PHOTOGRAPHER'S FORUM — PHOTOGRAPHY CONTEST

I'm entering this contest! It's only $4.95 per entry, I think the first place winner receives a Canon camera. Woooooo!

http://www.theartlist.com/opportunities_details.php?id=5737

Anderson Gallery MFA Thesis Show, Interstitial by Hassan Pitts

Interstitial-pertaining to, situated in, or forming interstices.
Interstices- an intervening space.
or a small or narrow space or interval between things or parts, esp. when one of a series of alternating uniform spaces and parts: the interstices between the slats of a fence.

The first thing I did after I came home from the MFA Thesis show was look up interstitial in the dictionary. The definition still didn't clear much up for me about the piece. I saw this piece twice, under different circumstances. The first time I saw it was opening night. The first time, the sound was down pretty low and I had to share the room with multiple people. The second time, I cranked the volume up (like you told us to in class) and sat there with one other person in total silence. I felt uncomfortable most of the time. You made the whole process, especially removing your piercings, seem very painful (especially the septum ring), I was literally squirming in my seat. There was one point during the removal of the rings, where the sound got really really loud and I was just sitting there, eyes glued to the screen. I couldn't look away. The whole time I was watching, I felt like you were preparing me for something really big to happen. But it never happens. Maybe that's what the title has to do with the piece. An interstice is the small or narrow space or interval between things or parts, maybe the whole process of you removing your piercings, shaving your head, and covering yourself in green stuff, is part of the interval before something really big and important happens. However, you don't show us what happens next, leaving me wanting more. The first time I saw your piece, I wasn't sure how I felt about it. I wanted to like it but I wasn't sure. The second time changed my mind a bit. Cranking the volume was the key. The music is definitely what did it for me. It was very foreboding and fit very well with the action taking place.

Ok...I want to continue with this blog and I will as soon as finals week is over and I stop losing my mind.

Anderson Gallery Student Juried Show

In an earlier post, I mentioned that my piece had been rejected. That didn't stop me from going to see the rest of the show. I would have to say that my favorite part was definitely the video pieces. I'm a big fan of video art and I wish I was better at it. It's something I've been working on and I'm hoping someday I'll be able to create something really cool. There were 2 or 3 pieces that I really enjoyed. One was called "Tree Ghosts" and consisted of people running and jumping around while covered in white sheets. Half of the video was done with the mirror effect, creating doubles of everything. There was a really good song playing in the background too, which is probably why I liked the video so much. I wish I had been able to figure out what the song was. Overall, the whole video was very ethereal and "ghostly" which is probably the effect the artist was going for, calling the piece "Tree Ghosts." The other piece I really liked was called "Punk." It consisted of those cartoon drawings of different careers, the ones I used to see when I was 4 or 5 years old and in daycare. There had to have been about 20 or 30 different cartoons popping up on the screen, one after the other, on beat with the song. It was really funny to watch, especially since the careers were all wholesome like policeman or fireman or ballerina, set to some random punk song that goes against these ideas. The videos were definitely my favorite part of the show, I think out of everyone I went to the show with, I was one of the only people that liked the videos most. I didn't see much photography in the show, which was kind of disappointing. The Photo department is gonna have to bring it next year!

Artist Statement...I guess.

Well, here goes:

As of now, the series I'm working on is untitled. It's mainly influenced by my part-time job, as a clerk at CVS Pharmacy. I'm really interested in the "retail culture" that exists among fellow employees and myself. This is only something I've noticed after working retail for a few years now. It's almost like an "us against the world" situation. My series is focusing on this. I've taken portraits of my fellow employees, poking fun at the seriousness that is the retail world. These portraits are just one half of my series. The other half consists of self-portraits, where I'm "acting out" typical scenes that I encounter on the job. In doing this series, I'm hoping to convey the human side of retail, the side that the public doesn't see all the time. I want to poke fun at the whole idea of retail as well, some people take it so seriously it's almost laughable.

This post is also really late...

I submitted a piece to the Anderson Gallery Juried Show...and got rejected. It's all good, I'm not bitter. For real. I have pictures to prove I entered!

Artist Resume

Katharine Braswell
N. Lombardy Street Apartment 2 Richmond, VA 23220

Education
Virginia Commonwealth University, Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography, 2011
Experience

Experience
Summer Classes, American University 2005-2006
Took various art classes over the summer break such as, 35 mm photography, film studies, and digital photography.

