Assignment A+B(six)

1. Write about an artist whose work, ideas, strategies or use of technologies you are connecting with2. Begin to record your own ideas that are developing and the potentiality of your work

“My photographs are documentations of sculptures and installations but they are also records of actions and elaborate processes. Days are spent, sometimes with a crew but more often in solitude, silently driving, carrying supplies, erecting structures and sets, and studying the slow progress of the sun overhead and its all-powerful, comfort-giving and –taking effects. Created in close collaboration with the movements of the sun, precisely observed, I see my photographs as acts of reverence and participation in a deep, reassuring natural order outside of and much larger than myself.”

“What I’m trying to do is capture moments. To be sensitive to time passing.”

“It’s important for me to leave traces of the process so that information is there for the viewer. My constructions are not sculptures in the traditional sense. They’re just vehicles to reveal a process that is focused on experiencing time and understanding what photographs do – or don’t do - to time.”

“It’s one thing to use a photograph to create an illusion,it’s another to realize that all photographs are illusory.”

-Chris Engman

Inverse Negative, 2010

1.

Three Squares, 2006Three Moments, 2009Equivalence, 2009

Although photography is the main media that Chris Engman uses, what he really shows is the contents which are usually installations that connect closely and co-respond to the location. In most cases, nature is the dominant surrounding that the artefacts engage in. Tech-niques such as framing, mapping are generally used to create new environments that are partly made confusing and misleading visually.

The Artist as an Explorer, 2002The Meeting, 2004

The Disappearence, 2006

Chris Engman’s works indicate that still images can also be Performantive. As the subject of the pictures, human beings were put into the illusory world of photograph. They react to it, in the same time act as a part of the installation. Audiences are drawn to figure out the narrative behind spontaneously.

Inversion, 2009

Dust to Dust, 2010

Time usually plays an important role in Chris Engman’s images. Photos are always con-sidered as a media to capture time instant and record it in an eternal form. But just like how Chris builds his unreal world, he aligned pictures together to create the circumstance of time passing and used light to twist the sense of time marking. In his images, objects stayed like they never did, landscape moved like it never did, time become most sensitive.

2.

Developing ideas:

PerformantiveHuman presenceSubstance encounter/Surface behaviourVoidRelocation/mobilityPermanent/solidOptic and hapticViewer behaviour

Performantive Human presence

Interaction between artist and the drawing. Double the identity. Assignment A(1)

Imprint of paint flowing down by human. Although human doesn’t physically appear in the image, we can find him by tracing his behaviour.Assignment A(3)

Humanized effect happens on machine-made artefact.Assignment A(3)

Irregular pattern on fabric, indicating human deliberate influence during making process.Assignment A(4)

Which can prove human presence, things left by human, things with human shape or things that directly touched human?Assignment A(5)

Similarity in nature is somehow the clue for people to discover their presence. Assignment B(5)

People become a part of the performance unconsciously. Life is a stage, the place hap-pening is a scene.Assignment B(1)

Within audiences’ walking into the exhibition area, they themselves become the perform-ers of the art work. New 21, ACCA

The original performance was blurred and doubled into a new shape of movement by a designed apparatus. 2 shows are on at the same time in the same place.West Side Gallery

For an artefact that depends largely upon natural attribute instead of human intention, the recording of making process become a part of the work itself.Assignment A(4), Pencil

When human behaviour happens in a space deliberately, aiming at gaining something, it become performantive.Assignment A(5)

Substance encounter/Surface behaviour Void

Drawing is the implication of artist’s inten-tion, on the hand, it is the encounter of pencil and paper.Assignment A(2)

Photographer Ori Gersht likes to capture still landscape and create a peaceful nature within arranging the proportion of void in the images. Assignment B(2)

White colour in the composition of the pic-ture is treated as stillness, quietness, space that leave focus to the main object, while tell narrative of the content. Assignment B(2)

Void exists in the nature. It can be in the shape of light spot, it forms a dot of blind-ness and moves with several others together.Assignment B(3)

Once exhibits are moved to a new place, the work with the space together generate new meaning.Assignment A(5)

The relocation of plaster spots which were derived from the original surface picture cre-ates a new surface to experience.Assignment A(4), Plaster

The combination of the arrangement by human towards the wood pieces and the arbitrary marks left by prints form the final pattern.Assignment A(4), Paint

The encounter of lead falling on paper brings two solids into one entity, and it’s the fusion of substances.Assignment A(4), Pencil

The texture of a substance either natural or man-made decides surface behaviour such as absorption of light and water.Assignment A(3)

The variation on surfaces through time is re-corded by marks and the growth of adhesive substances.Assignment A(5), The Abbotsford Convent

Nature’s influences on paper in a 3D space is like the colour on palette is a 2D plane. Both texture and property varied through time.Assignment A(4), Paper

Relocation/mobility

Optic and haptic Permanent/solid

In terms of graphic drawings, optic sense is always related to emotions, memories while haptic sense is concerning substance, mate-rial and texture.Assignment A(2)

Dye generates permanent marks on fabrics. It gives a strong impression of presence.Assignment A(4)

No instance was captured in the picture, just the object with its solidity exists. Assignment B(2)

Marks, traces of natural influence are not intangible, but real.Assignment A(3)

Instead of letting audience wandering around in the gallery space, I prefer create a route for them as a narrative of the whole exhibition. Certain obstacles are set in the middle of road to force them to get involved.Assignment B(5)

The work presented not only offer a optic experience but also a haptic one. Through squeezing hand on the surface surrounded by strings, the sense of touching transferred back to visual sense again-the imprints.Assignment A(4), string

Audiences are supposed to move under the exhibits hanging, occasionally touched the drawings with the top of the head. Here, head become a haptic tool.Assignment B(5)

Viewer behaviour