CHESTER FIELDS

Installation art describes an artistic genre of site-specific three dimensional works designed to transform a viewer’s perception of a space. You may choose to do document some kind of installation or artful interference for your Foreign Object entry (although the clock is ticking!)

Take a look at these images by Beijing artist Xiong Wenyun. Her installations include blocks of pure color mounted in the doorways of truck stops, homes and shacks along the along the Sichuan-Tibet highway. Here’s an example of how a fairly simple gesture can still have quite an impressive visual impact. What kinds of simple interferences can you create in photographing the landscapes that surround you? Can you incorporate some kind of cultural investigation? Wenyun undertook other experiments with color on rocks, streams and clusters of trucks covered in bright canvases. The work is meant to be a reassessment of the value of colour and the rainbow in chinese culture, and, in particular, in the buddhist interpretation of tibetan tradition (for the tibetan monks, the rainbow symbolises the ladder that unites the earthly sphere with the celestial).

Xiong Wenyun, from Rainbow series, 1998-2001

Xiong Wenyun, from Rainbow series, 1998-2001

Xiong Wenyun, from Rainbow series, 1998-2001

Technology has a big influence on art! Through new technology we bring up new ways of thinking and seeing.  Satellite imagery has created new ways of seeing the earth, our countries and cities. Through Google street view we can take virtual walks through neighbourhoods in almost any city in the world! The other day I decided to take a virtual walk through my own neighborhood. On my adventure, I came across a shop where my friend happens to work. I walked from out front of the shop and around to the back alley. When a blurry figure appeared, I realized it was my friend, taking out the garbage! What a strange way to be captured in time! The kinds of technological adventures change the way we see our surroundings, and the way we think about being seen.

Vancouver artist Patrick Cruz captured one such moment in his recent exhibition Forecast Situation. While walking in virtual Vancouver, in-between one place and another, Cruz took a screen capture of what he was seeing. The capture, a photograph taken inside his computer, employed several layers of technological processes: the Google street view camera, the internet, and Cruz’s computer. Cruz took this layering process even further by having the photo manufactured into a fleece blanket! What do the many layers of information within Forecast Situation reveal about the age and culture we live in? Are there some visual clues to the limits of this process of layering?

Patrick Cruz, Forecast Situation, 2011

Damian Moppett is a Vancouver-based artist who made this series of photographs from an array of objects he found before him.   The constructions he built from the various items were the artist’s remedy to simple boredom.  There is no clear indication of where he was at the time, but the make-up bottles and brushes, film canisters and lighters offer some clues.  The constructions or sculptures that Moppett created are the focal point and subject of the photographs in this series.  The setting and circumstances are secondary to the new forms he built from the found material.  Look around your bedroom or home for a cluttered or messy space. Can you re-arrange these everyday objects in unique and interesting ways? New meaning and new interpretations will arise, depending on the objects you choose, how you re-situate and how you photograph them.

Untitled (Impure Systems), 1999, C-print, 48″ x 40″

Untitled (Impure Systems), 1999, C-print, 48″ x 40″

Photographer Christos Dikeakos explores themes of place, history and memory in his work. His iconic images of Vancouver from the early 1990s looked at how the layering of narrative and time can transform the meanings of particular sites. For his “Bridging” series the artist researched the sites of bridges in and around Vancouver in an effort to unearth their particular histories. From archival sources and collaborative work with First Nation elders, Dikeakos was able to give voice to an alternate reading of space, place and purpose. For your entry you might consider digging through the photographic archives of the Vancouver Public Library to learn more about a particular area of the city and it’s evolution.

Christos Dikeakos, Gigeyt (Patullo Bridge), 1991-1993. C-print, glass with sandblasted text.

Bailey Bros. Studio, Archival image of Vancouver, Corner of Hastings and Granville looking East, 1880s.

Try using Google Maps street view to compare what that intersection looks like today!

Remember Shadi Ghadirian? Her photo sereies Qajar that we looked at for People Take Pictures of Each Other could also work for Foreign Object. Your entry doesn’t have to be a still life photograph, maybe you’d like to do a portrait of someone highlighting their relationship to a particular object. Check out this series of photos titled Like Everyday. With this series, Ghadirian creates a link between domestic objects and the female face, with particular reference to an Iranian traditional style of dress. What do you think she is trying to say with these images? Is this a celebration of a female domestic role or a criticism of one? What kind of compelling questions can you convey to your viewer using limited materials and simple arrangements of objects?

