Hey, Look!

Night Watch (1642) by Rembrandt van Rijn, though famous, hardly relates to the viewer. Through this project, I wanted to bring the viewer into the art. Some key features of the painting (or this small photograph of a specific portion of the Rembrandt painting) are 1.) the characters depicted looking in several different directions but never breaking the fourth wall and 2.) the hand that we know extends out to the viewer because of the shadow. I placed a photo of a man looking directly at the camera on the extended hand and integrated his shadow onto the painting to make him seem a part of the painting, though obviously separate. The presence of the man addresses the lack of relationship between art and viewer in Night Watch. His presence also creates three "planes" or layers of content: one containing the painting, the second containing the man on the extended hand, and the last contains the viewer because the man addresses them as part of the art. The size of the print turned out smaller than I intended with no way of enlarging it without distorting the image. I did not know whether this added to or took away from the meaning of my work but it seemed a successful move to pass it around like a "postcard" during the critique.

footprints

Unwanted Present

“Unwanted Present”
Digitally Altered Image presented in Four 5x7 Prints
Eric Mistry
March 2013

Some images define more than moments; they can define an event, a life, a war. Eddie Adams shot the picture that defined the Vietnam War, the famous shot mere moments before a police chief general executing a member of the Viet Cong. The emotionally-charged image sped around the world press and earned Adams a Pulitzer Prize and a place in history. The image is widely regarded as one of the most important in history.

It is that pedigree that led me to alter this photograph into something completely different. My new image is a perversion of history, the offensiveness almost too much to handle. I wanted to explore what happens when an unquestionably serious photograph like the Adams image meets the ubiquitously whimsical red balloons. The result is a difficult to handle. Almost everyone has seen the Adams photograph, so this new image causes dissonance between what is shown and what we all know happened. By erasing the general's pistol and giving him red balloons, this image takes on a new narrative, a moment that never happened. The unreal moment now exists in the bizarre reality of the altered image.

I wanted to raise questions surrounding the sanctity of historical images. What happens when we remove key pieces (the gun in this example) and place in pieces that do not belong (the red balloons)?

In presenting this piece, I wanted to reference film in a few forms. I set up the image with four matted prints aligned vertically, like a filmstrip for a movie projector or a set of film negatives. Either way, these four frames capture a clip, a mere moment in time, moment that never existed.

kaleidoscope

look again...

The Baroque Imaginary

This semester I’m taking a class with Professor Lyon called The Baroque Imaginary and have therefore spent a considerable amount of time reading and thinking about the theories underlying Baroque art.  Something I have found particularly interesting in this course is the concept of layered realities.  The best description I have come across of this theory is William Egginton’s, in his book The Theater of Truth, wherein he explains that “the dreamer who dreams us is in constant danger of discovering that he, too, is living a dream in an abyssal cascade that never permits an end point to the situatedness of knowledge” (85).  We studied how these “dreams” are present in several Baroque works (i.e. Rubens’s Eucharist Tapestries), and I was intent upon trying to explore this theme in my own work. 

With this photo manipulation, my specific aim was to make several of these layers of reality visible while implying the existence of many more.  My hope is that a viewer will be able to both recognize a familiar scene (museum goers engaged in the expected act of observation), and a the reversal of viewer and viewed (figures from Velázquez’s paintings occupy the gallery), while also being forestalled by certain visual distortions or unrealities (i.e. the curtain and illogical reflections).  Ideally this print visualizes and perhaps even elaborates on Egginton's "abyssal cascade" and posits questions to an observant viewer about the nature of art, illusion, and reality.  

My altered image puts a familiar subject in a new (absence of) light. The original image was taken of a residence in the middle of the night, which I saw as a dead ruin only vaguely nostalgic of the comforting sanctuary homes can be. The photograph didn’t communicate this impression accurately, and I hoped sinking the subject to rest in suffocating depths would better convey the sense of loss associated with rotting remnants of something once intimately valued.

original

A Literal Interpretation

The photograph is by Henri Cartier-Bresson and is called "Mario's Bike".  I'd been reading an article about art in the digital age, and it mentioned that someone had posted this famous (?) photograph to Flickr and it generated a lot of critiques.  Since I didn't know the photograph, I Googled (R) it and, instead of the photograph, mostly got pictures of Super Mario.  This piece responds to that experience.

Gif Project

                                      Traditional Spring Scroll

Monsters In the Light

Altered Image

For this project I was interested in altering the past in terms of memory. The original image is one I took on a trip Paris with my parents so in this way, it is a representation of my memories. However, I altered it to change the people in the image to my dad and me. I wanted to explore the idea of changing how events in my past happened. In addition, I was interested in not just the alteration of my past memories but also in playing with the idea of heritage. My dad and I are in the place of two people who were actually from France. By placing us in the position of these two, we become more a part of the country. This was interesting for me because people often think that I am French. In some ways, this is also an alteration of memory. In playing both with the interaction of more immediate and heritage I’ve created an alteration of reality on different levels. This concept of different realities and the ideas of “what could have been” or “what it seems like” are very interesting to me. This interaction was a way to play with these ideas.

