Evaluation (Unit 7)

Final Evaluation

After beginning with concepts of looking into something dead and then working it with detail and scale it has become something different; instead of looking at death I’ve looked at and highlighted in presentation the significance of bees.

One significant thing to mention is that I found throughout the course that physically presenting and working changed the meaning of my work as much as contextual research. Two linked prime examples of this was when I looked into insects because it was accessible death, when it ultimately changed the focus of my work to bee’s that I found; the same happened again after that when I presented my work in a space using pins and without text and felt It needed something to break it up and bring out something more, which again changed into writing reports and significant thoughts and changes about the meaning of my work.

Overall parts of my work have changed since the beginning but has maintained an overall inclusion of work with detail and scale. It has improved and I feel has become something more than intended.

Exhibition finished (Unit 7)

My exhibition space is finally finished, i printed out my text sheets on A4 in formats similar to Stuart Brisley's as reports on the bee's condition and the definitions of "work", "survival" and "exist". 

I put the work up firstly with tape to match everything up and to measure with a spirit level and then up before pinning with wall mount spray:

Before spraying with tape

Wallmounted with spray

then with pins hammered directly into the wall, two for each text page, and i actually came out with a new idea while pinning for the digital scans. In the same way a bug will get a pin physically through it like i saw in the museum, i would directly pin in the same way through the body as it looks on the photographs like so:

Pin directly into the bee

I did the same for all of the photographs, including the one with many pieces of bee, so that there was eight in one photo. Also as the photos went from less to more pixelated i put less pins in because it wasn't totally recognisable where the bee parts were.

All the pins hammered in, with scanner on display

Further photoshop experimentation, text layering

After deciding to put some text in the piece i tried layering the text over the scans in photoshop.

Font; Courier

I experimented with different colours as I wanted to see what the best outcome would be. However after trying several different colours I decided that plain black looked the most effective and worked best over the image and keeps it in the same colour tones as there is black on the bees. After layering the text over the images I decided to separate the text and the image into two separate images as I feel they compliment each other well separately. By being together they take away attention the simple pixelized images of the bees. The text looks best in black on the white paper, the font and colour combined reminds me of documenting research/ a report, so I feel they work better as separate images. 

I decided to use this font as when experimenting with others the images did not compliment each other or look linked. Where as this font is old fashioned and could be said to have been one of the first fonts on a computer screen, this connects with the pixelated images as the pixels used to be larger and less of them on the first/old computers.

Text in work and the idea of processing bee's (Unit 7)

Ive started to write out some of the text I'm going to put in my exhibition. It involves reporting on the before and after state of my bees, including aesthetics with colour and technical terms.

All of the below will be presented in the format similar to Stuarts shown below. The exhibition is coming soon so i am to update this further and print them out and pin up tomorrow.

  survive - continue to live or exist, especially in spite of danger or hardship

  "       - to remain alive or in existence

  "       - to carry on despite hardships or trauma; persevere

  "       - to remain functional or usable

  exist - have objective reality or being / live, especially under adverse conditions

  "     - to have actual being; be real

  "     - to live at minimal level; subsist

  "     - to continue to be; persist

  "     - to be present under certain circumstances or in a specified place; occur

  work - activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a result / a       task or tasks to be undertaken

  "    - to exert oneself physically or mentally in order to do, make or accomplish something

  "    - to be employed; have a job

  "    - to function or operate in the desired or required way 

  forewing, hindwing, abdomen, spiracle, thorax, ocelli, sting, pollen press, hind leg, middle   leg, antennae cleaner, foreleg, tongue, jaw, antenna, compound eye

Stuart Brisley, Tate Liverpool, Text into my work (Unit 7)

While at the Tate Liverpool for three days filming Mondreans Studios being re-created i saw some work by Stuart Brisley entitled "ZL636595". It is a performance piece that results in an exhibition of twelve photographs, black and white, on paper and three typescripts on paper.

Upon first viewing i found it really curious, the typescripts were lists of the variables in a controlled experiment and performance piece, definitions of distinctive and chosen words (survive and exist) and a  set of declarations and agreements by the artist as results of the piece.

"ZL636595" Tate, Liverpool

Photograph

The typescripts are important to me because they are going to be inspired from and put into my own exhibition. Once i had put out my scanner and my photographs up on display, i think that it needed something to break up its visual and make what I'm trying to communicate more precise. Text was my first and i think best idea to do this. Especially since i had seen Stuart Brisley's work before hand and it was a lot to take from.

This is one of the three typescripts from the exhibition.

Typescript 1/3

The font, the texture and the format is what i think would work with my scans.

Now, the content of this typescript is a kinda of report responding to his experimental piece. When i build text to put into my work the idea of building aesthetics through pixels and also the quite significant big ideas surrounding bee's. I haven't gone too far into why bee's have been chosen to scan because at first i just used what was most accessible. But that in itself means a lot about bees, that they were so easy to find, so close to where i was lay dead. From this I've actually decided to report on the condition of the bees (like Stuart has) like a report from whence i found them.

Also i feel coincidently that the significance of existing and survival mean a lot with the bee's, so I'm going to steal variations of definition from Stuarts report (1/3 above). As well as copying the overall format.

