Research artists and works

When I was first introduced to this project my initial research led me to look at text and words within art. My first thoughts where to look at graffiti and street art as this was something that I was aware of as a art from involving words as the art itself.

I looked at artists such as John Fekner, Ben Eine and Stephen Powers as some artists who use predominately words as their art form, this is an area of great interest to me but I feel that for this project I would like to have a go at making something that can be seen alongside other works as I have never done this before in an art context on through film has my work been shown with others.

I am still trying to find what sort of artist and art work I do, as this is my first time studying fine art I have found this to be the most difficult part during my time on the course so far. This I hope will help me tie together common themes and ideas that will give me a deeper understanding of my practice and where I can position myself in regards to other artists work.

Continuing my line of research led me to Fiona Banner, for me this particular artist is one that stood our for me as her most notable works have been text based where she will write down the description of what she is seeing onto paper and then canvas, for example her 1994 work ‘Top Gun’ Banner writes down a description of the Tony Scott film in her own words. For me this work is a great starting point for my research as it ties in film, art and words.

This work reminded me of the 2000 Simon Ellis short film ‘Telling Lies’ in which Ellis uses the text on screen to show the audience what the dialogue is not, the dialogue consists of a series of recorded telephone conversations. This approach of words on screen to describe the narrative is something that I will be looking at with my own work for this project.

Telling Lies (2000) from Simon Ellis on Vimeo.

I have also revisited previous artists that I have looked at for other works such as Glitch artist and theorist Rosa Menkman. I have taken techniques from Menkman’s work previously in order to create new works, for example I have use the image code manipulation technique in order to create Glitch art before and applied the same technique to audio files in order to manipulate the code to create a new distorted version of the original. I shall be using code manipulation once again for this but I will let the code set the words for the video and the composition of the music.

In Menkman’s The Glitch Moment(um) she describes how to create a piece of Glitch art from a digital image and how to manipulate the code in order to create a new piece of work.

As I am wanting to exhibit this work for my peers to give me feedback on and see if it works as a piece I have begun to look at local studio and exhibition spaces in the area. I have found some that are in the town centre that is useful to exhibit works as I live in that area. Most spaces charge between £15-£50 per day, this is a cost I am happy to cover to see that the piece will work. I have been in touch with Dove Street Studios who are alumni from NUA and they where more that happy to show me around their spaces, yet I was unfortunately unable to rent a space at the time but it is definitely something that I will look into for future projects.