Project
Friday, 14 July 2017
Flesh
These are the pieces that I submitted to be exhibited at the UWE Fine Art First Year student held exhibition with the running theme of 'Flesh'. Greatly interested by textures and folds and creases of the skin, I decided to translate and exaggerate those textures into these surfaces created from calico and glue and water. Soaking the calico in a mixture of glue and water renders it stiff after drying, allowing me to manipulate it into peaks and folds and which held their shape.
 |
| Flesh Exhibition view |
Thursday, 6 July 2017
Convergence
Convergence is a project exploring the way our various digital realities and personalities permeate into our immediate, actual reality. The final piece is a projection onto paintings which I think illustrates translation of the digital world to the physical world well. I have become increasingly aware of the way we manipulate images and use filters to cover and conceal aspects of the original, which we then use to curate and display our lives in the digital sphere. I wanted to convey this ‘beautification’ of images through initial collages, by combining and layering images together so that they’re rendered unrecognisable and incomplete –a completely new image, their original form hidden and at the same time being revealed beneath veils of concealment which in this case is geometric coloured paper cut outs and structured vertical strips of differing imagery.
The collages then developed into a very experimental video I created of my documentation of various imagery being manipulated and edited in a similar fashion each time, changing a specific aspect of the image in a specific order such as changing the exposure first then the brightness then the tone of the image, then ultimately documenting the erratic way I used the ‘heal’ tool which copied and pasted a circular area of the image that I chose to select. I used this as a way of layering and concealing parts of the image as well as to create a completely different version of the image that I began with - just like how our online personas are created and curated; parts of our lives selectively chosen to be exhibited or otherwise hidden. The paintings are tilted, the projection layer not aligned, intended to create this effect of a filter, like the ones used on Snapchat, which in this case is the painting sliding off of or away from the images being projected, as if it’s been ‘swiped’ off (referring to the action of adding or removing filters). It’s also a testament to going beyond pictorial space and the conventional straight edge.
Tuesday, 20 June 2017
Configurations
|
Card and photo paper cut outs, 35 x 20 cm (individual hanging pieces)
|
Monday, 12 June 2017
The Self Is All That Can Be Known To Exist
Inspired, fascinated, and confused by the philosophical notion of solipsism, I wanted to investigate the dissonance of our experience of reality when you come to believe that the self is all you can really be sure of that exists. Starting by creating drawings and collages that separate and isolate people from their surroundings - heads from their bodies, limbs from the figures of commuters on a train - removing them from their original context and replacing them into a space, I developed this project into an installation composed of mostly steel wire embellished with threading wire manipulated into shapes and forms from my initial drawings suggestive of human characteristics. These wire forms, two-dimensional and unassuming were then projected onto the surrounding walls to form shadows that overlapped and created line drawings.
Saturday, 10 June 2017
Lolo Portraits
Lolo: Tagalog for grandad. He became the ideal model for portraiture when touring Ilocos Norte in the Philippines last year. Unaware, candid, and almost always sat down at our destinations, I wanted to capture my grandad's peaceful and observant nature as well as record the beautiful settings that we were in.
Friday, 9 June 2017
One Minute Epics: Flow
Submission for the one week set project of 'One Minute Epics' using low quality equipment which in this case is my iPhone where I showcase the aesthetics of flowing water whilst maintaining a narrative, a definitive beginning - middle - end.
Thursday, 8 June 2017
Tangled
Revisiting a project I did during my foundation where the primary source for development was drawings of hair, I chose to tackle it literally rather than figuratively and focused largely on the immediate representations of hair instead of abstracting it. I took up close photographs of different hair textures and during the process wondered about the strangeness of how hair found ON the body is largely seen as beautiful, integral and almost worshipped, whereas isolated and AWAY from the body it is seen as disgusting and repulsive. With this in mind I gathered materials such as rope and netting, materials with textures reminiscent of that of hair and assembled a hanging piece of work with which to project my images of hair on to.