72 Hour Film Festival, Frederick, MD 2006
Created a film in three days with a team of six people that was screened in front of a large audience.
As team leader, I developed an idea, scouted locations, filmed, and edited a short movie.

Production Assistant, Isabelle Glass, Frederick, MD December 2005-May 2007
Assisted jewelry maker by torching pieces of silver to be used in bracelets, earrings, and necklaces.
Responsible for data entry and maintaining guest list.

Other Activities
Staff member, The Bridge Literary Arts Magazine, Frederick, MD 2005-2007
Worked with other students to create my high school’s literary arts magazine. Graded submissions for entry into the magazine, arranged fundraisers, submitted art.

Awards Received
Roberta Timmons Cannon Memorial Art Scholarship, Frederick, MD, 2007-2009

Sametime 1:04

I was also in Michael Lease's class last semester. I remember when I first saw his website I was enthralled by what I saw. I loved the ideas behind his project. And I thought a lot of the pictures were meaningful, with or without the use of the caption. Overall, I thought it was a really cool idea and a really interesting way to showcase everything that happens to someone in the course of a year. I think it's really neat that students in our class are trying to do the same thing. I think setting these kinds of goals for yourself as a photographer is a good way to grow because it's not always easy and a project of this nature is hard because you have to remember it every single day and find something to photograph that will capture the moment you're in. I'm not sure if I get the same feeling from Sametime 1:04 that I got from Michael Lease's version. When I look at Sametime 1:04, I feel like not as much effort was made to capture the feeling or the emotion of the moment. I feel like the photographer had their camera and just snapped a picture at the same time everyday. This isn't true for all of the photo's but I noticed it's true for some. I think if the photographers pushed it a little harder then I would get that same feeling from their work as I get from Michael's. In the end, I think they'll learn a lot that will help them as photographers in the future.

Amy Stein

First off, I just want to say that the Amy Stein lecture was my favorite out of all of the lectures I've seen this year. Paul Shambroom is a close second. I really like the ideas behind her work. Her series, Stranded, was one of my favorites. I love the idea of just driving anywhere, with no destination in mind. You don't know when you're going to find your next subject. And then you see someone, so you stop, not knowing if you're going to get a picture or not. I think the whole idea is really exciting because you have no idea what kind of people you're going to run into. I think her pictures really capture her subjects and their emotions well. Her pictures are often funny but they're also tinged with something else. And it's something I can't really describe. It's just an emotion that I felt when I looked at them, I'm not sure if anyone felt that way. Her project is something that I wish I could do now but being a student I feel like I don't have time to do anything much less take a cross-country road trip. I think her Domesticated series was really well done too. I think it's so funny that all we ever talk about is how we want to be more connected to nature. People spend millions of dollars on private homes tucked away into the mountainsides and then flip out when animals come close to their property. Before you were there, animals were there and it is in their nature to explore the area around them. We want to be close to nature and then when we have it, we're scared and we want it to go away. It's a really fine line and I think the artist captured that well in her series. Like I said before, Amy Stein was my favorite of all the artist lectures I went to. I look forward to seeing more of her work in the future.

Harrison Street Cafe

Wow...this is so late. I have been slacking hardcore.

I wasn't sure if I liked the show at Harrison Street Cafe the first time I saw it. After I saw it two more times though, I came around to it. At first, I didn't like the whole setup of the show. The pictures were hanging above the booths in the cafe and sometimes people were sitting there. So that was somewhat awkward, trying to look at the pictures while people are sitting right there. After we heard PJ Sykes talk in class, the whole setup of the show made sense. Basically, it's about getting the art out there, in places that you wouldn't expect to see art. If you can get it out there to more people, then go for it. I really liked some of the photos and then there were some I just didn't like at all. There were some pictures that I felt looked more amateur than others and I didn't really understand how they were considered "art." But then, what is "art?" I don't know if I can even answer that question. I've heard it debated and rehashed so many times. Overall, I enjoyed the show. I liked seeing photographs on display in a coffee shop, it was a nice change to go into a store rather than walk into a gallery to see art.

Artist Lecture-Paul Shambroom

First of all, I thought this artist lecture was much much better then the last one. I really liked the ideas behind Paul Shambroom's work. My favorite series was the "Meetings" series. I like that he visited small towns and observed the goings on in their town meetings. I think that is much more interesting than what he was talking about before with the big, corporate meetings. I love photographs of small towns, in places I've never heard of. It makes me want to travel all over, so I can see these places I've never heard of and experience them for myself. I know he didn't pose any of the people in his photographs and I really like that. I like how into it all of these people are getting, for what might be something small and unimportant. I think you could take his work in a more ironic tone, one that would belittle the people in the photographs but he doesn't think that way. 

