Kingdom of Colours

FIRST OF ALLLLLLL this video is very satisfying so enjoy watching it! I've been trying to find ways to incorporate  sound in my videos by looking for inspiration in other experimental works where the compositions are based on shapes and color. This beautiful video demonstrates a way to not only present very painterly shots but also a way to use music to keep it dreamy but still have a faster pace. Watching this video I really enjoy its tempo. Its slow and trippy with intense fast paced moments - almost gives the feel of taking a journey into the colors. I dont know how I feel about the kens burns effects that Thomas Blanchard decided to add to it. I can see for the content it makes it look more professional maybe and more complete? I would be very curious to watch this video without ken burns... still willing to try it with my video to see what happens. KEEPING AN OPEN MIND and experimenting!

https://vimeo.com/190226045

Katya Zamolodchikova - drag + performance art

So I'm big fan of Rupaul's Drag Race, one of my absolute favorite queens on the show being Yekaterina Petrovna Zamolodchikova, also known as simply Katya - a queen from Boston known for their outrageous Russian persona. Before Drag Race, however, Brian McCook (their real name) studied Performance Art at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where he first found his interest in drag performance. His knowledge of performance art visibly translates into his insane and twisted humor, as well as his erratic and captivating performances as Katya. He's truly unlike any queen I've ever seen, bringing such an interesting twist to the world of drag.

Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katya_Zamolodchikova

Now, I follow Katya on pretty much everything, and a couple days ago they uploaded a video to their youtube channel titled "RuUnion with Detox" - referring to her being on Season 2 of Drag Race All Stars.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXb6APovQio

(ok wtf rebecca why are you showing us this of all things)

I was completely confused upon first watching the video, but by the end I was completely floored by it. Though a lot of people in this class, not knowing the context of the video, will probably not get a lot of the references, I found the video super interesting, especially knowing the queen's background as an aspiring performance artist. Also having personally seen Katya on season 7 of Drag Race as well as All Stars 2, I was especially enamored to the references to complete inner turmoil and untreated mental illness.

UGHHH. Honestly I feel like not many in this class are gonna get me on this, but I was SO PUMPED by this video. This queen is just so bizarre and hysterical on so many levels, and seeing them finally incorporate their crazy performance pieces into their drag career just gets me so hyped. Additionally, I felt SO inspired by this video in terms of performance and incorporating ideas and themes of the turmoil of untreated mental illness and just straight up absurdity.

Anyway. Check this queen out if you love drag race/drag as a whole. She's so great, and an amazing performer. ALSO watch drag race so I can talk about the show with more people. :)

Distant Feel / Joe Ely

So, on the last project, I presented a work that deals with commodity and how we are objectifying homeless people. And in the past few days, I thought about the work that i made and how to make this concept further. Then, I realized that my work ultimately deals with empathy and so, I decided to push the idea further.

So, I found this artist named Antoine Catala and in his project: Distant Feel, he deals with empathy through apathy; the artist shows image and texts that seem to provoke empathy yet, because we're looking through the screen, we can't really have intimate relationship with the subject, hence we feel apathy. I thought making viewer realize we don't care enough about what we see on the screen with the words and images that's somewhat emotional is clever way to show apathy.


go to this website and scroll down to see what this work is about.

distantfeel.com



keeping this in mind, I think now i know what to do with my work. In the last critique, although i was successful on making classmates feel bad about themselves or anxious, it needed more work to it and I didn't have solid idea of where to go next.
So, I was going to make different version of a person laying down with jean frames. I thought about having gender involved on this because people often times objectifies women or just have collection of homeless people's sign around the image like joe ely sort of did in his book project.




























But after more research and thinking more about this project, I noticed that I care about duality of people than just capitalism and money or whatnot.

Werner Herzog

Saturday I had the absolute joy to see Werner Herzog speak at the Virginia Film Festival in Charlottesville. He only spoke for two hours, but I could have easily sat through several more (he joked about having brought about 48+ hours worth of clips, I told my friends I would attempt to stay up for that). 

I first came across German filmmaker Werner Herzog back in 2005 when I went to the Traverse City Film Festival (put on by Michigan and my hometown native, Michael Moore) and they were showing Grizzly Man. I was freshly 18 at the time, just starting to get seriously interested in the arts, and was especially taken with documentary filmmaking. I thought the way he would digress from what seems to be the main topic to speak about humanity as a whole was really brilliant and interesting. 

For anyone who hasn't seen anything other than the film we watched in class (Cave of Forgotten Dreams) Werner Herzog has had a long and impressive career.  He made his first film at the age of 19, and has made 48 feature length films to date(both fiction and documentary).  His has a sort of obsessive commitment that is very apparent in his films, most especially Fitzcarraldo(1982), in which he actually had the indigenous people who had volunteered to be extras pull a ship - a full size ship - over a mountain for the film. 

