tea

Currently I'm exploring the subject of tea, and its place as a ritual part of daily life. I'm also trying out painting and experimenting with tea staining in creating owrk. These images are some things I've found via searching on Google images, I'll upload some of my own work once I'm happy to post it up.

see what I got

Sophie Calle is fascinated by the interface between our public lives and our private selves. This has led her to investigate patterns of behaviour using techniques akin to those of a private investigator, a psychologist, or a forensic scientist. It has also led her to investigate her own behaviour so that her life, as lived and as imagined, has informed many of her most interesting works.

The Birthday Ceremony is her first major sculptural installation. Although made in 1998 the work has its origins in the years 1980 to 1993 when Calle invented and sustained a series of private and shared rituals around her birthday. These are now manifest as art, demonstrating how closely her life and her art are intertwined. Over this fourteen-year period, aside from the occasional year of disruption, Calle held an annual dinner party on the evening (or around the time) of her birthday. To each celebration she invited a group of friends and relatives, the precise number of invitees corresponding to the number of years of her age, with one additional, anonymous guest nominated by a chosen guest, in order to symbolise the unknown of her future.

They were the most ambitious of a series of rituals Calle had invented to override an obsessive insecurity she experienced in early adulthood. The guests brought gifts, tokens of love and affection, and these Calle displayed in a glass-fronted cabinet, as a constant reminder of this affection. At the end of the year the objects were boxed up and put away, their places taken by the gifts of another birthday dinner party. At stressful moments over the years Calle was able to unpack the boxes and reassure herself of her networks of support. When she became forty in 1993, Calle realised she had been cured of this obsessive insecurity and no longer felt the necessity to recall her friendships and family ties in such a formal way.



The Birthday Ceremony brings together fifteen cabinets based on the medical design of the original, which had been given to Calle by her father. Thirteen individual cabinets and one pair, each contain the gifts of a single year.

They include works of art, hand made tokens of affection, books and letters, junk and antiques, plastic trivia, items stolen from a restaurant, bottles of wine, chocolates and so on.

frame exteriors (interior life)

rain
naked
exposed environment
exposed figures
filters colour
natural light
transparent apparent
raincoat?

frame exteriors

frame outside space
life drawing placed outside
unprotective environment
exposed to wind and rain
colour filters
transparency
multiple images

Eye see through

Obsessed with reflections, transparency from glass, windows, plastic everywhere in the environment - I am exploring this in a new brief at college. Picture frames, mirrors, cut-out photographs of scaffolding layered together with other images taken live in an environment - in the photos here it is a classroom.

Water works

Swoon's Swimming Cities of Serinissima is the international street and installation artist Swoon's floating art project, is the kind of undertaking that puts it in the creative ranks of other optimistically adventurous events like Burning Man. With a mission of inspiring hope in a time of over-consumption and economic despair, the collection of handcrafted sculptural vessels built from salvaged materials will make their way from Slovenia to Venice, collecting beautiful things along the way, such as flowers, seeds, music and stories, to build a cabinet of wonders to share at this year's Venice Biennale.




To help make this expedition a reality, Swoon—whose work has exhibited at MoMA, PS1 and Tate Modern—is selling two different limited edition silkscreen prints that are analogous to the Swimming Cities project. The first, "Serenissima," is a signed and numbered double layer silkscreen edition of 250, designed specifically for this year's venture. "Switchback Sisters," is a seven-layer, 106-edition silkscreen print on tea-strained archival paper that's an upshot of Swoon's maiden voyage, a flotilla that sailed from Troy, NY to Manhattan. The silkscreen takes its image from the 27-foot high paper-and-wood sculpture which formed the centerpiece of the resulting installation, "Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea," which will be incorporated into the new Serenissima raft.



The "Serenissima" print is available for $150 and the "Switchback Sisters" print for $700. The crew of 35 artists, performers, activists and home-brewed mechanics will be throwing numerous fundraisers and events in which you can show your support, to find out more information about the ambitious project or to make a donation visit the Swimming Cities website.





A really insightful short film on the creation and exhibition of this work is on You Tube at the link below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9rTmTFMYH0

dialogue

Annabel Fraser

No Place (part 1)

The No Place books (2007) question whether narrative is essential to create a space that carries meaning. It is based on written observations of a street in London and aims to be as objective as possible. The works use the depth of the book to build up an ever-expanding picture of the space through words. The deliberate absence of narrative encourages the reader to naturally seek one out.

