Work In Progress #2

Converge
The Converge team has been hard at work planning this years lecture series. We are a little disappointed that we did have our first event yet, but scheduling conflicts with the artists did not allow that to happen. We have our first event booked with Chris Curreri & Louis Jacob. We met today with Dave Dyment & Roula Partheniou today to discuss our second event and have dates for that now set in stone. A couple other artists have been contacted and are aware of our interest. On the boring side of things, all of our funding applications have now been sent out. We have yet to hear back from everyone just yet and still have a few presentations we have to make to people but the boring number stuff has been completed. We re-established our social media presence and are ready to get into that. We have fundraising plans ready to get right into when we come back in September. Overall, it's been a slow start but we are excited to finally start the events in the next term!


Personal Thesis Project
I haven't had much time to really work on my personal thesis project too much. I am so glad I chose to do it in the second semester though, even though I am going to be flooded doing both projects next year. I have had a lot of time to collect materials and do lots of research. The annotated bibliography has been very helpful for me. I am never able to do much research before delving into my projects so I have found this time very enjoyable. As soon as my work load lightens up next week, I am super excited to be able to start playing around with my ideas more so I can come back in the winter term with a hopefully solid idea. I still have no solid idea as to what I am going to be doing for sure, but I feel i'm in a better place about it then I was back in September.

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY : 3 Non-Print Sources

1. Not Paper

http://archive.notpaper.net/

I found this website through Aprile Eelich (one of my 4 artists listed below). It is a collective project that she started in 2008 and is the primary curator of. The description on the blog states that it is "dedicated to showcasing the work of international collage artists. We strive to meet the artists and understand the thoughts behind the process, so interviews with artists are a big part of what we do."
Unfortunately the site has been unactive since 2012, but there's 4 years worth of goodies still on the site. I am still going through the archives and finding so much great work and inspiration.

2. Take Me Out - Franz Ferdinand, Directed by Jonas Odell

VIDEO LINK

I have heard this song many many times but had never seen the video before. I was out at a bar one night and this came on the tv. It is so incredibly true that you find inspiration when you are least looking for it! I stopped talking to my friends and kept my eyes glued to the screen until it was over. It is sooo Dada-esque! It's interesting to see how the collage element is used in video form. Definitely not something I am willing to tackle just yet but great for future reference. The video includes many interesting compositions in it and I thought it was cool how they turned the texts that would normally be German Dada messages into lyric excerpts of the song.

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY : 5 Print Sources

 Ades, D., & Herrmann, D. (2014). Hannah Höch. New York: Prestel.
This is one of the first books I looked at over the summer while figuring out what to do for my thesis project. I started out looking into Höch's work because she is arguably the most famous female collage artist. I wasn't too familiar with many other collage artists yet so I thought this was a good place to start out. It familiarized me better with Höch's work and introduced me to a LOT of her work I had never seen. The writing in the book was minimal but it allowed me to learn her basic history and background as well as see a wide collection of her work.

Lavin, M. (1993). Cut with the kitchen knife: The Weimar photomontages of Hannah Höch. New Haven: Yale University Press.
This book on Höch had a lot more writing in it. I learned a bit about her process and about the topics she worked with. It was very interesting to read about what she thought about when making her works and why she made them. I find it hard to find books that really share how artists make work as they are often just showcasing the work with very minimal writing. This book was a really great source! She is quoted in the book as saying that she likes to cut up pictures because it gives them new and numerous meanings as it is removed from any context. There are infinite juxtapositions, contrasts and connections in Dada and Surrealist collage which is why I really love it. It can mean one thing to one person and another thing to somebody else, so was great to read about what she intended her work to say but to also know that she didn't really mind if people thought differently of it. It could be such a beautiful composition but mean something truly terrible and vice versa.

Robinson, H. (2001). Feminism-art-theory: An anthology, 1968-2000. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
This book had pretty heavy content and I admittedly did not read the whole thing. I skimmed through a few of the essays that popped out at me and got some good stuff out of it. I wanted to look at this book because I never really read much about theory and also because I think feminist art is important. I am still not sure how much of a feminist voice my work will have but it is still important for me to research it. I am definitely going to go back to this book over the Christmas break to see what else I can pull from it.

Siegel, E., & Bello, P. (2009). Playing with pictures: The art of Victorian photocollage. Chicago, Ill.: Art Institute of Chicago ;.
I saw this exhibition at the AGO a few years back and it has always sort of been my driving force with wanting to do collage art. I loved how playful the works were and that they included both painting and collage. I never read up about the work much after the exhibit but it was always stuck in the back of my mind. I was looking around at the Reference Library and was excited to see this book there as I forgot there was a publication to go with the exhibit. It had a lot more writing in it then I expected which was awesome! I learned that it was mostly women that made these beautiful collages and that they made them for their family photo albums. These women were mostly part of royal families so all of the figures pictured in the collages are their relatives. The collages "represent ways in which many women understood their femininity and that the spaces and objects depicted are largely domestic". The author also stated that the works gave "fantasy to truthful records". I like this idea that you can turn something real into something completely not real. 

Wallace, I., & Augaitis, D. (2012). Ian Wallace: At the intersection of painting and photography. London: Black Dog Pub. 
I have always wanted to try and incorporate painting in my work somehow as painting was always my forte growing up and I don't do too much of it anymore, so I thought i'd look through this book to stay open to the idea.  I had not heard of Ian Wallace before but I picked this book up and liked what I saw! It's hard to make works that cohesively go together when you are using mixed media elements. Wallace does an excellent job doing so. I like how much variety there is in his work and how he explores many different mediums. There were even some collage pieces in the book which was cool to see. 

