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Head to this link to see development of the collective publication assessment 

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rock (5) - 2015 + Statement

Making little pieces that could be left in public spaces, in walls and cracks, out of fimo clay, glitter and beads has been my main aim. Mainly to make them interesting so in the places I chose to place them, they stand out from the site. They contrast against these sites, refusing to fit in where they are placed, they don’t necessarily fit. People may walk right past these pieces and they will go unnoticed. Others might walk past stop and go back to have a look and take a photo. The success of these works therefore stem from the people who respond to them, it requires a collaboration between the form, the site and the audience.

Art is brought to the masses, it becomes unlocked and free from constraining white walls, brought out from a fantasy into a reality. We all live in the real, so why shouldn’t the works that we make live here too? After all they have been inspired by each of our own realities. I think of this because of a recent interview Ice Cube made while promoting the film Straight outta Crompton. Essentially he speaks about the argument as to why the content of rap music is so violent, and he says we wrote about the world around us, the world that was immediate to us, and that happened to be gun culture, violence and drugs. We all take inspiration from what’s around us and yet we often place it into a sterile environment free of those inspirations that originally inspired the works, so by actually placing these works back into the environment that they were inspired from, I could show that we are actually rebelling.

Mark Jenkins is one such artist who takes inspiration from sites and his installations respond to the space. He makes his installations humorous (toast gutter) and I really wanted to try and take in the spaces I wanted to use for this project and make forms that both fit into the environment, while also sticky out, making them feel like an odd addition to the area but also weirdly fit. A common name is one such artist that I think does this very well. She started the art series “Urban Geode”, street installation pieces made from paper and resin. Its now become a global project with others placing her pieces into the streets of their cities, this collaboration is an act of rebellion in both the way the artworks are created and installed and how people can find geode’s that “seem to explode out of the walls, frames and cracks in the city”. Something she has also said, that I’ve taken inspiration from is how an audience should participate with street art and cities itself, “Take a look around, notice the small things. Find wonder and beauty in the mundane and forgotten.”

I’ve always been inspired by the Rocks in Sydney, being the first settlement of the English colony in Australia it was made using the tools brought with them and materials found in the area, they had to make the settlement by hand without the big industrial processes with have today and because of this, it retains a character that the rest of the CBD doesn’t have. 

After decided that I wanted to do something that involved installation pieces, I thought using the rocks as the destination for the objects would be a good choice, considering the inspiration I get from the spaces there up and around the argyle cut and stairs. Thinking about that space there is a particular colour/material scheme that pops to mind, sandstone, concrete, steel/metal, brickwork and cobblestones. I didn’t want any work I made to blend into the landscape, I wanted it to stand out so it rebelled against what is there, ultimately so that it’s visible. This made me think back to Ai Wei Wei’s coloured vases which have two components; the coloured paint which stands out and the han dynasty vase that acts as the paints canvas. In many of the pieces you can still see the vase underneath which displays colours similar to scheme of the rocks. Anything that goes against the natural scheme of the area its placed in will stand out to people as they walk by. So ultimately, I wished to look at how forms can rebel against their space, while also fitting into the site well. 

Bibliography

Mornings interview with Ice Cube: http://www.9jumpin.com.au/show/mornings/latest/2015/september/i-had-to-make-sure-he-was-ultimately-the-best-man-for-the-job/ 

A common name: https://www.facebook.com/ACommonName/info?tab=page_info

Mark Jenkins: http://www.xmarkjenkinsx.com/outside.html

Ai Wei Wei, “coloured vases” before and after pictures: http://www.phaidon.com/resource/p4889-1014.jpg

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rock (4) - 2015

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rock (3) - 2015

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rock (2) - 2015

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rock (1) - 2015

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http://little-people.blogspot.com.au/

Some street installation works can go unnoticed, and this is sometimes due to scale. Unlike the size of Anish Kapoor's work, little people make their works small, so as to add a small something to each space and utilise the interesting aesthetics of sites better.

[georgiadower]

I’ve chosen to use acrylic paints, glitter beads and crystal pieces in order to add interest to the clay baked forms. Additionally I also decided to make some further forms in orange colour clay to also create interest. Plus I think a coloured clay should stand out from a wall in the city quite well. 

