User:Alice

16/01/2014

"Dancing Boys"

Description of what I'm making

Currently I am working on a series of four paintings of dancing boys. The images that I am using as source material, are photographs I took over a year ago; of my former flatmate and boyfriend dancing wasted and topless in my bedroom. The images had been languishing on my hard drive for a while. The photographs in their aggregate have the sense of being film stills.

How I'm making it

I have stretched incredibly thin linen on to cardboard boards (each 55cm by 80cm), and used paper mache to fix the materials together, and then primed the boards. There is a possibility to potentially make either a foldable screen out of all the boards combined, or to take the paper mache further and make each painting in to some sort of diamond shaped form. I am drawing with a combination of oil and acrylic paints

Why I'm making it

I have been interested in going back to figurative painting. The boys poses are formally quite traditional, when looked at together they reminded me of the quick poses drawn in a life class. Looking at the work of Sophie Calle, I have been thinking about the autobiographical elements in my work, and so I wanted to work from personal imagery. I have been attracted to ideas around homoeroticism, gay culture, and sexiness in art, particularly current art practice, and video artists like Adham Faramawy. Last night I watched "Paris is Burning", and have been thinking about "the disco", and giving everything to that one night of glamour.

Palm Tree

WHAT? A made fake pot plant. An appropriation of a palm tree, of a height of one and a half metres. Its skeletal composition is of a found bent steel pol, that makes up the trunk. And the leaves are structured out of wire loops. Modrock has been used to mould the composite elements into a plam tree like object. It has then been painted in brown and green, and placed in a pot. This tree then became part of a larger installation named, "Modrock Plantation".

HOW AND WHY? My interest was to make a sculpture out of found source material, and then to use craft to make it more "glamorous". The attention has been paid to the facade of the object in particular. A similar method to the way I had been making paintings. Pot plants are natural sculptures already and so it is fun to make a sculpture of something that is already considered a sculpture. Thereby the point of the artwork is to look and comment at what already exists around us.

Paintings of Waverly

WHAT? Two inherited cemi-circular boards of wood, each about an inch in thickness. They were cut from one circle, so share the same diameter of one and a half metres, and can connect together in a number of ways. Painted on the front surfaces of both boards, are imagery made from photogrpahs that I took whilst visiting my Grandad in Waverly, Johannesburg. They are not directly representational psintings, as certain shapes have been repeated, and lines extended. The other sides of the boards are painted with more abstract forms.

HOW AND WHY? My grandfather's house - a complete late 1960's timewarp, was interesting source material to me. What interested me in particular, is the matching and mirroring used in the interior design of the house, and of others in that period. Something that has been lost to some extent in our present day aesthetics of how we decorate our homes. So therfore using two canvases that were able to mirror eachother made perfect sense. The fact that the semi-circles are painted on both sides is relevant in order for the paintings to be objects that can be moved around aswell as just being paintings. Due to their shapes' they hint at being furniture like, only completely obsolete in any practical purpose.

Monitor

WHAT? A simple black monitor the dimensions of a standard TV. On it plays a series of 15 still images, that remain on the screen for 8 seconds, and are shown in a loop. The images are analog photogrpahs taken of an installation, and the surrounding interiors of where the installation happened. The installation was the aforementioned "Modrock Plantation" which consisted of a series of made plants, abstracted pot casts, and some paintings. The space of this happening was a warehouse.

HOW AND WHY? The idea of re-working a piece of art into another piece happens frequently in my work. Particularily when it comes to collaboration - these photogrpahs of my work were taken by somonelse. That persons viewpoint was obviously an edited view of my work, and then my working them into a slideshow enabled me to re-edit their selection. Other than the general idea of documentation, the point of the monitor was to encapsulate the original installation in as filmic manner as possible. The intrinsic nostalgia of analogue photogrpahs is something that I am personally afraid of working with directly, and yet I love their quality of visual representation. Therefore this manner of using somonelse's photographs enabled me to conquor my fear and use the medium for my own gain!