Altered Image

Somewhere Beyond the Sea

Barred

enveloped

Hendrix

Altered Photo

Mr. McGibblets

Altered Image

At first, I approached this project by adding different things into a image. I manipulated colors, size, shapes, or even took a figure from one image and put it in another. The images that resulted lacked cohesion, simplicity, and was obviously altered. I thought back to the first day this project was introduced and tried to change my mindset of what an altered image meant to me. Alexander Apóstol's images stood out to me, because his images were so realistic that in some cases you were not sure what was wrong/missing from them until someone else told you. This changed my focus. I had taken this image originally because the sky was so awing. But as I looked closer it was really obstructed by the power lines. I used inspiration from Apóstol's work and removed the power lines. Now the image is almost representing a fantasy of what I wish I had seen or of what could have been seen without man-made structures interrupting our views. 

Bones are for Ugly People

Two

Into Da Moon

Thought process:
1.Over the top...
2. What's literally going over the top?
3. Cow over the moon.
4. More over the top?
5. Going into the moon.
6. More over the top you say?!
7. BA BAM!!

Shoot the Poochie

        For my altered image, creating a sense of unease was my priority. I chose a non-threating image of two well-known childhood figures, and then shot each of them in the head. By using Charlie Brown and snoopy, I hope to create a personal connection with the viewer while simultaneously making them feel uneasy. The characters are not the only familiar aspect of this image, by using newsprint for printing; I mimicked the medium in which these characters are normally viewed. My initial reaction to this image was unease, but as I continued to manipulate the image, I became desensitized to the guilt I was feeling for shooting a childhood memory in the head.

GIF

With some nice musical accompaniment for your viewing pleasure. 

Altered Image

In my altered image project, I used a photograph I took in San Francisco of a long, tree-lined street and removed many of the objects that cast shadows. The trees, cars, motorcycles and lampposts are gone, but I left their shadows in order to identify the absent objects.

I think the composition of the original photograph works well for this idea, because it allows the main focus of the image to be the triangle of the sidewalk disappearing into the distance in the background. The overall dull color scheme doesn’t overly glamorize the image, and the lines disappearing to a single focal point give the illusion of the strangeness continuing into the rest of the city. The composition also allowed me to set limits on which objects to remove and which objects to keep, because the background objects are too unimportant to remove, while there are a concrete number of objects in the foreground that leave noticeable shadows and that make sense to remove.

The most interesting places in the image, for me, are the edges where the shadows meet up with their absences—for example, where the shadow of the car meets the street and where the shadows of the trees meet with the holes in the sidewalk. These are also the most important places, because they are liminal spaces between illusion and reality.

The essential concept behind this image is questioning what is reality. Because the shadows do not correspond to any real life objects, the reality I’m presenting is clearly false. This is similar to the Zizek article “Desert of the Real” and the idea we get through films like The Matrix that the reality we’re living in is too perfect to be real.

Altered Image

 In my altered image project, I wanted to completely change the tone of a recognizable image. The concept of a wedding came to my mind because although weddings are rarely associated with any emotion besides happiness, many marriages end in divorce. I changed the colors and a few textures in the photo to give the image a more sad tone. I also replaced the smiling bride’s face with my own unhappy and almost scared face. During our critique, Abby commented that this image seems like a moment in between happy wedding pictures, when the cameras aren’t supposed to be on but just happen to catch the bride’s real feelings. That is what I meant to portray with this piece, a moment of uncertainty and truth during a typically happy event.

Gus Gets Weird in Art World (Gus is so giffable)

Digital Alteration

                                                  

 

Edith March

Ice Queen

2013

Digital Camera, Photoshop, Printed on Matte paper; Mounted on Black Styrofoam

The initial goal for Ice Queen began from trying to confuse the viewer’s ability to distinguish reality from digital craft. Though most of the image is constructed from an abstract digitized world, some of this abstract shapes on the body were physically drawn on the model and were not altered in the final image. However, a narrative built up within the image as I integrated the model into her abstract world. The narrative focuses on the transition between winter and spring. As the symbols of spring, butterflies, fly onto and into the ice queen, she melts and bleeds (though she continues to smile, possibly accepting the natural cycle of seasons). In addition to the confusion between reality and abstraction, (which are vague concepts) I wanted to examine how spring, commonly accepted as a symbol of life, can also mean the death of winter.

Pulse / Come to Light

Waking Up Post 10/10

cinnamongraphs

Probably not final, just testing how they load online