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This project is particularly inspiring to me as it uses the spaces within cities to create little pieces of beauty. I think looking back at my clay forms so far they need to be more colourful to make them pop out of the spaces I put them in better. 

Once your eye is awaken, you’ll find treasures on the street. Check the work of A Common Name making the world a treasure hunt.

[georgiadower]

Using polymer clay (oven bake clay) originally made a triangle styled form which was very hard to shape to be angular and once baked I found the shape of the form to not be that overly interesting. 

So the next forms I made, I wanted to make more soft in shape and less jarring. To do this I decided to stick to curls and twists in the clay. Once I had finished shaping them and baked them, I couldn’t help but feel that the shapes were oddly organic in nature, kind of like flowers. 

I think these pieces could work very well in spaces that are industrial in nature or are the opposite of the form itself, such as places with lots of brickwork and clean angles. 

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Anish Kapoor

Thinking about installation street art, I wanted to think about what works were extremely obvious in a public space due to there scale. Kapoor’s Cloud Gate in Chicago stands out because of its scale and people can choose to walk right by it or interact with the work by seeing their image bend in the mirror facade. I find this work an act of rebellion because it doesn’t look like the objects that surround it in the city.

I also find that this work and other installation works can also be acts of collaboration, because they require the audience to interact, look and pay attention to it in a public space to make it an actually piece of work, because, unlike works in a gallery which already have the attention of audiences due to their choice to come to the space, street installation works must I feel work harder to gain the same attention. 

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Mark Jenkins

After finding an interesting post with Jenkins’ work, I thought I go looking for further works by him. What I really like about his street installation works is that the places and sites inform the works, not the other way around. Each piece uses the site to make meaning, which at times is rather comedic, with the drain producing toast.

[georgiadower]

Really enjoy how the piece is using the bent pole as part of the work.

Image of the Day:

Street Installations in Washington, DC by Mark Jenkins. I’m in awe of his talent.

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Dope creations, inflatable installations! Check out the works by Filthy Luker

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An interesting way of using a space to inform an artwork, without each other (the lights and the space) their would be no artwork. They rely on each other.

Kinematope [gare d'austerlitz]

Artist: Pablo Valbuena

GIF: The Gasoline Station

[georgiadower]

Analogue vs. Digital

We are so used to using digital cameras with the availability to edit while we take - delete and micromanage what survives and what doesn’t. Going back to disposable cameras and film cameras means you don’t know how something will come out until you have developed the film, some maybe of no use to you while others might be beyond your expectations. 

I took photos using instant film cameras, with which you run a risk of not getting any good photos, its also a financial risk as film often has high costs ($2 per piece).

I went out into my area and took photos of things I thought would look cool, on my smaller polaroid camera the flash ruined many of the photos by taking away just the exposure of the natural lighting onto the film, which often resulted in the over-exposure. My larger camera, I have less film for so I had to chose carefully what I wanted to shoot, I could also turn the flash off on it but I found most of the photos to be out of focus because I was too close to thing I was taking a shot of.

Out of all the shots I took, I found that I only liked 2. This is part of the rebellion against digital photography, in film photography you can only discard photos after you have taken them, so you run the risk of losing material. I often find however some of the better shots actually come out of partaking in this risk. What is also interesting is that it requires me the photographer and the subject to interact with each other. I think I’m going to try and look further at this interaction between a person and something within their surroundings.

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I really love the contrast between the landscape and subjects of these photos and also how the subject of the photo, which clusters in the middle of the picture stand out from the background due to their colour. 

Thomas Jackson was born in 1971 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and grew up in Providence, Rhode Island. After earning a B.A. in History from the College of Wooster, he spent much of his career in New York as an editor and book reviewer for magazines. It was his particular interest in photography books that led him to pick up a camera, first shooting Garry Winogrand-inspired street scenes, then landscapes, and finally the installation work he does today.

His work has been shown at The Center for Book Arts in New York, the Governors Island Art Fair, the Gallery at Eponymy in Brooklyn and Industria Superstudios in New York. Jackson was named one of the Critical Mass Top 50 in 2012, and won the “installation/still-life” category of PDN’s The Curator award in 2013. He lives in San Francisco.

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