Shadi Ghadirian, Like Everyday #7, 2000

Shadi Ghadirian, Like Everyday #16, 2000

Shadi Ghadirian, Like Everyday #2, 2000

Photographer and writer Moyra Davey considers taking pictures as an act similar to taking notes or making quotes. Her photographs capture humble and mundane objects found within a lived-in space. The images are modest in scale and are taken with a macro lens and printed from home. Her focus on the everyday represents aspects of our daily lives that often go unnoticed. Selective details take center stage: the top of a refrigerator, a bookshelf, a tabletop, a desk surface, a junk drawer, or even the space under the bed. What makes her photographs interesting, useful, necessary and moving is her capacity to pause and reconsider everyday objects. You too can create new ways of looking at seemingly simple things for your own investigations as part of Foreign Object.

Moyra Davey, Shure, 2003

Moyra Davey, Copperhead #81, 1990

Moyra Davey, Untitled (GLAD), 1999

A big part of being a photographer, especially for a documentary photographer or a photojournalist, is about gaining access. Often a photograph is memorable because it gives visibility to something largely unseen. Take a look at these photos by Justine Cooper showing the stored collections of the American Museum of Natural History, New York. No big deal, just a closet full of tiger skins and a bunch of pickled monkeys, right? I bet you have crazier things in your lockers… but if you do have a hard to reach place in mind that could be the basis for a great series, use your status as students to wiggle your way in. Talk about your eagerness to learn, adults love that! Humility goes a long way;)

Justine Cooper, Untitled from the Saved By Science series, 2005

Justine Cooper, Untitled from the Saved By Science series, 2005

Justine Cooper, Untitled from the Saved By Science series, 2005

Check out these still life photographs by Vancouver artist Evan Lee.  His series of thirty-six images of ginseng roots was captured using a digital scanner. The scanner bed itself is an interesting venue for making images. By isolating, arranging, and capturing inanimate objects, Evan Lee exhibits a narrative open to interpretation. One consideration that comes to mind while viewing his scans of the ginseng roots is it’s common function within Chinese and homeopathic medicine. What do you think of when you look at the ginseng root? Consider collecting and arranging objects as a strategy of cultural investigation. Make the invisible parts of your world visible. Create spontaneous associations and capture your own arrangement of cultural meaning!

Evan Lee, Ginseng Root Study No.1, 2004

Evan Lee, Ginseng Root Study No.5, 2004

Evan Lee, Ginseng Root Study No.11, 2004

View more images from this series here.

Take a look at these portraits by Catherine Opie. Shown as Opie’s first one-person gallery exhibition in November 1991 at New York’s 494 Gallery, Being and Having marked the artist’s first use of strict seriality. With so many similar photographs, what do you focus your attention on? What’s the first thing your eye is drawn to?! Anything? Anything at all?! I’ll give you a hint: it starts with C and ends with OOKIE DUSTER!

Catherine Opie, Bo, 1991                                              Catherine Opie, Chicken, 1991

Catherine Opie, Jake, 1991

The thirteen color photographs that make up the series are variations on a theme: decked out in exaggerated masculine facial hair, Opie’s friends are shot against a brilliant yellow background while they stare directly into the lens of the camera. Each closely cropped image is presented in a wooden frame bearing a nameplate that lists the sitter’s alias in etched cursive script: Chicken, Con, Ingin, Papa Bear, and so on. Deliberately toying with outward signs of gender, Opie’s photographs challenge the notion of gender identifications as stable or unified.

Take a look at these portraits by Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto.

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Napoleon Bonaparte, 1999

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Princess Diana, 1999

How are these images different from other portraits you have seen? Although at first glance these look like rather conventional portraits, you may have figured out by now that we’re looking at photographs of wax sculptures! Sugimoto uses an 8×10 large-format camera and extremely long exposures to take these pictures… no wonder he doesn’t make portraits of living people, the slightest move would cause the image to blur.

What do you think qualifies as a portrait? Does a portrait have to be of a person?! Maybe not. You could choose to challenge the idea of portraiture with your entry! We encourage you to think outside the box!