ar3006

[ar3006]

Research Artist #8

Andrea Miksys

DISKO is a photography project by American-Lithuanian photographer Andrew Miksys, shot over the period of ten years while traveling in rural Lithuania. The project documents nightclubs and parties in crumbling Soviet era cultural centers. The project is not just about nostalgia; it is also a reflection on freedom, cultural renaissance, and how subcultures shape political consciousness. Especially relevant to Miksys's later work in Belarus documenting the intersection of youth nightlife and political activism.

I’m drawn to Andrew Miksys' DISKO because it captures a profound moment in history where teenagers, emerging from an era of political oppression, try to create something joyful and normal amid chaos. The images feel both intimate and surreal: young adults dressed in party clothes, dancing in spaces that still echo a controlling regime. The energy in the photographs is a party, yet the settings are haunting, filled with visual remnants of the past. This work resonates with me because it shows how creativity and resilience thrive even in rotting or constrained spaces. It inspires me to consider how my own creative practice can document transformation and how art can create room for joy, rebellion, and recollection all at once. Miksys teaches us that youth culture is not simply a reflection of change; it can be a catalyst for it.

[ar3006]

Research Artist #7

Chris Lael Larson

Chris Lael Larson is an artist based in Portland, Oregon, whose practice explores the complicated interdependence between consumer culture, waste, and visual culture. In Product Flows, Larson engages with individually produced waste as a critical and creative exercise. These groupings refer in a visual manner to things like studies on audiences, sales graphs, test flights, and trend research. After having constructed the scenes, Larson photographs them using regular product photography techniques. The concluding pieces are dreamlike, impactful, and judgmental. They force the viewer to confront the dissonance between the thrill of consumption and the cost of waste, excess, and environmental impact.

I like Product Flows because it's just packed with color and visually rich you're brought right up short. What I am most inspired by is the artist's ability to take things and commonly trash into a whole new reality and meaning. It makes me think about the ways that I can set scenes using what's already available.

http://www.fractionmagazine.com/chris-lael-larson

[ar3006]

Research Artist #6

Susan Burnstine

Susan Burnstine is a fine art photographer from Los Angeles recognized for her eerie, dreamlike photographs. Her Absence of Being series addresses memory, loss, and the invisible presence of the past. The photographs in this series are intentionally blurred and surreal, such as fragments of memory or fleeting glances. Photographed in low light or soft contrast, the images tend to have the nature of moments pulled from a dream familiarity, yet intangible.

I really like Absence of Being because it reminds me that a photo need not be in focus to be effective. Its utilization of blur and shadow to create a surreal effect is beautiful. It's a dream frozen in one moment of life, something fleeting and emotional that you can't quite reach out and touch. That concept speaks to me so deeply and makes me want to permit imperfection in my own photography. This project reminds me that photography can be just as much about feeling and atmosphere as it is about clarity or detail. It's amazing how much feeling can be communicated through something so soft and subtle.

http://www.fractionmagazine.com/susan-burnstine

http://www.susanburnstine.com/

[ar3006]

Research Artist #5

Paul Thulin

Paul Thulin is a photography artist and instructor from Richmond, Virginia. His photos often pursue the interests of memory, history, mythology, and family within visually thick and multi-layered images. Pine Tree Ballads is an extended photography series built from his own family's many-generations' history to Gray's Point. This series of work synthesizes visual narrative with personal memory and family memory, using the rugged landscape of Maine as both literal terrain and symbolic environment. The series of work is made up of surreal and atmospheric photographs. Images of woods, foggy fields, sea views, relatives, and artifacts that are infused with a haunting sense of timelessness. The photographs often have the dream-like quality, with subtle suggestions of the supernatural in everyday settings. Thulin labels the work as "a poetic vision of land, family, and time," wherein past spirits inhale through leaves and pictures bear the weight of tales transmitted generation by generation.

