4-11-10 Artist Blog, Christopher Reiger

Christopher Reiger

"My work is principally concerned with contemporary man's mutable conception of Nature." As a child, "I anthropomorphized animals and cast them as key players in an epic production of which I was a part... As I matured, however, my childhood love of nature evolved into a fascination with biology and ethology, an intellectual ontogenesis like that impelled by the European Enlightenment."

"Incidentally, we've realized that the divide between the imagination and reason is unnatural: We learn an increasing number of facts about Nature, we understand ourselves to be apart from it, and our experience of it is therefore less complete."

"My artwork is born of this apparent opposition. The paintings are celebratory hybrids of myth, natural history, and science; the world they picture stretches between the tidy "truth" and the messy question. They depict a world in flux, a Nature imploding and dissolving. But this dissolution is also an opening of the senses, the seepage of magic and mystery into the picture. The drawings are poetic vignettes that explore the same ideas and questions."

The above are the highlights of Christopher Reiger's artist statement. http://www.christopherreiger.com/statement.html


Synesthesia #1, 2008

This was the first piece of Reiger's that I first stumbled upon at http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/seeing_antlers_feeling_dendrites/. The article explains the fascinating condition of Synesthesia and how art can give the masses a glance into its world of meaning.


Didelphis Virginiana (Virginia's Double Womb), 2006


Canis Lupis (Dog wolf), 2006

In his 2006 work, Reiger combines drawing, scientific classification, and words in his drawings.

4-7-10 Idea Post

Biology

-A natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy.

-The term was introduced independently by Karl Friedrich Burdach, Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus, and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck between 1800 and 1802 AD. It is inspired by the Greek word bios (life) and the suffix logia (study of).

Above is a diagram created by Ernst Haeckel called The Tree of Life
wikipedia.com

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Recently I have been thinking more about my collections of animal assortments (if you will), inspired by the work on the very top floor of the Anderson Gallery. I was jealous of the bug collection(s) and wonder if the person/people collected or ordered the bugs. The preservation and presentation wasn't top notch, but was impressive overall.

Collections (particularly of animals) and their presentation are art within themselves, but they are not appreciated in the same way 'art labeled' works are- they're given museum quality appreciation. I'm not sure why I have such an interest in this quality, but I can guess.

The Naturalist Center (Leesburg, VA) is only down the street from where I grew up in Northern Virginia. It is the biggest interactive collection of natural history objects I have ever encountered. They have over 36,000 hands-on collection objects including skeletons, furs, animal preservations, bugs, shells, etc. They are a branch of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

One day I aspire to have a fraction of this type of collection and display within my own house.



^^The Naturalist Center in Leesburg, Va^^

4-5-10 Artist Post, ROA

ROA

ROA is a street artist also known as the Gent Zoo Keeper and the King of Doel Jungle who hand paints large black and white murals of animals: rats, pigs, rabbits, and cows (from what I can find). He often targets decaying urban areas, which began with the outlying abandoned buildings and warehouses in the outskirts of Ghent, Belgium (home town). He replicates animals found in the area and seeks to embody their amazing ability to adapt to urban environments and become scavengers in order to survive.

ROA's artwork went global when he ventured to urban New York, London, Berlin, Warsaw, and Paris to paint his often depicted cross-sectioned animals and city scavengers.

A majority of ROA's work shows a transformation, whether it be through his painting of the animal or emphasized in the environment.

A piece that hung in the Gallerie Itinerrance in Paris earlier this year

[From the same gallery as above] The metal pieces in this artwork are on hinges that allow the viewer to alter the work seeing two sides of the animal (interior neuro-structure vs epidermal layer).

Unlabeled location

Unlabeled location

Unlabeled location: In this piece, the yellow door flips open to show a complete rabbit (instead of a skeletal head) as well

ROA's website has very little information and I'm not sure whether the photographs are taken by himself or by fans. Understandably, he wishes to remain anonymous.

http://www.roaweb.org/

4-1-10 Idea Post

More thoughts on the domestication of animals:

At what point during anthropomorphism or domestication do animals lost their identity? When (if) do they stop being animals and become humanized beings or objects?

What IS an animal? How does our culture define animalia?

Animals are a major group of mostly multicellular eukaryotic organisms of the kingdom Animalia or Metazoa. Their body plan eventually becomes fixed as they develop, although some undergo a process of metamorphosis later on in their life. Most animals are motile, meaning they can move spontaneously and independently. All animals are also heterotrophs, meaning they must ingest other organisms for sustenance.

The word "animal" comes from the Latine word animal meaning 'with soul.' In everyday colloquial usage, the word usually refers to non-human animals. Frequently only closer relatives of humans such as vertebrates or mammals are meant in colloquial use. The biological definition of the word refers to all members of the Kingdom Animalia including humans.

wikipedia.org

I would suspect most people think of wild animals when they hear the word 'animal.' We use 'animal' as an adjective pertaining to the physical, sensual, or carnal nature of humans rather than our spiritual or intellectual nature. At one point, all animals were 'wild' or undomesticated. At what point do we stop referring to an animal as 'wild'? Is a caged lion or tiger still wild?
Remember: Domestication is a process of selection in which animals or plants become accustomed to human provision/control.

