Gary Hill

Tall Ships

"Enter a long dark corridor, like a narrow harbour, and encounter a fleet of twelve human figures like tall ships adrift in space. They are the only source of light, their faces like white sails in the moonlight. Like the spectral figures in Dante’s Purgatorio, or the sirens in Homer’s Odyssey, these phantoms stand silently, waiting, until you enter and disturb the fragile peace. As you journey into the stillness of this space, sensors are triggered and the nearest figure will move closer. Each apparition, whether man, woman or child, offers itself to you as if about to speak. Yet they stand, shimmering and silent, until they turn away, unable to unburden the secrets hidden behind their eyes. This fleeting moment leaves an unearthly, haunting sensation. Do we ever really connect, or are we just passing ships in the night?

American artist Gary Hill first exhibited Tall Ships in the early 1990s as he rose to prominence as one of the world’s pre-eminent video artists. While Hill has explored interactive encounters between life-size video imagery and exhibition visitors in other works, Tall Ships is considered to be the most profoundly immersive experience in his body of work. In the artwork, Hill allows his video art to move toward an expression of the intangible sensations that tingle on the surface of the skin, and linger in the dark recesses of our hearts and minds.

Tall Ships transports us from the real world, crossing into an unfamiliar world of experience where we discover lost friends and dream-like figures. Visitors to the deep spaces of Hill’s work transcend physical movement through the installation into darker, uncharted waters. Into the space of emotions, intuition and ghostly sensations. Into the space of premonitions, memories and dreams."

Artist's Statement  

"...That person, however vulnerable, will come forth no matter 

what. It’s the simplicity of the idea - humans approaching humans in a space of a work that is 

always slightly haunted by the notion of “ships passing in the night.”

identical twins

Take 10 Identical Twins from the guardian online

Link to photographs

Below- Alice and Lilly

Right- Me and Katie at the 'Muchty festival when we were about 4 (from the local newspaper)

some of the things I've been looking at

Bill Viola

Ocean Without a Shore, 2007

Using a mix of the oldest, black and white surveillance  filming and the newest HD cameras with a sheet of pouring water the person begins in black and white then breaks through the water barrier into full colour and detail.

The Reflecting Pool, 1977

Playing with the reflections in the pool and the tension/suspense of a person jumping and being frozen in mid air- suspended above the water. Then the activity continues only in the reflection and eventually a person does emerge again from the water.

Gary Hill

Viewer

People watching, people watching, Who is watching, who is being watched..

Mark Wallinger

Threshold to the Kingdom, 2000

Filming international arrivals at the airport, slowed down as people move through the doors an d then as doors in the background close the image fades into the next group of people entering, Links between Customs and the emotions or judgement people have there with the religious idea of Confession,

Angel, 1997

Filmed himself reading religious scripture backwards while treading on the bottom of escalators in the underground. The whole film is then played in reverse so that the words are fairly audible but distorted. Ends with him "floating" back up the escalators as if going to heaven. 

Bruce Nauman

VIDEO DATA BANK

biography

Dance or Exercise on the Perimeter of a Square (Square Dance) 1967

Some other studio experiments

Pinch Neck

Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square

Clown Torture

"Nauman's "Clown Torture" is a shattering spectacle of color, motion, and sound. Displayed at high volume, the audio level of the five simultaneously occurring videos is an assault on the senses. Heard long before it's viewed, one must bravely enter into an enclosed, darkened room in order to see where all the noise is coming from. Once inside, two pairs of stacked monitors and two wall projections come into view. Immediately one senses that something is awry, as only two of the four televisions are oriented right side up. With one monitor turned upside-down and the other placed on its side, the images become abstracted and disorienting. The videos playing on the monitors record clowns in unnerving or difficult situations. In one sequence, a clown screamsat an unseen antagonist. In another, a clown repeats the elliptical story "Pete and Repeat were sitting on a fence. Pete fell off; who was left? Repeat. Pete and Repeat were sitting on a fence." Recited with a variety of expressions (happy, scared, mad, etc.), the clown can't help but hide a growing frustration at not being able to finish the story or have it make sense. Two videos show clowns trying balance objects - goldfish bowls and buckets of water - with little success. The final video resembles a scene from a closed-circuit security camera, only it's a disconcerting image of a clown using a public toilet.

Nauman's "Clown Torture" makes its artifice obvious, from the caked makeup of the clowns' faces to the many power cords that run across the ceiling, walls, and floor. With activity occurring from nearly every angle, the viewer - like the clown - is the subject of experimentation and interrogation. While it's easy to tell that these clowns are only acting-out traumas, it is nevertheless difficult to watch and purposefully so. "Clown Torture" makes the viewer question his or her own participation in the events on screen. Alluding to difficult subjects such as insanity, political torture, and surveillance, the work makes complex connections between theater, media, and apathy The makeup, hair, and costume of each clown act as a disguise for the actor or person underneath. Anonymous victims and inciters of brutality and pranks, these scared and scary clowns seem simultaneously real and unreal."

some of the things I've been looking at

Mona Hatoum

"poetic and political oeuvre is realised in a diverse and often unconventional range of media, including installations, sculpture, video, photography and works on paper. 

