favourite in The Tate's permanent collection, however I do not intend this to be a review / critique on every famous piece of art out there but rather a vessel for connecting my research and interests with my own artistic practice.
How to connect a personal favourite with my own practice? Especially when the form of my own practice is still in the process of becoming? I could go into the context and intention of Bacon's triptych, but this will only serve to broaden and parade my knowledge of fact and speculation and would not inform the reader of anything new or original about Bacon that cannot already be read elsewhere. So I intend to review by comparison, with something that is closer to the form of my becoming practice, also to be found in The Tate, in one of their temporary exhibits:
1949-1955: Hunstanton School and the Photography of Life and Art.
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