DAHLE AP ART - Collections

COLLECTIONS

Starting a collection of objects, images, or ideas can be a powerful catalyst for generating art ideas and fostering idea exploration. Collections provide a tangible and often personal wellspring of inspiration that can spark creativity in various ways:

1. Visual Inspiration: Collecting items like postcards, photographs, or physical objects allows you to surround yourself with a diverse range of visuals. These visuals can serve as references or prompts for your artwork. Whether it's the colors, textures, or compositions, these collected items can trigger new ideas or help you see familiar subjects in a fresh light.

2. Narrative Potential: A collection can tell a story or convey a theme. It may chronicle your travels, interests, or experiences. Exploring the narrative potential of your collection can lead to art ideas that are deeply personal and meaningful. You can create artworks that explore the stories and emotions associated with the collected items.

3. Conceptual Exploration: Collections can serve as starting points for exploring larger concepts or themes. For example, if you collect vintage medical equipment, you might delve into themes of health, mortality, or historical perspectives on medicine. This can lead to a series of artworks that explore these concepts from different angles.

4. Material Experimentation: Collections often include a variety of materials. Experimenting with these materials can be a rich source of artistic exploration. You might incorporate elements from your collection into your art, creating mixed-media pieces that challenge traditional boundaries and techniques.

5. Research and Context: The act of collecting can also involve research and learning about the items in your collection. This research can deepen your understanding of your collection's cultural, historical, or scientific context. This newfound knowledge can inform your art and lead to more layered and meaningful creations.

6. Creative Constraints: Collections can provide constraints that stimulate creativity. Limiting your materials or subject matter to what's in your collection can force you to think outside the box and find inventive ways to express your ideas.

7. Evolution of Ideas: Over time, your collection may evolve or change focus, offering a dynamic source of inspiration. As your collection grows or transforms, your art ideas can evolve in tandem, reflecting your personal growth and interests.

In conclusion, starting a collection can be a dynamic tool for idea exploration in art. It not only offers a rich source of visual and conceptual inspiration but also encourages a deep connection to your art's themes and subject matter. By continually engaging with and expanding your collection, you can fuel a constant flow of fresh ideas and artistic exploration.

ASSIGNMENT:

Make a collection and document it.

Documentation ideas:

Audio Recordings, Book, Photographs, Poster, Drawings, Paintings, Rubbings, Sculpture, cyanotypes, stamps

Ideas:

Collect objects that are similar to each other

Collect things that are similarly shaped

Collect pictures of surfaces you step on regularly

Collect things/sounds that sound the same when you drop them

Every time you see a specific thing, take a picture

Make a book of pictures of things you hate

Artists

Lenka Clayton

63 Objects Taken from my Son's Mouth

2013 / acorn, bolt, bubblegum, buttons, carbon paper, chalk, Christmas decoration, cigarette butt, coins (GBP, USD, EURO), cotton reel, holly leaf, little wooden man, sharp metal pieces, metro ticket, nuts, plastic “O”, polystyrene, rat poison (missing), seeds, slide, small rocks, specimen vial, sponge animal, sticks, teabag, wire caps, wooden block / size laid out as shown 40" x 40" x 1"

Objects removed from my son's mouth on safety grounds, between the ages of 8 - 15 months.

Hannah Knox

Shirt Collection

Walead Beshty

Cyanotypes of everyday objects

Abstract of A Partial Disassembling of an Invention Without a Future: Helter-Skelter and Random Notes in Which the Pulleys and Cogwheels Are Lying Around at Random All Over the Workbench

The work A Partial Disassembling of an Invention Without a Future: Helter-Skelter and Random Notes in Which the Pulleys and Cogwheels Are Lying Around at Random All Over the Workbench, was originally commissioned by the Barbican Centre, London. The London-born, Los Angeles-based artist first exhibited the work there in 2014, covering the 273 ft long Curve gallery from floor to ceiling in cyanotype prints. The prints were produced over the duration of a year (October 9, 2013–October 8, 2014) and are chronologically installed in proportion to the exhibition space. For its New York première at Petzel, approximately 5,120 cyanotypes (38% of the total 15,616 sq. ft work) will be presented.

In A Partial Disassembling of an Invention … , each cyanotype (a 19th Century photographic process using ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferro-cyanide) was produced by placing tools and other objects used in the production process of the studio on cellulose waste material generated by that same process (such as wood, cardboard, or paper) that was coated with UV-sensitive cyanotype material. After being exposed to sunlight and washed in water, the object’s silhouette appears in reverse against a cyan-blue background.

In using everyday objects, such as receipts, prescriptions, invoices, financial statements, legal documents, letters, gallery invitations, etc. from the working life of the studio, an inherent transparency is embedded in the work, demystifying the artwork and exposing its process of coming to be. Representative of the lives of those who made it, the cyanotypes expose both aspects of identity and circumstance, situating the work within political, social, and economic exchange without being representational or depictive in the conventional sense. While both the Barbican and Petzel iterations deal with debris, this new display has a more overtly American immediacy to it. Considering the resurgent discourse on the politics of representation, there is a new urgency to exhibiting the work for the questions it evokes about the modes and uses of representation, such as how art can accurately display real world conditions of labor, production and power, and whether a truly accurate and transparent form of representation is possible.

Beshty will also show Prologue to A Partial Disassembling of an Invention Without a Future: Helter-Skelter and Random Notes in Which the Pulleys and Cogwheels Are Lying Around at Random All Over the Workbench, which are the cyanotypes that were produced in anticipation of the Barbican work from August 1, 2013–October 8, 2013, along with seven volumes of the 59-volume archive of the work. The books—in their Prologue and Opus volumes—comprise bound pages printed recto and verso of the entire work reproduced at 1:2 scale. The volumes create both an archival record of Beshty’s workspace as well as an index of all the tools and artefacts used for the work’s own making.

The title of the project is a reference to Hollis Frampton’s hypothetical lecture he muses about in a talk delivered at the Whitney Museum of American Art, but never actually gives. The title of this phantom lecture alludes to the origins of the medium, and its inevitable obsolescence. It also calls forward the question of the role objects play when they have ceased being useful. Wrenched by time from their intended use, the objects become purely aesthetic, becoming the focus of contemplation in both historical and poetic terms.

Also on view, Beshty will continue his recent practice of altering and reassembling the cover of daily newspapers, using gold leaf to spotlight the spaces made by inconsistencies in the day’s print. Following the Japanese tradition of Kintsugi (or Kintsukuroi, which means “golden repair”) in which broken ceramics are mended with a lacquer mixed with gold, silver, or platinum so that repairs are rendered visible and treated as part of the object’s history rather than something to disguise. At Petzel, Besthy will modify a copy of The New York Times for every day he is installing the show, furthering the specificity of this new reconfiguration.

https://www.artland.com/exhibitions/abstract-of-a-partial-disassembling-of-an-invention-without-a-future-helterskelter-and-random-notes-in-which-the-pulleys-and-cogwheels-are-lying-around-at-random-all-over-the-workbench