Whiteread's Memories

Rachel Whiteread | Gagosian

I still have a lot of uncertainty with Rachel Whiteread's art. Some pieces I absolutely love for their odd aesthetic and impenetrability, but some are just so aloof that I don't know where to go with them. I am especially frustrated because as far as I know she hasn't developed her style since the 1990's. While her early work is really exciting because of how it captures emptiness and relates to memory, her later stuff just feels pretty repetitive and uninspired. I hope we get to see some more stuff from her in the future that is more provocative. That being said, I really love her work and would love to see her pieces in person, I feel like in a gallery/museum setting they would be really imposing and off-putting, and people would get more out of them.

I think her work also provokes a lot of thought between what is sculpture and what is installation. I think most people would regard her work as sculpture, I probably would to for most of her work. But there is a relation to the body in pieces like Ghost that really make you want to look at it from every angle and find some way inside, it is so closed off you want to force your way in to figure it out more. I think that is what helps make some of her pieces installation. As well as the mode of 'heightened perception' that we talked about today, since the sculpture occupies emptiness, it makes you think about your relation to the room you are in, or could provoke claustrophobia by thinking of your space being cast in plaster/concrete/etc.

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Final, Untitled

Untitled, Ethan Swanson, 2022 I am really happy with how this project turned out, out of what art I have made, this is what I am most proud of. With other projects I feel like I haven't completely gotten what I wanted out of it personally, or people didn't totally react to is how I wanted. But this one was really meaningful all around. It was so wonderful to make something that feels super personal to me, but also exists on its own without being connected to me. It was so fun to learn how to make plaster casts (thanks again Charlie :) ), as well as figuring out how to use the space. The physicality of putting it together was also so rewarding, I feel that there was a lot of meaning created by putting it together alone, with my own hands. Using direct animation was also so fun, and I really look forward to doing it again. Although I love film, I often find that it is kind of distanced because of the use of a camer...

Picnic Projections

I really loved making our installation piece. The freedom we had to do whatever was so liberating. I was so impressed with how we had a bunch of different themes emerge from all the random stuff we brought, and how the piece felt pretty cohesive overall. The piece to me has a feeling of a picnic gone wrong. The front half especially is full of such vibrant colors and flowers, feeling inviting at first glance. Then as you look at it longer and read the writing on the walls, it feels a little more ominous. The back on the other hand takes this aggression further, with the book on the wall yelling at you along with all the 'Not for Sale" signs. It felt very current to make something that also seemed to be commenting on the environment. All the greens in the room and the flowers coming out of the trash definitely added to that, along with the fact that the possible consumerism of our 'store' was aborted by the 'Not For Sale' signs. I think it would be int...

My Flickr Findings

My Flickr Blume No. 2 "Something is happening here and you don't know what it is, do you, Mister Jones?" (Bob Dylan, 1965) I just took this quote on a very literal level instead of its total meaning. I like the idea of something that is happening that is under everyones radar, so that's what I tried to do with the abstraction in the photos. I like making people see things in a way that they can't with their naked eye. I took all these photos on a walk in the evening this past weekend. I focused mostly on making more abstract pictures because that is what I generally like to do in my art. To support that I manipulated them quite a bit in photoshop. I had a lot of fun in messing in the 'Curves' menu, I found that was a really good way to mess with them (especially in black and white). Overall I think that most of my photos are successful, about 16 of them I'm happy with. There were some I included ...

Ethan's Experiments

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