Typescript 2/3

Here Stuart has listed to conditions of his performance experiment. I am going to list the conditions of my bees, from once they had been found till what they are now.

Mondrian 70th anniversary of death retrospective at the Tate Liverpool (Unit 7)

Me and another student got the chance to go to the Tate Liverpool to film a timelapse of an exhibition of Piet Mondrians studios being re created. Also for me to go and ask the curator of the exhibition some questions if possible, but through the three days we setup there it was very chaotic and i didn't manage to catch him.

Photograph inside the almost finished studio

Photograph of Curator Franz in almost finished studio

Second Photograph of Curator and Tate staff 

Mondrian's work and this retrospective is important to my project because of the relationship between Mondrians drive to capture an aesthetic purity and my similar drive to form a true condensed aesthetic of different contents and of death.

Mondrian's work developed from a time of post impressionism past and through many later movements. He developed off of cubism to reduce objects to their most basic forms. This was the start of work that was non-representational, they included many horizontal and vertical lines and as time went by he began to create all of his paintings using a grid-like format, painting squares and rectangles of mostly solid colours. The way Mondrian would reduce an object to basic forms is key to my work in that i am doing the same through editing; gathering particles and condensing the colours mathematically into larger still single coloured particles. This in essence is reducing and presenting, the difference is that Mondrian's content is different and mainly for aesthetic, my part is a metaphysical aesthetic look into something dead. The idea aside from aesthetic for Mondrian was that he believed that art reflected the underlying spirituality of nature, somehow the way he simplified subjects revealed this mystical energy.

Here are some of Mondrian's early to later paintings to show what it means to gradually change his content into basic forms.

After the rise of cubism, segmental painting

The painting above is about as expressive in this way that he'd ever be.

By this time his work is fully non-representational

Mondrian's most famous works are his paintings made up of pure red, yellow and blue, as well as black and white, but for a while he used shades of gray as well, and even his lines were dark gray instead of pure black.

Here is a final example with my own work to show how they correlate:

Original against condensed pixelated version.

Whereas even though its not too obvious Mondrian does the same things with Objects, just through hand and mind (not through digital editing) and is a simpler representation.

Presentation of prints, gradual pixelation or single different prints side by side (Unit 7)

I have enough different images to be able to present many different scans of my bees next to each other, but after putting some up in my space i tried printing out all pixelation levels of three single images from the original to a completely pixelated unrecognizable image.

These are the levels of pixelation, not including many in-between.

Cell size 1

Cell size 10

Cell size 30

Cell size 60

This is just one row, and i plan on doing three-five rows above and below each other. Ive only chosen the above image of my first bee scan so far, ill choose the others once I've printed them out and put them up.

Photoshop pixelations (Unit 7)

 With the first thought of pixelation came the default look of square pixels, but without jumping straight into it i experimented with some other types of pixelation on photoshop.

Photoshop

Unedited

Facet

Fragment

Crystalised

Fragment was the most effective i think aside from mosaic (square tiles). Its blurred enough to recognize content but still be curious enough to keep a viewer looking. Whereas others are too much either way.

From this I've decided to stay with mosaic format and present it gradually increasing in pixelation from the original to totally pixelated.

Exhibition space and content (Unit 7)

With exhibiting there are many decisions for me to make involving content and space. Ive been in to rearrange and paint for the course exhibition and have been given a space of my own. Ive printed most of my content to different sizes in order to see which is most effective and to physically trial different setups. My content included hundreds of digital prints that have ranged through all different pixelations and pixelation scales (grid scales). 

Gradual increase in pixelation

After thinking about my exhibition i decided that as well as my digital prints I'm actually want to include the bee's physically in the exhibition to physically on display.  This is because of something i have explained in previous posts where my pixelated work seems to work and mean more along side the original unedited scans.

My first thought was to pin down my bees in a box frame on display. I have three bee's, one bee is flattened and thick, one bee is round and nicely formed and another is completely torn apart (which i still have the pieces contained). The torn apart bee would look beautiful with all its parts pinned across and i guess the others would to, i just felt like the torn apart bee would look good pinned alone. I actually went to Blackburn museum which has a massive bug collection just to think about the look of my own bees if i presented them like that.

Blackburn museum bug collection

So, after getting a box frame and putting it in front of my exhibition, it  just seemed a little empty. Its a white box and generally a white framed themed exhibition, whereas the bug collection i saw at the museum was characterised and fuller.

Then i came up with a better idea that still involved putting the bees on display. I would put the scanner (that i used as the process of all my work) on display, open, with the bees on it. Firstly, this means there are no pins, they just rest on the empty see through screen. It would be physically on display just in front of my wall on a plinth.

This works nicely as it gives the effect i wanted in being original along side my pixelations, its plain interesting to physically display my bee's unframed with nothing between the viewers and also in some sort of way having the process on display working with its results means a lot. Also its an A4 scanner, and my prints will then be A4 fitted just for that familiarity and sizeable looks.

Work space

Now i am to continue making decisions involving wether or not to frame my work and majorly which prints work best with what. So far it seems to me that the gradual pixelations from originals to completely pixelated mean the most and work the best. (See top picture). To be continued.