Great photographers have done it on the fly. It doesn’t happen that often. I just wasn’t interested in doing that. I didn’t want to spend my time running around trying to find an event that could be made into a picture that would be good.”
I really liked this description of how a good photographer worked, in a more naturalistic sense. It made me carry my camera around with me, incase a moment arose, rather than to artificially make one happen.
He produced them as unique objects, not in editions, and their aura was heightened by the mode of display: enormous transparencies lit from behind by fluorescent bulbs, a “light box” format that was typically used for advertising. Like a commercial light box, a Wall photograph grabbed you with its glowing presence, but then, unlike an advertisement, it held your gaze with the richness of its detail and the harmony of its arrangement. You could study it with the attention you devoted to a Flemish altarpiece in a church, and you could surrender yourself to its spell as if you were in a movie theater.
Capturing the image is one thing, but then choosing the proper image for a light box is another. I have to consider why a light box would add to the piece conceptually, not just on an aesthetic scale. Why do I want to have the image shown in a glowing presence? And why should that particular image be portrayed in such a way, to grab the viewers gaze?
He is critical of pictures that are unthinkingly big merely for the sake of being big, of sensational subject matter that is “too remarkable and too interesting” and of photographers who “want to nail something” and “hit it square on and make it impressive,” where he himself would “rather miss the nail and leave it crooked.” But he likes the notion that he has extended the possibilities of photography — and of art.
Again, in terms of ‘constructing’ the image, or letting the image happen on its own, I would like to be careful to not overload my image with too many thoughts and gestures. I really enjoy a minimalist approach to photography, especially in the light boxes. I particularly enjoyed the work of Jeremy Deller, for his humanistic work that questions who we are, and how we connect with one another. His photographs allow people to make their own interpretations, rather than throwing an idea in their face.
Quotes taken from here.
I really wanted to show the connection between space and sound and the connection they both have while I’m attempting to fall asleep. I have a playlist I pick albums from every night, which never fails to put me to sleep; they have all been very carefully picked out so my sleep does not get interrupted by a sound that madly startles me… yet once in awhile it happens if my playlist isn’t set up properly.
This video is meant to show the involuntary reactions to sound, and how startling it can be while dreaming - also, how the sounds I play on repeat really do effect my dream-state. There is great correlation between sound and space in dreams from my own experience, it sets the stage for what kind of dreams I will have (something calming especially helps me, since I grew up having night terrors).
Sensory overload: About textures and materials… being true to the materials. The videos are about people taking space in the universe. A lot of these people were hired through a sort of fantasy or fetish industry, where they offer a type of service for their odd attributes.
“By subjecting fragments from the film ‘Rashomon’ by Akira Kurosawa to the mirror effect, Provost creates a hallucinating scene of a woman’s reverse chrysalis into an imploding butterfly. Papillon d’amour produces skewed reflections upon love, its lyrical monstrosities and wounded act of disappearance.” Nicolas Provost
The Variable Form & Sensory Perception
For my video piece, I decided to use snippets from the film “Closer”, one of my favourite movies. I was very interested in recreating this feeling of a dream or daze like moment in a purely visual way. I began to take apart the movie by adding different movie clips with very low opacities, as well as changing the original video’s form by distorting, blurring, and brightening the footage. Changing the variables in the scene intensified the moment of the embrace.
ARTIST STATEMENT:
In this project I explored the existing video footage from the film Closer. This scene is one of the first bits of the movie, which shows the beginning of a love affair. I wanted to add an interpretation of how one would feel in the situation, the first kiss which shatters any hope of keeping the relation as an innocent connection. By seamlessly combining different clips together through different opacities, I strived to evoke a multi-sensory feeling in the viewer, through different sounds and movements playing throughout the kiss; as the first kiss unfolds, the characters become abstracted.
