Katrien De Blauwer, collage

http://www.katriendeblauwer.com I like Katrien De Blauwer’s collage works very much. We can see that her collage works are consisted of many fragments with creative imagination, which is very ambiguous. Waste magazine got an interview with Katrien De Blauwer. I am influenced by some parts of the interview. It shows that the process of creative collage, which is very useful for me.

What is your creative process like?

I have quite a fixed routine and working days. My working process can be divided in three parts: Looking for material, like paper backgrounds, old magazines and books. Preparing a bunch of material: which means tearing or roughly cutting images that touch me somehow. Making collages: which is usually a three or four hour session where I get into a flow and just create. It’s almost like someone else takes control. I follow my intuition without really knowing what the result will be. There’s only the paper fragments around me. Everything else disappears.

How do you find inspiration? Any particular influences?

I find inspiration in the material and in myself. I’ve been working for quite some time now with these 50’s and 60’s magazines and always had a fascination for that period. Lately I’m watching (again) the movies of Antonioni and Bergman from that period. They’re stunning. I find a lot of inspiration in movies.

Where do you find the materials and images to create your pieces? Do you ever incorporate original photographs?

I mainly find them in flea markets, second hand bookshops, by accident (in a container on the street). I like to build some kind of relation with traders, so that they understand what I’m looking for.Two years ago I did works that contained original early 20th century photographs.

In her collage works, she collects many fragments from old magazines and reconstructs these pieces,which give them a new meaning.Different contents are combined by Katrien De Blauwer,which make some narrative stories. It seems montage. I believe that this is an essential research to do further concept video or documentary. It is very interesting. Therefore,I am trying to do this kind of collage as an experiment for further artworks.

Ilona Sagar, Human Factors

These images from Ilona Sagar’s video,Human Factors

Human Factors,Ilona Sagar.

Human Factors antagonises connection between language, hierarchies and bodily well-being through its manifestation in architecture and landscape. Although the film has no protagonist a central element of the film is a voice over. What the voice represents is abstruse, she is both lovers, landmasses, ruptured bodies, a union between political bodies.

This video is collected from different visual elements , like body performance and manifestation in architecture and landscape. The video looks like an ambiguous fiction but it is filled with philosophy. I am influenced by this artwork a lot. In this artwork , Artist Sagar knows how to editing these different elements to highlight a potential topic, which is the relationship between human-being and environment.I really like this kind of recording form. Sometimes, we cannot present something directly but we can try to represent something from different points,elements,factors and directions. That is also can make sense of it.

http://www.ilonasagar.com/

Collage test 1

I am trying to combine different materials to do collage.

This is a combination of photographs and objects in the reality.

2014 Interim show

Experiment and Idea test 

Before last month, I got a part-time job in a Japanese sushi restaurant.My initial inspiration from job experience in there. I tried to make a comparison of two situations. One of situation is worker do something again and again like a machine. Another situation is peaceful landscape. I tried to put two videos on the two opposite walls, which things like a conversation between two different situations in the same context. (PS: landscape part from Japanese film, another part was taken in Japanese sushi restaurant by myself )

Due to the limitation of time and some reasons, I didn’t take sufficient video in my part-time job place so I have changed content of videos. One of the video is peaceful and flowing lake. Another one of the video is some still images of dynamic portrait（double exposure) on the street. I tried to make an ambiguous connection between two videos on the opposite walls. Anyway , it is a test for a comparison of two videos of different contents.

an artwork by 2014 Wimbledon student

This artwork by a 2014 student in UAL Wimbledon. ‘She is a Chinese Fine Artist who is interested in using video, photography and projection in her practice. Her works are about distorting the face by physical manipulation. They reflect the theme of the feminine struggle with power. She has researched the relationship between female beauty and power. She attempt to examine how ideas of beauty control people’s ideal self and how the contradictions and confinements of problematic situations restrict women.As her starting point, her work attempted to define beauty and ugliness in female faces using celebrity portraits and artist self-portraits. She made a series of female faces drawn on elastic materials (fabric, plastic, etc). By filming the stretching processes and recording how ‘beauty’ can be ‘destroyed’ or ‘rebuilt’. She examined the construction of this concept.In her later video work, her projected female faces (Her own faces and the combination face of her mother and her) onto her abdomen, meanwhile she wore the silk and was tearing the way out of. It symbolized the beauty across ages and generations. The powerful motions and the double images reflect the contradiction between beauty and ugliness, inner and outer, reality and the ideal. Also this work points out to the restriction from a long history of female generation, reflects the female get rid of matrix to rebuild themselves and unavoidable to continue the circulation of female’s life.She also using overlay photography and moving image animations of emotional self portraits that throw a contemporary look at Cubism and Expressionism, using historical art forms to simultaneously question identity and the self. Later, she would continue to test out more possibilities of the projector, using projection to discover the special visual effect for reflecting feminine issues.’

I like this expressive form very much.  The combination of photography, video and projection, which are an effective art form. I am influenced by this artwork.  Artist uses several balloons as a medium also is a very clever idea concerning different stages of portraits are quite vivid. At the same time, artist chooses portrait and self-portrait to present the topic of identity also is a powerful way.