i've been searching --------- some new thoughts, ideas, approaches

gestures becoming more important to me - tv, movies, globalism, gestures becoming more universal, universally understood - development of common visual language

gestures in art - art history - Baroque, Rococo: over-the-top drama - copies of porcelain figurines as symbols of this drama - make them explode and record it. Cornelia Parker's rock sculptures - explosions abstracted, frozen

the principal of explosions: from the inside out, expanding, undefined space, expansion from the center, in opposite of ceiling paintings where everything is directed toward central event - artificial spherical space is created by painter, controlled - explosion: space is created by explosion but uncontrolled (ultimate explosion: nuclear explosion: indefinite expansion), precarious

HAVE TO BUILD MODEL OF GALLERY SPACE

need to experiment w/ firecrackers BUT would like to make explosions more abstract, less obvious - tested balloon explosions, rather lame because balloon and material just collapsed

get away from ethereal, celestial, sensational of sky, heaven, explosion, purgatory, make it mechanical: create space above a ceiling paintings, looking down onto the heads of people

photograph people in conversation, small groups, from above, like in the duomo in Milan - looking down at them - light as if a huge door opened and let sight in, like in photo above



today, sunday, i photographed the angel from the dollar store - i smashed it with a hammer - hand gesture remains, like it a lot - create sculptures with porcelain figures and screws and photograph them, see diagram below

polaroid of angel base with fragments

lines = screws

post 1

1st year art project documentation

rusted metal as body parts

my plan of creating an installation is extending, the installation is becoming an idea of creating a room, with a large scale photo collage on the ceiling, mirror tiles on the floor, and video projections on the walls. i am interested in working with opposites, the piece will involve the viewer in a passive as well as an active way. as the viewer stands under the collage on the ceiling, she will see the collage when she looks up, but she will also be part of the piece when she looks down, only to see herself as part of the montage, or more precisely, of my chaotic version of purgatory. the videos are slow moving, very dark movies of some of my individual photo shoots.

about the ceiling piece - it's the main attraction, so to say. it's based on the idea of Baroque ceiling paintings, most often painted in churches from that period. i've been photographing individual people posing dramatically but posted randomly, chaotically, in the collage. there should be 20-30 people shown in the piece. drama is important, gestures are dramatizations of emotions. this touches on my research topic about the representation of pain in visual art through symbols and gestures, and the invention of a visual language. the collage will include the images of the people grouped around a center event, which is an image of an explosion. the people will be randomly arranged, but i'm photographing them from a very low standpoint, which gives them the angle that one would see when looking at a ceiling painting. baroque painters tried to create space where there was none. by printing the ceiling piece very dark, i am creating not non-existing space but my concept of purgatory. this place is supposed to be somewhere between heaven and hell, i am interested in spaces between spaces. i think this is caused by my experience of being a citizen of two countries, not knowing the feeling of belonging to a particular place.

these are some of the models i've photographed to be in the ceiling piece.

i'm experimenting with another method to photograph images from a low angle by photographing into a mirror. since the angle is much steeper than simply photographing from a low point of view, these images will add to the illusion of a three-dimensional space.

explosions. not easy to photograph

working with what i got so far -

one of the videos at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5260078913558731946&hl=en