#PROJECT4D

[jessnipperessresearchportfolio]

Skills learnt during Block 1 Assessment

Photoshop

I began with compositing the figures into the supermarket, which required a degree of layering, colour matching, skewing, warping and blurring. I also added reflections, which I used a vertical motion blur and skew to make it look more realistic. Then, to manipulate the image into something surreal and unfamiliar, I relight the entire tableau. I did this by creating a copy of the image and recolouring it, then erasing parts of the top layer image to allow spots of “light” from the image layer underneath. When creating the candlelight, I used the brush tool at a large size and feather, and at a smaller size and feather to create a fall-off light. I then took the brush tool to the figures, drawing on light and shadow to match the light source of the candle. I repeatedly experimented with different blend modes to help achieve the desired effect.In portraits, I created a slow shutter drag emulation using the path blur effect in photoshop.

Photography

I further developed my eye for composition and visual intrigue in this project, seeking out leading lines and framing up repetitive, commercial architecture. I also learnt to shoot with an eye to what the photo could be, rather than what it was, and envision both my figures in the context of the supermarket, and the supermarket with figures as I had to shoot them separately. Through the studio tech workshops, I also was inducted into the photo studio and learnt how to use flash.

Consideration of materiality

Discussions with the print lab technician opened my artistic practice to considering the material outcome of an otherwise intangible and digital work. The experience of seeing how the textures and cool colours in my photos were enhanced by a metallic, glossy paper has shifted the way I consider the outcomes of my photography.

[jessnipperessresearchportfolio]

Part B Artist Statement Block 1

Frozen in my photographs are the night creatures which drift through liminal modern spaces. The audience is confronted with the unfamiliar; in the half obscured glance of an anachronistic figure; the slow shutter blur of an individual masking and unmasking; and the strange tableau of a ritual scene performed by gowned figures; in a supermarket lit by candlelight.

I believe the supermarket, like many hypermodern environments, to be a strange liminal space, a resonating shell of signs and symbols. During the day, it is brought to life by the bustle of people, the movement of bodies, the social interactions; but once it empties out, the music off, the lights dimmed, its true unfamiliar form is revealed. In my photomedia series, I take this iconic environment of a modern consumer world, constructed with marketing images and edifices of illusion, and strip back the layers of illusion and spectacle to suggest how the supermarket is almost a place of worship for the deified signs and symbols of our modern society. The central piece interpolates this idea through a ritual tableau, where candle light and cloaked figures create a jarring incongruity with the supermarket setting, and the focus of their supplications, a puppet on a shrine, hints to this idea of “image worship” . I further develop this motif of image and obfuscation through the use of masks and a slow-shutter emulation technique in the accompanying portraits, conveying that sense of confusion and loss of self in liminal spaces.

The work elicits a sense of strangeness, of unfamiliarity and unease within a viewer, and encourages them to reflect on how places can become deeply unfamiliar in different lights.

[jessnipperessresearchportfolio]

Part A Artist Statement Block 1

In that strange way that things become crystal and warped at night, once the bustle and performance of the crowds has trickled away, familiar spaces can become stranger, subtler, almost otherworldly…

I’m fascinated by liminality and transitory spaces in our commercial, modern world. To me, ‘sense of place’ in our modern, digital and post industrial world is a distorted idea, as people feel increasingly placeless and drifting. I have chosen to explore this idea through a series of surreal photographs set in a supermarket, which is an ideal instance of a hypermodern environment.

Supermarkets, late at night, once the facade is seemingly dropped, always evoke this strange sense of liminality in me. My perspective becomes similar to that of a Bauderlian flaneur, drifting and disembodied. For this reason, I wanted to use photography, which feels flaneurial and immediate, but to stylise the supermarket scenes almost beyond recognition with colour grading and imposing juxtaposing figures and scenes into the world. I want to further elaborate on the idea of disembodiment and a loss of self through some slow shutter portraiture, which distorts people’s features and gives them a sense of ghostly impermanence.

[jessnipperessresearchportfolio]

Block 1 Assessment - Night Creatures