I adore Pine Tree Ballads for its eeriness, almost haunted by its beautiful atmosphere in the best way. There's something in the photographs that leaves me lost and somehow still home, as if I've stumbled into a dream that remembers me. It's a tale of an old family, but not forgotten, and that resonates with me so deeply. The project inspires me to take more "creeper" photo shoots that do not shy away from being unusual, dark, or unsettling, as long as they can continue to be warm and meaningful. It also inspires me to remember that photography is not just capturing what you observe, but capturing what you perceive or feel.

[ar3006]

Research Artist #4

Yun Peng

Yun Peng is Chinese-American painter and Professor of Chinese film and literature at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. Hotel Quarantine is her deeply intimate visual and word-based record of the journey she made from Honolulu to her relatives in China at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic during 2020. The photographic component of the project is stark, emotive images taken within the quarantine hotel room she stayed in after finally arriving in China. The photographs are low-key, quiet, and minimal, recording solitary objects, bare walls, bedclothes, meals, and shadows; tedious details of the hotel room elevated by emotion and context. The mood is one of loneliness and stasis, a manifestation of the concept of liminal space, where one is suspended between departure and arrival,and reconciliation.

I like Hotel Quarantine because it is so nostalgic and emotionally still. The muted images of the hotel room remind me of those strange, in-between moments in life. The ones where time is drawn out and everything is held in suspension. The show has a liminal space quality that I find haunting but peaceful. It also does something significant for me as an artist: that you can make strong and meaningful pictures anywhere, even in the most limited spaces, such as in a single room. The story and picture makes me think differently about how personal stories can be re-told through photographs.

http://www.fractionmagazine.com/yun-peng

[ar3006]

Research Artist #3

Carol Erb

Carol Erb is an American photographer whose work examines the constructed limits of public and private life. Her series, House and Hedge, privacy, includes dreamy and minimalist digital composites of photographically posed photographs of actual buildings merged with symbolic botanical fences, hedges, shrubs, and walls. That implies mystery, and psychological isolation. Her photographed houses are either flattened, arranged as sets, or relocated outside the real-world, against inky, bare backgrounds, all of which contributes to a dreamy and eerie mood. Perspective is clean and frontal, yet the composition experiments with oddity and atmosphere, implying something hidden off to the right side of the image.

Carol Erb's stuff, I think, is really neat. The surreal mood of the photos is what draws me in. The way she makes us feel like something mundane, a house or a bush, is off or weird is really interesting. It got me to start thinking about how different camera angles, composition, and digital manipulation can really change how we see an image. Her work influences me to be more intentional regarding the manner in which I arrange my own pictures and to try to make photographs that make people pause or slightly uncomfortable. Her photographs have a mood that influences me to further explore the mood in my own work.

[ar3006]

Research Artist #2

Alessandra Sangguinetti

Alessandra Sanguinetti is an American-Argentine photographer born in New York in 1968 and raised in Argentina between 1970 and 2003. On the Sixth Day is a body of photographs and a photo book completed in 2005. The work chronicles the lives and deaths of domesticated animals in rural Argentina, south of Buenos Aires. The title refers to the sixth day of creation in the Bible, when humans and animals were created, suggesting the spiritual and existential imagery the photographs contain. With natural lighting and close-framed composition, Sanguinetti creates a respectful stillness and poignant beauty. The photographs move from sunny, soft natural light to darker, to more dramatic shades that suggest changes in mood and deeper emotional context.

I am very fond of On the Sixth Day because it is such a strong emotional and visual storyteller. The book's movement from life to death and back again reflects the natural cycles we take for granted. Most that hit me was the way Sanguinetti sets a mood with the ordering of lighting. Specifically the way that the center of the book goes dark and becomes more mellow, setting a dramatic emotional low that feels intentional and impactful. The depiction of animal mortality was gruesome but not overly gorey; it felt part of an overall message about the cycle of life, served up with honesty and empathy. It leads me to consider how I could use tone, order, and light to narrate a story or elicit emotion in my own writing and artwork.