Above are photoshop mock ups of how I imagined, or ideally envisioned how the projection would look like and below is what was actually exhibited. I think the hair textures looks incredible enlarged and projected like that.
 |
|
“Tangled”, 2016; fishing net, mesh ribbon,
string, colour image projection; 110 x 140 cm,
Spike Island
|
Wednesday, 7 June 2017
Anthropomorphia
Hairband characters born from hoarding inherent in my nature and my unwillingness to let go of things that belong to my childhood in the Philippines. Wanting to see what I could do with my vast collection of hairband and hair pins I began creating piles which soon became apparent were figurative apparitions of some kind: a furry bobble signifying a head and clips for arms. Fairly humorous in essence, I've given inanimate objects personalities, methods of expressing emotion through their poses, the positioning of their limbs and 'clothes' that they wear, personified them in a way that illustrates a childhood in the motherland that I miss very dearly. This series is meant to be playful and not one which I see much room for development in the future unfortunately.
Monday, 5 June 2017
Sequences II
Part II of my Sequences series still sets out to document the passing of time but this time through exposure photographs, experimenting with two to five second shutter speeds, capturing fleeting moments and short intervals in an attempt to understand and depict the notion that "what we perceive as present occurs over an interval." The ghostly blurring of the figure as they walk up or down the stairs depict a moment but not necessarily the present.
For me personally, I find that the most accurate depiction of 'now' in photography are the ones that are blurred due to the motion of the subject. Like the character Nao's (from Ruth Ozeki's A Tale For The Time Being) observation of 'now' never truly being now but has actually become 'then' in the time you recognise it as now, motion blurred photography is like capturing multiple nows-turned-thens attempting to truly capture now.
Sequences is a series in which I explore the passing of time through photography. Initially I was mostly concentrating on the notion of 'now' and how photography can be used to describe it. But can the 'now' ever really be truly represented since the present is ever-moving, ever changing? Few photographers have succeeded in doing so such as the grandfather of candid street photography -Henry Cartier Bresson.
In Part I of my Sequences series I chose to take multiple images of a figure walking down the stairs, at rregular intervals and arranged them in a grid in chronological order in the style of Eadweard Muybridge and Duane Michals. Rather than narrating a story through these sequences, I simply wanted to plot moments during an interval to visualise the passing of time. These photographs individually wouldn't really work as a composition by themselves because I wasn't able to capture that 'decisive moment' like in Michals' images but strange as this subject matter may be, they work as a collective when grouped together in this manner and viewed in this specific way and order.
-
The lighting in the following sequences is very extreme in order to portray an atmosphere or mood, the monochromatic palette helping to exaggerate the melancholy and gloomy atmosphere of the particular day the images were taken on. It's very obvious that these photos are staged and absolutely not spontaneous due to the repetitive nature of the poses but the feeling of the passing of time is still evident within them.
-
Sunday, 4 June 2017
Location II
These analogue experimentations were part of a 'Location' project where we had to develop pieces of work based around the location that your group was given, in my case, a graveyard. The above images were primarily inspired by a photograph I took at the graveyard with a decomposing leaf slightly obscuring the lens of the camera so that shapes were blocked out and revealed at the same time. I cut out the light areas/orbs in the image of the tree canopy and juxtaposed them on top of blurry motion capture images. I placed the cut out image accordingly so that the main subject of the image underneath is still discernible through the shapes and lines that conceal it. The fragments look almost like a mosaic, and through squinted eyes perhaps a kaleidoscope.
The next two images are my way of 'prolonging' instantaneous moments, extending the 'now' by cutting up two disparate images and arranging them alternately and in a very structured, kind of uniform manner.
Saturday, 3 June 2017
Maquette #1
|
|
“Configurations”, 2016; paper cut outs, 21 x 11 cm
|
Maquette: a small scale model of an unfinished sculpture used to visualize ad test shapes and ideas. On the contrary, these maquettes are the final product and make up a series of on-going explorations with low-fi, non-technical materials such as paper. The basis for these were quick observational drawings of hair from which I made several paper cut outs made from graph paper, parcel paper, tracing paper, newsprint and foamy material.
Very much inspired by Kim Kei and Larry Bell's hanging sculptures, I created forms, 'spatial drawings' of sorts, organic and quite dynamic. Islands in their own right these initial paper structures will form the skeleton of a bigger, more ambitious project that I have in mind using more experimental materials and processes.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)