Kumi Yamashita

Kumi Yamashita has a very unusal talent, and could be seen as an instillation artist, she uses shapes made from wood or metal that when the light is just right, cast shadows of people. Its a strage thing to look at but it is a wonder. after all there is a shadow of a human standing, sitting ect, but no one is actually there. The interesting bit is that without the lighting being perfect there would be no perfectly formed figure waiting there. Its very unusal. the most unusal ones being the sulptures made from text and letters that some how magically forms into a persons face or full figure. As i have been looking at surrealist films and photographers like to play with shadows and contrasts, one film that stands out of its shadows is  Nosferatu the german expressionist vampire film. Maybe i could also work in some play on shadows or even just using it as another way of deforming the figure, the person. 

 

No Face

Doing this idea and thinking of ways to hide something, hide urself, hide who u truely are just makes me think of a character from Anime Classic Spirited away, an odd spirit who takes an interest in Chihiro. Seeing No-Face standing outside in the rain, Chihiro takes pity on the creature and lets him into the bathhouse to take shelter from the storm. At first, he appears to be a strange, demure, cloaked, masked wraith who seems mute other than his breathing and urging grunts. Seen as polite, calm, and quiet at first. This soon changes as he seems to feed off of the people he encounters, and once seeing how the staff of the 'spirit' bathhouse respond to him producing gold, he becomes consumed with greed and gluttony. However once fed with a medican ball (and alot of pukeing) he seems to return back to his calm state and in turn, stays in the bathhouse as a helper. While slightly out of the ordinary and from the style and approach i am taking, the fact that he is a creature that has no face, no persona of his own, and seems to feed on how everyone else is, everyones emotions and even takes on the voice of one of the staff members he seems to eat. hes almost a blank canvus, empty, just a shell and this is what made me want to discuss this as part of my reserch. His character appearence  is also very interesting. He is almost ghosty and only regains substance when he feeds off of other people.he has no voice until he takes that of another, and the blank white face, and black cloak even starts to change as he grows with greed.

Rebecca Belmore

Belmore is a canadian performance and instillation artist, her work focuses on a range of subjects from history,voice and voicelessness, place and  indentity.  while her work is interesting, expesherly her video instillations such as fountains (added at the bottom) and while she looks at indenity, she looks at it from an angle that i do not really wish to persue. its mainly looking into her own historical identity rather then my idea of sort of hiding urself and who u really are deep inside. the reason i looked at her was a section of stills from some of her performances and instillations looked like they could relate however personally this isnt a direction i would like to take my work. the only really thing that i liked was the fountain and how the water was used to distort the video and such. expesh as the video was projected onto a water screen (a moving waterfall)  that made it more interesting to me. I found a good artical about her fountain piece on Conundrumonline.

Mark Jenkins

Mark Jenkins is a street artist best known for his street instillations using everyday objects such as packaging and tape.  His work is not just street based but his work is shown in galleries all over the world. His street work can be split into different stages or catagories: 

Tape Men (2003--)
Jenkins first street series in which casts made from his body using clear packing tape were installed in city streets in Rio de Janeiro and later Washington DC.

Storker Project (2005--)
In this ongoing project tape babies are "dropped" in various outdoor environments in different cities as part of a "species propagation movement." To date there have been over 100 babies installed.

Embed Series (2006--)
In this series, Jenkins dresses his life size tape casts in clothing to create realistic sculptures which he installs in various positions in urban environments—stuck into traffic cones, trash bags, cans, etc. He documents the reaction of the people who pass by them with video. The most watched of these videos features a figure sculpture positioned to create an illusion that it is sticking its head into a wall.

Meterpops (2005)
The Meterpop installation involved putting transparent lollipop heads onto parking meters in Washington DC on Independence Avenue (outside the Department of Energy).

Traffic-Go-Round (2007)
The "traffic-go-round" project converted a traffic circle (Thomas Circle, Washington DC) into a merry-go-round using horses made of tape mounted on the lampposts around the circle. The horses were faced the opposite flow of traffic to create for riders the illusion that the horses were moving past them.

Jesus 2.0 (2006)
Jesus 2.0 was a collaboration between Mark Jenkins and the Graffiti Research Lab. Two clear tape sculptures of a child in crucifixion position were fitted with LED Throwies and then installed on a lampposts in New York City.

alot of his work involves people who have there faces covered or hidden or dont even have them, as well as that but the ghostly presence of his celeotape men and women are really interesting takes, it shows no identity at all and distorts and makes the audience form a new view on who or what they might be. 