Installation 2 - 'Falling Down' 5th - 20th September 2009

These are images of my second installation exhibited at the Glasgow club venue 'The Flying Duck' during September 2009. I was invited by the club night 'Orderly Disorder' to create a piece for their artspace, and so the installation entitled 'Falling Down' was created.

The concept of 'Falling Down' is an intentional juxtaposition of the recession with the classic tale 'Alice's Adventures In Wonderland'. Whilst we will still continue to consume during the recession, our choices made as to what we consume are influenced by the sense we make of the worth of the consumables in our lives. There's fun to had in consumption but what would you do to get out of a hole where new choices present themselves? This is the focus of this installation, with objects taking on personas and projected shadows (using LED lights) that give the objects life. It is certainly apparent that the objects are characters that are positioned to represent the sequence of meetings that happen for Alice during her time in wonderland. I see the experience of recession as very similiar to Alice's experience in wonderland, and how her interactions with characters influence her choices, and prompt her rapid maturity in a non-sensical place that questions reality.

Installation 1 - 'Filter'

These are images of my first installation exhibited as part of the end of year show at Anniesland college this year.
The concept is the existence of buildings, and how a structure can convey a certain presence in its construction and its demolition. I'm interested in the shadows that buildings cast over an area, and how these can be manipulated to take on different forms.
I used scaffolding fabric to create varied forms and used differnet lighting setups to cast subtle shadows onto the installation space.
In the centre of the installation sits a peephole box which has more shadow experimentation inside.
I am developing this installation's elements further in my future work.

Craftex Exhibition - photographs included are....

Craftex Exhibition 2009

Thursday, June 11th at 10am - 7.30pm
Friday & Sat, June 12th & 13th at 10am - 4.30pm
Sunday, June 14, 2009 at 12noon - 4pm

Location: Trades House, 85 Glassford Street, Glasgow

It took me ages to choose just 2 photographs, as there's a limit on how many you can enter, the options are to just go for a single image, or a series of photos. I've compromised on this and gone for a twin set of images that capture the type of style I've been experimenting with, and they are the only ones I have which festure a human figure, namely me, which I think is interesting as a look into the viewpoint of the photographer. These images are collectively under the title 'Filter'.

Looking forward to seeing some interesting work in this exhibition.

Exhibition news

It is exciting to report that I've got my first exhibition experience happening sooner than I can sit still to think about - so I'll keep this blog short.

The end of year exhibition at Anniesland College art campus down at Balshagray Drive opens on Friday 5th June. I'll post more info as it comes in, but it's pretty hectic just now.

All I can reveal is that I'm exhibiting alot of work involving shadows. The photo below is earlier in the year's work, and may make an appearance in a different form. All I can say is that I'm working with a really exciting space, and am looking forward to showing it to an audience.

Watch this space....

I'm currently working on development for two art briefs: one's called 'Parasite' and the other's called 'City'. For both I'm exploring 2D & 3D approaches, and time is taken up just now with photography, sketching and sourcing materials for sculpture.

I will be updating here with my development ideas, but not all of them, I hasten to add, for personal creative security and actually credibility, and because I'll carefully post images up as a taster for the forthcoming exhibition in June.

Expect some interesting and hopefully thought-provoking work to appear in this blog space soon....

Inspiring artist - Dan Graham, US conceptual artist (1942-still going)

Since taking these office space images I've discovered the works of artist Dan Graham (USA). He uses the processes of mirroring to examine different aspects of human interaction from corporate power structures and surveillance to consumerism and social relations.












Dan Graham transformed the roof of 548 West 22nd Street into a small-scale urban park for New York's Chelsea neighbourhood. The project was accessible to the public from 1991 until 2004, when this exhibition space closed. The project included a large-scale architectural glass pavilion designed by Graham in collaboration with architects Mojdeh Baratloo and Clifton Balch. Constructed from a two-way mirrored glass, the walls of the pavilion shifted between transparent and reflective states as the intensity of light changed, creating changing and complex visual effects with the sky, surrounding landscape, and interactions with people on the roof. The project also encompassed a small shed on the roof which was converted into a cafe/video viewing room. The video program was organized around themes chosen by Graham.














More info about his art can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Graham

Office space

Whilst working on research material for a current art brief entitled 'work' I have found an interesting subject matter to be desolate office spaces. In the present economic climate, it is the increasing absence of work that is omnipresent daily. The emptiness of work spaces, particularly offices convey an intriguing atmosphere that allows the viewer to simply wonder what used to happen in this space.
I am focusing on the this in the photographs taken, some of which are below.