We were assigned a list of artists to look up, to gain inspiration for our final projects, and then add more artists we liked to the list. I researched these artists by watching interviews by them about their work, online.
Timothy Green-Sanders
A very intelligent artist, who works with topics revolving around minorities, women, and people’s perception of them. He is an eminent photographer who has photographed distinguished people like various presidents, and now decided to come up with a book titled about face, that dealt with picture of porn stars fully clothed, and juxtaposing them with their pictures in the nude. He referred to this book as an exploration of sexuality, and people’s perception towards porn and gay porn. I think, the conversations, and resistance that the project provoked, only added layers to it. Another series of projects that were really intriguing were short movies like The Black List, The Latino List (whose second part is coming out), and the LGBT list, that were all aired on HBO, and consisted of straight up interviews of a diverse list of 15 famous and eclectic people who belonged to each community.
Nan Goldin
“Nan’s work is as complicated as being alive”. In one of her exhibitions that was displayed in a gallery in the Whitney Museum, she photographed what was happenings around her for 28 years. She photographed herself, her family, best friend, people at her school, etc, for years and her photographs record them making their tiny memorable moments, their potential mistakes, at the brink of making decisions that would change their lives. This series of photographs is thus extremely intimate and personal, and is a true self portrait.
Sally Mann
A southerner, devoted to her home and land, photographs themes that include her children, their surroundings, death and her husband in his illness in a series titled “Hold Still”. She always works in black and white and is a workaholic. What intrigued me most about her work is how mysterious, theatrical and dramatic it all looked. My favourite photograph I think is the one that shows her daughter lying submerged in a pool with only her face over the surface of water, and her hair splaying out around her, framing her face like a halo. Its absolutely magical. I intend to try and bring that element of intense drama and intrigue in m work, for the final project.
Nikki S. Lee
Born an raised in Korea, Nikki S. Lee, worked with photography, film, and multimedia. Her work named “Projects”, was really fascinating, which showed her transforming herself extremely convincingly into different people. I think it is extremely incredible that she can make herself look like she belongs to any specific crowd, from senior citizens, high school girls, skateboarders, young Japanese people living in East Village, to the punk rockers, and exotic dancers.
In one of her projects titled Layers, she asked street artists she met in her travels all over the world, to draw portraits off her, so she could understand how people from different cultures perceived her face, and then she layered these images over a light source and took pictures of that because she believes that she is all those faces and people,
In one of her series, she takes pictures with people she has personal intimate relationships with and then cuts them out of the picture. I just think pictures like this are so raw and personal, that it must be incredibly hard for her to bring them to the audience. I find it really scary to admit it, when I depend on people, because it makes me feel incredibly vulnerable to the possibility of not being able to keep afloat without them. This kind of series of photographs practically declares her dependency, and indicates who she depends on.
She says that she needs to involve people in her work because she wouldn’t understand herself without understanding how people understand her. It is through her relationships with others that she can understand herself, as they help her to fully express herself.
However, I found her idea of a fake documentary, one of her other projects a little confusing,to be honest.
Kehinde Wiley
Kehinde Wiley, re-imagines classic paintings, and repaints them in a modern manner, more suiting to contemporary society, while playing with topics like power and race. Art has always been about establishing and communicating power by making a show of it. It started as the property of wealthy patrons, church and the state. Kehinde tries to unravel, and re-establish concepts and definitions about power in contemporary times, society and its members. He wants to allow black and brown people over the world, to occupy that place of power.
He says that portraiture is about choice and about putting your self in the position of power to position yourself, or look a certain way while being photographed. While mug shot is still a portrait, it removes all that power. In his work, he strives o start a broader conversation about presence, eminence and the desire to be respected. he is putting brown and black faces into a world of art that has only ever had white faces.
Andy Warhol
Probably the most well-known of these artists, he made advertisements for art, instead of making art for advertisements. he was preoccupied with the idea of being a machine and making art that other people, and machines could mass produce for him. He was preoccupied with consumerism, how the rich and the poor bought the same things. He was intrigued not by the individuality of things but by the sheer abundance of them. He used rubber stamps, stencils and silk screens to make art. He tried to portray celebrities as commodity, thus creating a stage for a broader conversation about their place and image in the society. Shoes, products, money,celebrities, rich people, disaster, death and himself, were recurring concepts that he explored. In a way he redefined the definition of a sell out, and legitimized the work of artists who came after him, and were involved with creating art that was essentially made by others for them.
Cindy Sherman
Cindy Sherman is an artist who has an extensive body of work , where she plays with, and explores the concept of self portraiture, dressing herself up as different characters who are people, that she creates stories around. They are complex characters that she heavily invests in, and dresses up as, using professional make up, prosthetics, masks, wigs, and clothes raided from thrift stores. What I find unique about her is that she blows these images up to an incredibly large-scale very consciously. She says she does this because so far, in the art world, male artists are known for creating large-scale work. This choice of scale makes the work bombastic, obnoxious, and a reflection of their ego, power, even supremacy, because of the amount of space it occupies in the gallery. Cindy Sherman, decides to be the woman who blows up her work, and let her voice be known as well.
Yue Minjun
This artist deals with self portraiture in his own delightfully crazy way. He draws multiple doppelgangers of himself, almost always half naked, with their bodies slightly contorted, features exaggerated and facial expressions split into those of glee and manic laughter. All his doppelgangers are always shown in fits of delirious laughter, to an extent that they both bully the viewer, and appear as victims of bulling and mockery. He depicts these doppelgangers in association with cultural symbols to comment over the state of affairs in contemporary China, and bring to the fore a vision of it as a country, that has grown disillusioned as a result of a lack of faith in religion.
Trenton Hancock Doyle
Trenton Hancock has an exemplary style when it comes to his collage work. His understanding of different materials and shapes, and concept of balance in the visuals is awe inspiring because he manages to maintain a sense of stability in spite of the seeming irregularity and explosion of colour and patterns, in his work. He explores topics like life, death, afterlife, torture, the struggle of human life, and even topics revolving around religion in his art. What fascinate me the most about his art, are is original narratives, and the parallel universes he creates in his work. It is almost like he is own creation mythology, so as to understand the working of the world. His sheer determination and drive to constantly churn out new work is absolutely motivating, and sometimes, I want to be him, when I grow up.