In conclusion:

At what point did the goose cease being a migratory majestic that signaled the change of seasons and begin to play the role of community pond accessory whose fecal matter covers grass to the point of non-enjoyment?

Human ignorance sound familiar?

Anderson Gallery

I entered three pieces to the Anderson Gallery Student show, two of which got in. =) Stoked!


Both are images from the fall semester of senior portfolio (2009).

3-30-10: Individual Meeting with Tom

This meeting was primarily a discussion of recent images. I showed the following:


We agreed this image is a little flat.


This was the image I re-shot from the midterm critique. Over spring break my wide angle lens broke so I have been using my fixed 50mm. The quality of glass isn't as nice as the other and it also makes shooting wider angle shots in small rooms VERY frustrating. I wasn't able to include both the top of the door frame and the air vent in the bottom corner- thus emphasizing the confusing scale discussed during the earlier critique. I would like to re-shoot this again, but would have to borrow a wide angle lens from someone. Tom and I agreed this image is important and strong, so a re-shoot is very important.



The bottom of these two images: Tom suggested I use a different animal because I already have two images using animals with antlers. He suggested the bunny in the top image. He also suggested playing with the scale of the rabbit in the image to relate it to the above image of the small door, arm chair, and human-dressed bunnies. This is something I will consider, but I'm not terribly excited about photoshop. All of my images thus far have been void of photoshop except for color correction and some spot cleaning.


Image without flash


Image with flash

Which do you think is stronger and why? What do you think of the tag on the right-most fur? Is it distracting? How do you interpret it? Include it? Photoshop it out?

Input on other images is always appreciated.

3-29-10 Artist Post, Chris Jordan

Chris Jordan

While this artist may seem to relate more to my earlier work at VCU, he is still relevant to my new work and interests.

His series The Message from Gyre was shot at Midway Atoll, a tiny beach near the middle of the North Pacific, and portrays the negative effects of pollution on the albatross population. He photographs deteriorating albatross chicks who have died from eating toxic waste. While the dead birds' stomach contents seem exaggerated, they aren't. Every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from their toxic diet of human waste and starvation.

He explains:
"To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world's most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent."

"Exploring around our country’s shipping ports and industrial yards, where the accumulated detritus of our consumption is exposed to view like eroded layers in the Grand Canyon, I find evidence of a slow-motion apocalypse in progress. I am appalled by these scenes, and yet also drawn into them with awe and fascination. The immense scale of our consumption can appear desolate, macabre, oddly comical and ironic, and even darkly beautiful."

"My hope is that these photographs can serve as portals to a kind of cultural self-inquiry. It may not be the most comfortable terrain, but I have heard it said that in risking self-awareness, at least we know that we are awake."





The Message from Gyre, 2009

http://www.chrisjordan.com/

3-24-10 Idea Post

Photography vs Human Vision


I re-read a chapter in Proust was a Neuroscientist (Jonah Lehrer) this weekend while I was waiting for my flat tire to get changed, only this time I took notes.

Chapter 5 on Paul Cezanne: The Process of Sight touches on the development of photography and its effect on the painting world. "How could the human hand compete with the photon?" (pg 99). While the era of painting came to an end with the invention and availability of the photograph, not all artists believed in its ability to depict realism.

It was thought by many (and still is for that matter) that the human eye acts just like the lens of a camera: collecting and processing millions of light particles to be translated into a visual plane for brain comprehension. In fact, the brain and imagination play an unexpected and even more vital role in visual perception. "If the mind did not impose itself on the eye, then our vision would be full of voids. For example, because there are no light sensitive cones where the optic nerve connects to the retina, we each have a literal blind spot in the center of the visual field. But we are blind to our own blind spot: our brain unfailingly registers a seamless world." (pg 117)

With the realization that "the mind makes the world, just as a painter makes a painting," Paul Cezanne invented modernist art and was a major player in post-impressionism (pg 113). "I tried to copy nature," Cezanne confessed, "but I couldn't. I searched, turned, looked at it from every direction, but in vain" (pg 104).

Cezanne sought to paint the world as our eyes interpret it, one carefully contemplated brush stroke at a time. He abandoned pointillism and began painting entire images in patches and strokes he called les taches and les touches. His paintings also began to incorporate large blank areas of canvas he called nonfinito. Many viewed his paintings as incomplete without realizing that he had dissected our vision well before his time. He left it up to the viewer's eyes and mind to complete his paintings.

"The mind is not a camera. As Cezanne understood, seeing is imagining." (pg 118)
Mon Sainte-Victoire seen from Lauves, 1904-1905

"Modern neuroscientific studies of the visual cortex have confirmed the intuitions of Cezanne... visual experience transcends visual sensations. Cezanne's mountain arose from the empty canvas because the brain, in a brazen attempt to make sense of the painting, filled in its details." (pg 117).

Foliage, 1895-1900

I strongly recommend this book to EVERYONE. Not only does it have this great chapter on Paul Cezanne, it also has chapters on Marcel Proust's The Method of Memory, Walt Whitman's The Substance of Feeling, Auguste Escoffier The Essence of Taste, Igor Stravinsky The Source of Music and more. You will appreciate the world in an entirely different way, I promise!