He is the only filmmaker who has made a film on every continent, and Roger Ebert once stated that Herzog "has never created a single film that is compromised, shameful, made for pragmatic reasons, or uninteresting. Even his failures are spectacular."

I think it's fairly apparent I'm fangirling out in a major way, but the ways he explores humanity is just very inspiring to me. I highly recommend watching his films, reading his books/articles and just really exploring his body of work. His newest film Into the Inferno just debuted on Netflix, and he has quite a few other films available online. From his fiction films I highly recommend The Ballad of Kaspar Hauser and Even Dwarves Started Small. 

Bonus: He once bet then-student Errol Morris that he would eat his own shoe if he "had the guts" to make pet cemetery film Gates of Heaven. Morris made the film (and went on to make The Thin Blue Line, another marvelous documentary) and Herzog kept his word. You can watch the documentary by Les Blank on Hulu.

Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe

Daniel Coburn

This past Friday I went to First Friday on Broad Street with a few friends. There, I went to the photo gallery that is next to Lift Café. The work being displayed was by photographer Daniel Coburn, specifically the collection titled The Hereditary Estate. The collection consists of a series of black and white images exhibiting metaphors describing negative events that have occurred in his family. He chose to focus on the negative family evets because those memories are the ones that most people sweep under the rug (so to speak). His end goal was to create an honest photo album of his family history, the one his mother neglected to make. I always love when photographers show the rawness of what really happens in a family because none of them are prefect. These images allow for the viewer to relate to the events of others, possibly finding some form of comfort in the imager. I know that I always feel more empathetic towards people who have been through similar family events as I have and I think that’s what draws me to this man’s work. Looking at his work also reminds me of some things I thought about after gave my presentation on Thursday. Got me wondering if I should break out some work about my shit family stories as an attempt to empathize with myself. Anyways, check this guy out his work is pretty dope! Also go see the show if you haven’t already!!!  (Quinn I think you'll be into this)  

http://danielwcoburn.com

Blacking Out

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jun/13/my-drinking-years-everyone-has-blackouts-dont-they

I know we as students are not all 21, and although I'm sure a majority of our class has had a drink before, I know that we don't all get "drunk" or that we don't all drink. However, I do and have been since sophomore/junior year in high school. It's become a significant part of my life, many good times to recall that are unfortunately over shadowed by really dangerous, scary and embarrassing moments. I wouldn't say that my drinking is necessarily a "problem." the majority of the times I drink, which I do consistently every weekend, I don't have a lot. My mood will be altered but i am rational and more importantly making decisions that don't put me in harms way. However, occasionally this is not the case and I go over board and have more to drink than I should. Over board for me is falling in the water and immediately sinking 100 leagues.  These rare instances of extreme drinking have caused problems. Uncontrollably crying at my cousins wedding after double digit glasses of champagne because I thought my parents weren't proud of me, perhaps right then they weren't. Or losing ride privileges from a friend cause one drunken night I saw the mcdonalds I just ate for a second time as i spewed it all over the back seat of her car. Or much scarier situations such as slipping and hitting my head on ice covered brick after drinking far too much only to wake up in a girls house who'd I'd never met because she thought I was unsafe at the party, we are friends to this day. I have put my self into a lot of tuff situations because of my drinking and unfortunately I only know of a lot of the situations because of the stories my friends tell me the next day, the are black outs. I just experienced another black out this weekend, very similar to the one the author describes in the article I've attached. That experience today had me confused, probing friends for clues and feeling extreme guilt for my actions toward the person I was with, mostly because I don't remember what my actions were. A black out is essentially when the level of alcohol in your blood gets so high that is shuts down the hippocampus in your brain, or the part of your brain responsible for long-term memory. You might still be able to function and carry conversations because you still have short term memory but as far as the next day there will be whole chunks of memory that won't be there. Too me blackouts and how i've experienced them really make me interested in creating work on the subject. A lot of people, especially in our class this semester, have made pieces concerning memories but what about the important moments in your life that you don't have memory of. Situations that i've gotten in because of alcohol perhaps, but can't remember because of said alcohol. Im not sure yet what type of work could come from this but I really feel like I could make something powerful through investigating the experiences I've had and also perhaps learn a lot about myself.

Miller Rodriguez (a.k.a. Pretty Puke) Christina you might like this

So, i was surfing the web few days ago and found this artist named Miller Rodriguez who's known as 'pretty puke'. He works in L.A. and his photograph usually deals with sex, crimes, death, drug, and party. But because he's dealing with intense subjects, his photographs are very intimate. 
























































































































































christina - Just like what we discussed your critique day, if you're trying to push the idea of being caught and maybe be more intimate with your subjects in your next project, i think you should look him up.

here is link to vice
http://www.vice.com/read/we-really-love-miller-rodriguez-aka-pretty-pukes-photos

and his website
http://prettypuke.com