Hatoum started her career making visceral performance art in the 1980s that focused with great intensity on the body. Since the beginning of the 1990s, however, her work moved increasingly towards large-scale installations that aimed to engage the viewer in conflicting emotions of desire and revulsion, fear and fascination. In her singular sculptures, Hatoum has transformed familiar, every-day, domestic objects such as chairs, cots and kitchen utensils into things foreign, threatening and dangerous."

Corps Etranger (2000)  (endoscopic camera exploring her insides and projected onto the floor of the tower like building). Then Homebound (2000)

The Seventh Seal

Ingmar Bergman Dir. The Seventh Seal in 1957. Swedish drama film about a knight Antonius Block returning from the crusades to see Europe being wiped out by the Plague. On return he meets the personification of Death and is allowed some reprieve from death by gambling his life over a game of chess. The knight and his companions travel to Block's wife whilst the chess game continues. Ultimately Death wins and Block, his wife and four others are seen at the end of the film in a "solemn dance of death" by the juggler friend Block let escape.

Amazing cinematography, every shot is stunning.

Like the use of transitions fading between scenes. Allowing the viewer to know time has passed but in this case it seems ominous.

 

Martin Puryear

Martin Puryear

wiki link

Sculptures show such skill in craft and art:

"At a certain point I just put the building and the art impulse together. I decided that building was a legitimate way to make sculpture, that it wasn't necessary to work in the traditional methods of carving and casting."

His understanding of the philosophy of craft- Soetsu Yanagi's The Unknown Craftsman- essays on aesthetics of Eastern Craft- reconciliation of opposites or embracing opposites... intuitive and inclusive... beauty as a "liberation from duality"

Sanctuary 1982

Thicket 1990

Thoughts on techniques???

Casting- multipes, cast vs mould, positive vs negative etc.

Carving- carved object and the remnants of saw dust etc. what if the saw dust was the deisred outcome though? carve wood etc to get the scrapings and the original piece of wood is just the byproduct?

Rubbings- taking a record of a surface but in a different way- lacking in form, certain detail, colours change etc.

Erase- layers/tracing/repetition/ build up/break down/remnants/palimpsest etc.

Film/photography- recording but can easily be altered. Could play with expectations. Or beleif in film or photographs to tell the truth.

Rachel Whiteread

Rachel Whiteread

biography

Like the use of materials and exploration of technique of casting. Process to use? Idea of multiplication, repetition, (twins etc). Also positive vs. negative with cast and mould etc. Which is the intentional outcome and which is the byproduct???

dichotomy/opposite

"A dichotomy is any splitting of a whole into exactly two non-overlapping parts.

In other words, it is a partition of a whole (or a set) into two parts (subsets) that are:

• mutually exclusive : nothing can belong simultaneously to both parts, and
• jointly exhaustive : everything must belong to one part or the other.

The two parts thus formed are complements. In logic, the partitions are opposites if there exists a proposition such that it holds over one and not the other."

"In lexical semantics, opposites are words that lie in an inherently incompatible binary relationship as in the opposite pairs male : female, long : short, up : down, and precede : follow. The notion of incompatibility here refers to fact that one word in an opposite pair entails that it is not the other pair member. For example, something that is long entails that it is not short. It is referred to as a 'binary' relationship because there are two members in a set of opposites. The relationship between opposites is known as opposition. A member of a pair of opposites can generally be determined by the question What is the opposite of  X ?"

self-initiated project

Interested in...

Individual or object's histories and experiences being revealed, hidden or distorted (looking at remnants, traces, memories as ways to explore this)

Dichotomies or opposites e.g. noticed vs. unnoticed, reality vs. expectation, sense vs. nonsense, intentional vs. accidental, revealed vs. hidden... thinking about what these reveal about our experiences, how we position ourselves in our surroundings and in relation to others.

Notion of time- consumed, recorded, remembered (cyclical). Time passing- relating to memory and becoming part of our personal experience.

Objectives...

Relate these ideas to me personally as an identical twin. Think about differences/similarities, other people's expectations- double take etc.

Look at fictional books- in relation to ideas if reality/expectations/perceptions. Story telling: records experiences but also has potential to change them blurring the line between reality and imagination; also in relation to childhood and therefore our pasts'.

Fables or pourquoi stories (eg Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories and Aesop's Fables) both because they were a part of my childhood and because of how they use story telling (explaining why something is how it is or using stories to teach morals).

Process Development...

Balance collaborative work with my sister and individual work. Possibly use film/photography/sound to try something new - especially because of their ability to record what can be perceived as "reality". (distort? play with expectations etc.)

Also continue to experiment with materials- perhaps by playing with our perceptions and expectations of their physicality by altering them (e.g. fabric soaked in glue becomes stronger, moves differently etc. but still looks like fabric.)