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY : 4 (+1 extra) Visual Artists

Here are some artists (in no particular order) who have been inspiring me along the way thus far. I have a long list of artists so I tried to select some with a variety of styles.

1. Richard Hamilton

I have always been a fan of Richard Hamilton's work. I was recently at Indigo looking at the Art magazines and one of his images from the "Fashion Plates" series was on the cover. (I cannot for the life of me remember which magazine it was though!) I had never seen this work of his before and I loved it! It's so different from a lot of his work and I think the compositions are really interesting

2. Mark Searcy

Mark Searcy is an artist that I found through Aprile Elcich (mentioned below), though their work is very different. He makes very beautiful and simple geometric collages.

"I work particularly with magazines that were printed and designed before computers. Their pages offer valuable graphic design history lessons as the typography, photography, design, and even the printing was more involved than it is today."

Website: http://www.mark-searcy.com/home/

3. Beth Hoeckel

I randomly came across the artist Beth Hoeckel one day when I was looking for inspiration. Her work immediately struck a chord with me. I find some of it very similar to my own work. It's very simple but so beautiful. I notice that she explores a lot of different subjects and works with a lot of different materials. She changes her style quite often and is very versatile.

Selected work from her Point of View Series: 

Drifters

Face to Face

 Selected work from her Poemme Series:

Black Phone

Downfall

Website: http://bethhoeckel.com/

4. Aprile Eelcich

I recently came across the work of Toronto artist Aprile Eelcich. I work at the Umbra Store and some of her work is featured as the face paper in our frames. I fell in love with it the second I saw it. I love how whimsical her work is. She  works with a lot of different materials such as envelopes and index cards - not just images. She also works as a graphic designer which you can see kind of influences her collage work as well.

Website: http://aprileelcich.com/

An interesting interview about her work and the blog she started (which will be included in my Other Sources):

http://www.thepaperplace.ca/wp/tag/aprile-elcich/

5. Hannah Hoch

Hannah Hoch is a collage artist that I have always been intrigued by. I only knew her early work such as "Cut with a Kitchen Knife" and I wanted to explore her work further. I read a few books about her and did more research and found a bunch of her later work that I just loved. It's so different from what she started out doing but still represented the same Dada and surrealist concepts we were always familiar with in her work. I love that they are so abstract and that they can take on so many different meanings.

Around a Red Mouth, 1967

Girl at the Sea, 1965

The Beautiful Bottom, 1959

Work in Progress #1

Still having a lot of trouble settling on a concrete idea. Finding lots of inspiration but not getting that 'Aha' moment yet for my own work. Trying to spend more time playing and hoping that it will come to me. I spent a lot of time just cutting out images and decided it was time to start placing them. I have just been taping images temporarily down to play with compositions. Right now they are very simple but I am trying to start somewhere. Have been trying to make them kind of humorous and I am liking it so far so I need to keep going!
Here are some (poor quality) rough scans:

Gallery Response

I love seeing the Aimia/Grange Prize Exhibition every year at the AGO. It's very inspiring to be able to see artists working today that are changing what photography is. You never see just plain old photographs in this exhibition - not that there's anything wrong with traditional photography, it's just nice to see something different! It's so cool to see artists working with all different kinds of mediums in their photography and how they tie them together. It's hard for me to pick my favourite artist in the exhibition, but it would have to be a tie between Elad Lassry and Lisa Oppenheim.

Elad's work is so interesting. I love how he is really challenging the idea of what photography is. Adding three dimensional objects turns his images into much more than just photography and I think it's great. It really makes you think.

Lisa's work challenges what photography is as well but is approached in a different way. I like that she uses pre-existing images because that is what I like to use in my own work as well. Pulling up images on Google is something that any person could do but she decides to turn them into something of her own. Although her smoke images do have a deeper meaning, I do just find them very beautiful to look at as well.  

12 words

Forward
What
Cut
Paste
Progress
Why
How
Reason
Women
Surreal
Collage
Source

Original Proposal

"Somewhere I find something trivial, the more trivial the better - something that doesn't say anything, but which suddenly stimulates my imagination and forces me to make a statement." - Hannah Hoch

          Last year I began to work with collage and more hands on processes for my assignments. I had always enjoyed doing this kind of work just for fun in my free time but until then had not started to think about using it in my work. I found it quite challenging to play out serious concepts when you are limited to already made images. It was quite overwhelming but I loved giving new life to old images that otherwise would remain in books and magazines sitting around collecting dust. So I would like to continue working with this process.

          As of right now, my idea is still a little up in the air. I did a lot of research on Hannah Hoch and other Dada and Surrealist artists. I have been very inspired by Hoch's aesthetics and loved reading about her stance on feminism and gender roles. I studied through a lot of paintings by surrealist artists too and even drew inspiration from those. Last year I did a bit of a commentary on what it's like to be a woman in a world which sometimes feels is completely run by men. I played with text phrases from teen magazines from the 1960's and placed them with images of women on absurd backgrounds. I found it interesting to work with old material as it shows how far we have come since then but also shows that in some cases we are still kind of in the same place with feminism and gender roles.

          At this point I am teetering between continuing with this sort subject matter or exploring surrealism a bit more. Last year I changed my idea several times as I was creating the collages as I was constantly being inspired to new ideas by the material I was using. I have begun working on it and I should be able to have a more solid idea in the next couple of weeks but this is where I am at right now.