Essay:
Idea
My idea for this project is to create a piece that represents a scene of my every day life and to express the way time feels during that time. It has to be a scene that happens recurrently not only in my life but also in others’ so that the audience can relate to it as well. I want to choose an action that is relevant my change of life style when moving to New York.
The Artist
When looking in. the library I found pages about the artist Elisabeth Woerndl in the book ‘Me, myself and them’. Her portraits attracted me because of the contrast between the simplicity and the complexity of them. They are relatively simple in terms of where they’re set and how they’re taken. She chose natural environments, she doesn’t seem to have set up anything or changed any of the natural backgrounds to realize her pieces, she also doesn’t seem to be forcing poses or to want to make everything look planned or perfect, she simply moves the way she feels like moving as the shoot goes on.
Her photos however turn out to also be very complex in terms of emotions and details. Her eye for colors and focus points makes elements and emotions stand out of the photos. There is also a lot movement in these images which creates details and strong feelings when looking at them. The backgrounds, although they seem simple in the sense that they seem random, are filled with colors and details and are a lot more meaningful than what we might think when first looking at the pieces.
The words she uses to describe her piece are vibrating in it ‘This photographic work documents an approach process to my mother, reconciliation, and saying good bye’, ‘The personal confrontation with the Self and the mother in front of the camera, the self-staging in mother’s dress, points out a moment of the imaginary identification with the mother. Closeness and distance are put on and off like a dress.’
I chose this artist more for the aesthetic aspect of her work rather than for the emotions expressed in them but I quickly realized that both are actually linked because by using this aesthetic this is how she manages to express her emotions.
I chose to create my piece in the laundry room of my building as it is something I link a lot to the city. I grew in the country side in Switzerland with washing machines in our homeland when I was younger my parents would use them for us. I always associated the common public laundry rooms with cities, American movies and young adult/university life so it is definitely something I noticed when I moved here to live on my own. It is also a space where I go a lot and where the perception of time differs from what I’m used to. When I go there I think a lot about time, I look at my watch more than usual, I count minutes and seconds, I walk around aimlessly, time goes by very very slowed sometimes I even feel like I am waisting it. It is definitely place where I find myself alone with my thoughts, where experiment different emotions and I feel that with such a big influence of time it is a perfect place to choose to create my introductory project for this TIME class.
To create this piece I want take photos of myself waiting in the laundry room, in different positions, walking around the space, staying very natural. I want to make the colors on myself stand out by enhancing different colors as I wait and I want to keep the background (the washing machines) plain and simple.
Brainstorm in images:
Photoshoot:
Experimentation images:
Final Image:
Artifacts:
I decided to link in every way possible the artifact to the image so I chose to do it on T-shirts and to hang them them upas if they were drying, fresh out of the machine. By doing so it enhances the feeling of being there, of living the piece and of feeling it.
Conclusion:
This project was very interesting to me and taught me many ways of working. What I really wanted to achieve was to make a piece that is very personal to me but that can also be personal to everybody and I feel like I have managed to do that. I really liked to learn how to use digital media and how to print of textures.