Chris Dunlop

Chris dunlop is a fashion, editiorial and music photographer. The main reason i wanted to look at him was a photo collection that he did for the band Funeral For a Friend. These images for the album casually dressed was based on the work of Rene Magritte (see previous post on him.) I wanted to include these because they show how his idea of people with this 'cloth' bag over there head would translate from painting to photography. I think they are very powerful images, and while they dont really have the same 'naturalistic' poses as Magrittes paintings they in there own right have a surrealist feel by not really embrasing the avaerage scenes and being placed in the middle of a corn feild.They also have abit of a weird mixture of colours. the last image seen here has very saturated and popping colours while the middle image seems rather paler and destaturated apart from the red dress which seemingly pops out.

Zdzislaw bekzinski

Bekzinski is a renouned polish painter and photographer. His paintings and drawing are gothic fantacy and are often focusing on representing surrealist worlds. His work is both visually stunning and really is rather eerie and almost frightening in places. it all revolves around worlds filled with creepy looking demons and creatures that look like they should be in a tim burton movie. However supposidly this was a vast contrast to the person Bekzinzki was because he was seen as a vastly happy man. His photography has the edge of surrealism seen in his other mediums of work. The dark and dreamly black and white contrasty photos often shows portraits but in a way that you never see the whole person, cut off and unusally framed photos. He also uses a play on shadows, sometime to the point of obstructing a whole face. One of a woman leaving the frame  reminds me ALOT of meshes of the afternoon that can be seen in a pervious post. Its very interesting and this idea of closely or oddly cropping to get just a section of a person revealed is something i have been thinking of including in my video.

Rene Magritte

while he is a painter, Rene Magritte was a very famouse belgium surrealist artist. within his work, his intended goal  was to challenge observers' preconditioned perceptions of reality and force viewers to become hypersensitive to their surroundings. His work often toys with basing work on an object (such as a pipe or an apple) and making them realistic in a sence, but adding the statement that because it is only a painting of an apple it is not infact an apple. The work that relates most to the idea i am looking at, 'hiding who you are'  are a series of paintings he did of people who had cloth bags over there heads, even though they are seemingly in natural posing positions, or that they are unaware of the fact that there faces are concealed. There is also one of his more famous paintings of a man in a suit and bowler hat, hoewever he has no face, his face is seemingly missing. and another where the buisnessmans face has been concealed by an apple seemingly floating infront of his face.  This is the sort of thing i would like to look at more,and explore how other artists, photographers and video makers hide the identity of modals, or deform the identity of a person.

down with the sickness

only resently have i relieased the similarity with the lyrics to disterbed 'down with the sickness' and how its like some of the discriptions ive heard about just one min being fine and then all of a sudden it changes and your something else, you dont feel like urself. although the video to this song is the band just singing i found this video where the lyrics are plastered across a video intime with the song.

redoing lip scene

one of the main problem from the first shot of the lip scene was the fact that because i was using my lip ring, the hole was already in the skin and seemed to make it appear to fake, however i am going to experiment creating fake skin and seeing if it will look real, but also be able to be broke through with the needle to give the effect we want for it. i found a website tutorial on using liquid latex to create a thin layer of fake skin actually for creating a needle through skin look for halloween/horror effects.

which i have here: 

fake stitches and scars

i have also perchased some liquid latex to try and practice to see if it is possible to make it look effective.
im trying with a small area of liquid latex, and although it seems abit thick as long as i can adhear it securely to my actual skin it will be easy to break through, providing it does look real once the foundation has been added and the latex is added to my skin.

plans and story board

so far ive really just been brainstorming ideas of what im going to do and in all honesty all the ideas ive had have been for video, so after much thought i think im going to focus on just the one medium. The idea is to focus on imagery and the sound to accompany it. I want it to appear so that in all the images that the face is covered, distorted, or only parts of the face showing. ive been working on the kind of imagery ive wanted to include and brainstormed and even worked on a little storyboard style thing which i will upload soon. for the sound i want to create an atmosphere, as well as maybe having a narration, if i was to do a narration but with the voice to be distorted, and just as annonamous as the face.Also i will be looking into re shooting my lip scene from my last video.