I also liked his series with the army weapons that are displayed in public places. That really reminded me of home because I grew up in a town with a HUGE army base and I always saw stuff like that growing up. It's funny because I never thought of how weird that is until I saw his photographs and I thought, "hmm...what is the point of displaying that?"I think it's really cool, what he does, because he gets to travel to places all over the country, taking pictures that showcase these huge objects on display that most people don't think about at all. It's just part of the landscape.

First Fridays 2/6/09

I hadn't been to First Fridays in a long time, so I was excited to go to this one. I had read up on some of the galleries and shows beforehand and there were a few places I really wanted to check out. One of my favorite galleries of the night was ADA gallery. I almost always end up liking whatever is shown there. That night there were some drawings on display, my favorites were the drawings by Rob Lee. I just love his style. His style of drawing is how I want mine to be, if I could draw better. I really can't draw at all, so I try to avoid it at all costs. His drawings were pretty funny, they involved people and random creatures. I really liked this one drawing, there were headless people and weird animals and the clouds looked like they were melting. It was mostly done with red ink and pencil, which I think is what drew my eye to it in the first place. After the first look though, I kept staring just because I was trying to figure out what was going on. 

Another really good exhibit from the night, another one of my favorites, was the show at Gallery 5. It was put on by the YWCA. They were showing art that had been done by victims of domestic/sexual abuse. Next to each piece, there was a short description of what the artist was feeling when they did the piece, how old they were when they were abused, and how old they were when they did the piece. Overall, it was a very moving show. It was hard to read some of the personal stories but it was very uplifting to see how strong some of these women were in the face of adversity.

Maggie

I was able to make it to the Emmet and Elijah Gowin show the day it was ending. I'm glad I did because it was awesome. The whole set-up was really simple and plain. The walls were plain white and the frames were minimal. The photographs were spread out one after the other on the walls. Besides the fact that the photos were printed really well and were really beautiful to look at, there was also a good story behind them. You can tell that the artists are truly obsessed with this woman and everything about her. The photos of her are almost reverent sometimes. I really liked the photos that looked like they had been set up. The candid ones were good too but I preferred the tableaus. There was one in particular that I really enjoyed. Maggie is standing in front of a shed and it looks like she is holding this flock of birds by strings. There's another one where she's standing in front of a shed and she has paper moons strung up on a line. I really like these because they look surreal and from another world. I enjoyed the more realistic prints too, I think because they reminded me of my own family. I liked the closeness of them and the fact that the photographers were so comfortable with their subject.

Visiting Artist-Alix Pearlstein

I'm not sure what to think of this month's visiting artist. Some of her work I really liked and some of it, I just didn't get.

I'm not sure if I liked the "Two Women" piece. I thought it was weird and kind of creepy. But it made me think about how obsessed we get with people and how when you're really into somone you'll look at pictures of them all the time, hoping for something more to happen.

"Distance" was interesting. I liked seeing the scene from two different viewpoints. I didn't really understand why everything was happening or what the purpose was of this piece. But I thought it was different and mysterious, so I wanted to find out more.

"Forsaken" was the easiest piece to understand. It was the most obvious of everything we watched. I liked how a lot of her pieces were set in the white studio. It was easier to focus on what was happening between the characters without all of the background noise diverting your attention.

Overall, I liked what I saw...mostly. Some of it I didn't get at all. But I like that because it makes me want to find out more about the work. It makes me want to research the artist more and find out why they're doing what they're doing.

Stiff Lace

I really enjoyed the Stiff Lace show but for this blog I'm going to write about Janissa Hamilton's pieces. I really liked the lightboxes because I felt like they were self-portraits, even though different models were used. The lightboxes looked like windowpanes, so you feel almost like a voyeur looking in at the artist's life. I liked the snapshots that were hanging up everywhere. I feel like the portraits were giving us insight into who the artist is inside while the snapshots were suppsed to represent the artists life, and everything that is a part of their life, including the small, everyday things like a sign, or a car that don't seem important at all. I thought the snapshots hanging everywhere was a cool idea. I like the idea of hanging them everywhere, being surrounded by the artists life. I noticed some of the prints were framed, while others were not. I thought that maybe it was because they were more important than others or they had more significance to the artist. Overall, the print quality of the photos, in the lightboxes, looked really good although you could tell they were digital prints because some of them looked too good while the snapshots were more realistic in showing normal, everyday life.