Visual Artist Statement

 My professor, Sarah Buckius, had a very interesting creative exercise for class today. We printed out our thesis projects on a black and white laser jet printer along with three sentences of our artist statement. We cut up the paper and made a flat collage, a 3D collage, and a time-based collage (I used a long shutter speed).

From Dust flat collage, Kim Berens

From Dust flat collage, Kim Berens

Horace 3D collage, Kim Berens

Horace 3D collage, Kim Berens

MSU Filmmaker's Club logo motion collage, Kim Berens

MSU Filmmaker's Club logo motion collage, Kim Berens

Alex Stoddard

Alex Stoddard is a only 17 years old, and is a great example of how photography is changing. Not specifically in terms of the equipment used to make photographs, but the possibilities available to show those photographs. Alex started taking photos not long before he decided to take on a 365 - taking a picture and sharing it everyday for a year. His photos greatly improved over the course of a year, and you can see his learning curve. I can see that some of his images are digitally manipulated - which means that more are, but I just can't tell!

Alex was born in Jacksonville, Florida, but is currently growing up in Georgia. I suppose he must go to school, but he recently quit his job at an arcade because he's officially self-employed. Based on comments on his flickr posts, he has several commissions for prom pictures and "other client stuff". He has a blog where he posts very little at a time - a short video, and answer to a questions, a link to a friend's artwork, and that sort of thing. He's currently on his 302 day of his 365, which not only means he only has 63 days left, but also that all of his current success in photography has come in the last 10 or so months.

He explains in this interview that his 365 has helped him discover his emotions, as well as his photography. This is very evident in his shots, which are quite emotional, and very ethereal. I find his photographs incredibly inspiring, both where it concerns living my life and taking my own photographs.


 He does mostly emotionally dramatic photos, but he has a sense of humor as well, evident in this photo.

Here is his very first 365. Awful, isn't it? The one in the woods is day 4. His color correction has much improved. That's what I like about this project. You really see the improvement of the photographers. And you don't see an amazing picture everyday, and that's okay. It helps me have less pressure on myself to always be perfect, because than I can just create what I feel compelled to create without worrying that others will judge my overall talent over one image.

Here's his most recent photo.

Janet Cardiff

Janet Cardiff and Georges Bures Miller

Her Long Black Hair, 2004

Janet Cardiff was born in 1957 in Brusself, Ontario. She studied at Queen's University and the University of Alberta. Currently she lives with in Berlin along with her friend and collaborator George Bures Miller. Her works tend to be installations, usually with audio involved.


She has been included in many exhibitions all over the world, including Scotland, England, New York, and Canada and represented Canada at the 2001 Venice Biennale with Bures Miller.

Ship of Fools, 2010

Some of their work includes walks, where they tour people around a city or a building with headphones and photographs. One example is 'Her Long Black Hair', where people carry photographs of a woman going to the same places around Central Park in New York. The walk is roughly 40 minutes long. Their most recent walk was in 2006 where visitors were taken on a walk through a landscape where the battle between the Prussians and Napolean took place over 200 years ago. The audio includes excerpts from Louise Seidler's journal, the painter of Goethe from Jena. The audio includes sound effects of battle scenes.

Telephone/Time, 2004

Cardiff and Bures Miller recently salvaged a thirty-foot Chinese junk boat. They took it to their studio and recreated the the interior. Viewers enter the cabin and discover many pointless contraptions, like a "underground workshop for nonsense". These contraption represent the people that ran the boat captionless - therefore pointlessly and without direction. It takes roughly six minutes to go through the installation.

Smaller works they have done together include one called Telephone. The visitor listens to a conversation on an old-fashioned phone. What they hear is a recorded dialogue between Cardiff and a scientist discussing space and time. It loops every two minutes.

Blog Prompt #25 & #26

I would hope that my work would be displayed mostly outside a gallery setting, as most of it is posters advertising one thing or another. If they only exist within a gallery, they are probably not reaching the intended audience. I would love to see my work out in the open. In the public for anybody to walk by and ignore. Preferably not ignore, but in public spaces, people have that option to ignore if it they want to. In a gallery, people feel obligated to look at something. At least for me. I feel obligated to look at everything, even if I'm only interested in half of it. When I do skip over something, I feel the artists eyes on the back of my neck, judging me for not understanding.
But in the open, you can easily ignore the ads on the side of a bus stop or in a movie theatre. Yes, these are supposed to be eye-catching, that's sort of the whole point. But they're supposed to be eye-catching because people don't feel obligated to look!
The art I am making for my thesis relates to different things, because each piece is for a different client, so they weren't treated with the same concepts in mind. However, the process for each was similar. I wanted to use texture that derived from outside the computer (although I scanned it in and compiled everything in Photoshop and After Effects).

