Old Artwork – PART II
This artwork which I created as I started university, involved similar ideas to those of my final work at Foundation (see Part I). Ideas of space and time: We all tend to experience the same space and time in regular, prescribed ways. I was interested in exploring and showing the regular day-to-day world in new ways, from different perspectives and at different times. This work was influenced by me having to catch a bus every day. The bus being a transient, communal space where very different people stay for short periods of time. Opinions are quickly made of your fellow passengers and then just as quickly they have to be discarded, as they get off and your stories and thoughts can be neither proved or disproved.
I took videos and photos of other passengers, generally from under the seats, of their feet and ankles coming and going. I hoped the anonymous nature of the images, would further add to the viewers judgemental attitudes towards the characters. This viewpoint also tried to create the idea of an unseen, forgotten, unappreciated world beneath our seats. Or perhaps tried to make the camera, and therefore the viewer, become the inanimate objects that witness our lives.
At the time I was still occupied with ways to show these images that would create a more natural gut reaction in the viewer. So I made the bus images into stickers and stuck them to the back of seats on buses on the same route. I hoped this would have more of an impact on the viewer, by targeting the images at an audience who clearly had some affinity with travelling by bus and not necessarily an interest in art. Rather than targeting them at an audience who had an interest in art, but didn’t necessarily travel by bus.
These videos were an extension of my photographic work and a bit of an experiment at the time. I embedded my camera into a cylindrical metal tin, allowing it to roll around the floor of the bus. Giving the viewer the perspective of a discarded bottle or drinks can.
I remember being pretty pleased with the results at the time, and if it was to be done again today would probably work out much better because of the tiny yet high quality digital cameras that are available now. These videos never really got finished, and I probably didn’t push and develop them quite as much as I should have at the time.
After exploring buses, I moved on to a subway near where I was living. In some ways similar to buses, subways are a ‘none’ space; under normal circumstance you wouldn’t choose to spend any more time in them than necessary. Especially when you’re alone they can be intimidating, a place where you would rather not know what has happened in the past. My experiments here involved photographing views of the subway, then colour copying these images and pasting the copied version back onto the walls of the subway. On one occasion someone had ripped one of these images off the wall and stuck it to a light in the subway. So, in turn I photographed this and pasted this new image back onto the wall. I was never really sure where any of this was going, and it was impossible to get any kind of feedback as I was rarely there when anyone might have looked at the images. It was another case of me enjoying the experience of actually making the work, rather than the viewer necessarily enjoying it when they looked at it.
Photos of the subway, my image stuck to a light by a passer by, and then my new image pasted to the subway wall.
While messing around in this subway I realised that when some of the photos were displayed it wasn’t immediately obvious which way was up, causing a shift of the perceived reality in the viewers mind. This lead to me begin exploring other ways I could shift the viewers perception of what they were looking at, and force them to suspend their disbelief.
A test strip used to work out the correct exposure and colour balance during manual photo enlargement.
This is when I really began a new stage in my work. Moving away from simply doing interesting things myself, taking photos, and then hoping these images would somehow pass on some of the excitement I felt while making them to the viewer as they looked at them.
I started attaching objects to walls and photographing them. The aim was to make the viewers mind shift as they jumped between the miniature sideways world in the foreground and the real world in the background.
I soon discovered a limitation with a normal lens camera: Lens cameras have relatively large apertures (the hole through which light passes, inside the lens). This large aperture causes only part of the image to be in focus at one time. If something very close to the camera is in focus then any distant objects will be blurry. The amount of objects at different distances that are in focus at any one time is called the ‘depth of field’.
So I started using a home made pinhole camera, this effectively had the smallest aperture possible and therefore an almost unlimited depth of field (everything in the image, no matter how near or far from the camera was in the same focus). This helps to distort the viewers perceived sense of scale. By making my own camera it also allowed me to put the aperture very close to the ground, creating a real ‘ant’s eye’ view.
This camera was made from one new roll of film, one empty roll of film to wind the exposed film on to, some card board and plenty of black gaffer tape. The pinhole itself was made from a piece of aluminium coke can, which I sanded down until as thin as possible, then pricked with a needle to form the actual hole.
Some (regular lens type) documentation photos of my 1:72 scale painted figures.
The first few images I took were of cheap plastic firemen from Poundland. But then I moved on to using toy farm animals and also discovered 1:72 scale figures (2.5 centimetres tall), which I customized and painted. My pinhole camera’s shutter was simply a fold of black tape to cover the hole, which I pulled back to expose the film. So getting the right exposure involved lots of trial and error.
A bit of the many rolls of film I have with poorly exposed, blurry images on.
All this experimentation resulted in about 3 images which I thought worked (below). By this time I had become somewhat obsessed with pinhole photography; the physical hands on, home made nature of it and surprising results. This once again meant that the process had began to dominate and the resulting imagery had become secondary.
Part III will continue as I manage to move away from my pinhole obsession and start to experiment with constructing models of interior spaces and rooms.
Art, Photography | 
July 8, 2010 22:55
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