[ar3006]

Research Artist #1

Gary Schneider

Gary Schneider, born in South Africa in 1954, is a photographer and visual artist known for his innovative use of biological and scientific imagery. Genetic Self-Portrait is one of his most famous works, completed in 1998. It contains a series of images obtained using different methods of scientific and medical visualization such as X-rays, and DNA sequencing to represent a self-portrait based not on outward appearance but internal and microscopic structures. The work includes images of Schneider's own retinal scan, fingerprints, chromosomes, and DNA strands, among others. Rather than providing a regular portrait, the art pieces reveal the biological and genetic matter that constitutes his being.

I especially love Genetic Self-Portrait as being beautifully distinct and inspiring. The creative spin on the idea of a "self-portrait" re-imagined as genetics and internal construction is inventive enough to push aside traditional ideas about identity. It inspires me to think about what an image can be, particularly as it relates to myself. There is a strange abstraction and strangeness to the images that renders them intriguing, encouraging me to examine further unusual and experimental approaches in my own work. The work encourages

[ar3006]

Final Project

[ar3006]

Proposal: Doll making

The process of doll making. Photos of the progress of the doll’s creation and all the ups and downs. I like taking close up shots of subject matters so I thought of creating a small doll to take pictures with around set locations. I'll gather supplies for this doll and then take pictures of the process and then end it with a mini photoshoot of the doll in set locations. Planning to use scrap fabric and air dry clay to create a mini doll. Also using wires and stuffing to give support to the body's form. I want to try to create something I have never created before. I want to document the progress of creating and I thought making a doll would be interesting. Document the progress of creating a lil being out of almost nothing to become something to be cherished.

[ar3006]

Elements of Art and Principles of Art definitions:

Elements of Art

Line: A mark of a direction with a longer length than width. Can come straight, curve, or zigzag.

Shape: Shapes are a close line and come in geometric or organic. 

Form: It is shapes but in a 3D dimensional form.

Space: The area around within or between images, object or elements.

Color: Color is the most expressive element and can be bright or dark.

Value: The relative lightness and darkness of color. A gradient is a series of values, from lightest to darkest.

Texture: The tactile qualities of a surface or visual representations of such surface qualities.

Principles of Art

Balance: Creates a sense of stability and cohesiveness.

Movement: Indicate the direction your eyes explore the work.

Rhythm: Creates a sense of flow and connection.

Proportion: A nose fits onto a face the way you would expect it.

Unity: Establish an overall cohesion of the work.

Variety: Create a sense chaos, harmoniously.

Emphasis: Creates a focal point to accentuate a message.

Harmony: Creates a sense of flow and connection.

[ar3006]

Scavenger Hunt for my photography class.

[ar3006]

Weekend Photo Story Project

Good Morning World. I think this picture was taken around 2pm.

Good morning to my old dog. He is an old man. He is not amused with me sticking a camera to his face.

Took pictures of the tree branches in my backyard. Wanted to test out the camera in an outdoor environment.

My other dog came out to check on me and wonder why I'm taking pictures of the trees. As you can see, he questions why I'm just standing there pointing a camera at him. He is concerned.

I also took pictures of my sister-in-law's dog. I was turning on their room light for better lighting. As you can see, he is also concern why I'm pointing a camera at him and he was watching every move I make. He does not like the camera I'm using, especially the shutter noise.

My other dog. He is an awkward dog. But he doesn't care about the camera so he isn't scared by it. But he is never sitting still long enough, this was the only shot I got of him being still. He was distracted by my mom having food in her hands.

Night time is drawing time.

The mines call to me. So a little break from drawing won't hurt me that much.

I like green tea a lot. I was sick so I had to drink a lot of liquids.

Sister-in-law's dog running away from me once he notice I was pointing the camera at him again.

I spend my entire weekend at home. Nothing much happened besides me tormenting my dogs for photo shoots.

[ar3006]

Class blog# 1 - Introduction

Hello, My name is Andrea.

My major is animation. I have no idea how to use a camera properly so I know I will need a lot of help. I hope to use the photography skills I will learn in class as my own reference material for my own artwork later down the line.

Likes: I like green tea and indie games

Goals: I would like to graduate school.

Hobbies: Digital drawing.