Teun Hocks

Teun Hocks is from the Netherlands, born in 1947. He started taking photographs at the age of 14. By his early 20s he started painting on them. He makes his photographic prints on toned gelatin silver-print and uses oil paints to paint on them. I think more recently he has been digitally painting his photographs. These pieces seem more digital, but are conceptually in the same vein as his previous work. His list of solo exhibitions is quite grand. Hocks has also published several books of his work.

He photographs himself for his work, which is often humorous. I found myself laughing with much of his work. He definitely makes fun of life, but you can tell he has a joy for the little things. It's something I try to express in a lot of my work as well, and they way he pulls it off, you don't necessarily notice it right away. It's not big, like Hello Kitty. It's a subtle suggestion that you may as well enjoy life if you can help it. like a reminder - "hey, enjoy tripping" and that sort of thing.

What he says about how his ideas are formed,

"Sometimes I have an idea immediately, but most of the time I have half-ideas. So I make sketches. Sometimes I’ll look in my sketchbooks and find a drawing that I’d almost forgotten about. So I change something, and then I find I’ve started to make a work. I make a choice that I want to make a drawing into a work if I find I’m intrigued myself. But I need to draw. I have to draw to think."

His work is a combination of real and surreal, but they exist together as if they're the same thing. Like someone is so excited he can fly, but the viewer doesn't learn until the end that everybody can fly. So flying is surreal.

He begins his process by sketching and creating water color drawings of the final composition. Then, he paints or builds a backdrop for his scene. He photographs himself in black and white and prints the image. He uses transparent layers of paint to color the photograph, so you can still see the photograph underneath.

Judy Coleman

Judy Coleman was born in New York, New York, but now lives in Venice, California. Her education includes Cornell University in New York and the University of California in Los Angelos. She's had collections displayed all over the world and an impressive list of exhibitions in California, but also internationally.

She explains on her website that she discovered photography after becoming a newspaper reporter, and since, the camera has become her way of exploring body language, especially through the female form. Her technique blends photography, painting, drawing, and sculpture.

I think her art is incredibly beautiful, and sometimes it is difficult to tell whether something is photographed or illustrated, though I think illustrations are always involved. Her animal portraits are beautiful, but the following drawing just goes to show, even very talented people don't always make the best art.

Jessica Bruah

 Jessica Bruah was born in 1981 and in recieved her BFA at Columbia in Chicago and her MFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York, both in photography. She has won several awards and held many solo exhibitions, including one at ACRE Projects in Chicago, where she was an artist in residence.

Her most famous series is titled "Series", later to be renamed to "Series 1" after making a "Series 2". Both works include woman (sometimes men?) doing sometimes normal, but mostly unusual activites, like lying face down in the snow, posting post-its all over the house. None of them include the women's faces, therefore it's difficult to tell if the images sometimes have men rather than woman.

This is what she has to say on her series,

My project Stories originated as a way to merge my interest in writing with photography. The work is influenced by the formal qualities of short fiction and its tendency to focus on a single mood or event. Like a photograph, the short story is an exercise in brevity; they both exist as concise pieces that are at once resolved and unresolved.
My images are meant to be vignettes, presented as isolated fictional experiences. They are also filled with contradictions and ambiguities: the domestic settings can be seen as both comforting and confining; the scenarios presented have elements that are realistic and surreal; the nameless, faceless character presented in the images is both the subject and the photographer; the work is continually shaped by the convergence of the Decisive Moment and staged photography.
My hope is that the viewer becomes an active reader of the narratives presented as I continue to question the ability of storytelling within a fixed frame.

Her work to me seems very young and very playful. I love the colors and the lighting. She can create beautiful soft lighting and make the view take the subject less seriously. For example, the photo of the woman lying in the leavces would be quite depressing with somber lighting, but, but with the soft lighting, it seems like a petty or simple sadness that drove the woman to just into the leaves like that.

Erwin Olaf

Erwin Olaf is a Dutch photographer. He was born in 1959. He does both commercial and fine art photography. His commerical work included Levi's, Microsoft, and Nokia.

He studied journalism at the School of Journalism in Utrecht. He currently lives in Amsterdam. He got his start after winning the first prize for the Young European Photographer competition, which was followed by an exhibition at the Ludwig Museum in Cologn, Germany. He is also a videographer

His Fine art work includes a series of photographs titled "Grief", it depicts ordinary looking people in their homes showing subtle signs of grief. Sometimes it looks like simple grief, and sometimes it looks like deep deep grief.

Olaf plays with both high-key and low-key in his photography, occasionally meeting in the middle.

His series titled "Royal Blood" depicts famous royal people and how they were killed. Most of the royalty I cannot recognize (as he is using models), but Princess Diana is the most obvious, I think, especially with the Mercedes logo slicing her arm.

Olaf's works are usually provocative and humourous. And many people either love them or hate them.