Brad Hodgson.: November 2010

And On An Unrelated Note...

Tonight I watched the film Dead Man by Jim Jarmusch, and annoyingly i can't screen grab the shots from it I liked or find them on google for that matter, but I found the filming technique really inspiring, especially the monochrome shot's of desolate locations, someone on my own wavelength.

Finally, after yesterdays informative presentation, the underlying message of creating new work hit home.
So as with my original works I just went out and created it, this time however there would be a marked difference in that my landscape rather than the 'void' is white, meaning that for it to stand out my object would need to be dark.
Covering the original board in black card for it to stand out against the snow landscape I went to Hyde Park in Leeds which has taken a fair amount of the white stuff and would also provide me with a different style of environment to capture my work.

Whilst it may seem a little naive to just 'go out there', I felt this needed to be done in order to freshen things up, and although the works are of questionable quality I still feel they posses something. Unlike the disastorous Photoshop incarnations before them, this series does I feel add something interesting and new to the concept, although wether it complies to the original intentions of the work remains to be seen.

Rather than being a 'void' the black becoems an obvious bold statement that provokes reaction, as was the white piece but I feel the black is too intimadating and bold rather than the mysteriousness of the white.

Altering the images due to the original scale was again something that I felt needed to be done in order for the piece to create the right visual impact.

Positioning My Practice.

put up notes from cheryl, joanna and dan here

Artist's Coffee Morning Take IIII: 3D Design Presentations

LCAD Pop Up Shop.

After attending Bridget March's 'First Tuesday event, designed to get creatives working together and also get their work 'out there', myself and coursemate Andrew Ellis decided to team up and apply to be vendors at the event taking place next month.

Andrew and I are both avid users of Flickr the online photo host, and through this we both became aware of each of others interests in photography and helped each other in selecting appropriate images to sell as well as teaming up on the purchasing and assembelling of frames and mountboard.

We have our first initial meeting with the rest of the vendors this evening and will bring a selection of our prints along.

I feel our work offers great variety with Andrew's work  documenting his visit to the Amazon earlier this year and mine predominantly focussing on local landscapes.

Web Presence.

In prepertation for next Monday's web presence presentations I am preparing my online portfolios using a selection of platforms I have chosen for their relevance and usability.

Disregarding Indexhibit for the moment as problems with set up and usability have made me look on this platfrom unfavourably, I also don't feel it gives a particularly good looking final outcome, I will try to create something on tis by the end of the deadline but for now I want to focus on platfroms I know work and that have great results in terms of proffesional application.

To give my presence a bit of variety I have employed several resources for respective reasons:

Cargo as an introductory page giving a flavour of my work and a brief overview of my practice as well as links to my other outlets.

Carbonmade, an increasingly popular site amongst creatives, as a web based portfolio similar to issuu but without needing a file to be hosted anywhere.

My trusty Blog of which is the most regularly used and updated resource for finding out about my practice.

As well as site based resources we are required for this module to create two PDF files, one interactive and one print based. 

http://cargocollective.com/bradhodgson

I am becoming increasingly sceptical about using Indexhibit, it's cumbersome nature and it's proneness to problems has made me reconsider using it, add to this what I feel are pretty average looking results

and

As all I need is a basic user interface that can both showcase work and redirect to my blog I have decided to look at two other recommended options Cargo and Carbonmade.

Applying for a Cargo account is apparently a lengthy process, I have already submitted my application and hope to have an account set up relatively soon.

Carbonmade on the other is immediate in it's application and as shown below has made the flickr slideshow redundant with it's slick and easy to navigate portfolio viewer.

http://bradhodgson.carbonmade.com 

a platform that is becoming increasingly popular amongst practitioners and employers as a way of finding emerging creative talent.

provides users with a nice crisp interface,

in a similar vein to Indexhibit it's layout is very set in it's ways, but whilst I feel I can work with Carbonmade's conformations easier than than i can with Indexhibit's strict left sidebar alignment, which feels redundant in terms of how I would make use of it within my site.

Working in a similar fashion to how 'Issuu' navigates through a PDF document

Whilst I await to see if I can get a Cargo account sorted in time I need to crack on with both creating more work and PDF's in which to show them.

So as for my web presence portfolio I now have a Blog, Carbonmade Site and now need to create two PDF documents, one web based and one interactive, which all need to have a cohesive and consistent feel about them.

Artist's Coffee Morning Take III

Steve talked to Andrew and myself today during the artists coffee morning, ( different running order this time, this week's session was aimed at Interdisciplinary presenting their work informally and next week 3d will return the favour with their formal presentations, about photographers Lee Friedlander and Diane-Arbus in relation to Andrew's work.

Tutorial with Dan Robinson.

Tutorial With David Appleyard.

I scheduled a tutorial with David to talk about where I plan to take my work, and he being a construction in relation to my planned visit to Dale Head, Cumbria a week on Friday.

Crit with Dan and Victoria.

Today marked a crit, which acted for me as a way of signifying my intentions for the coming weeks, in particular a planned trip to the Lake District with friends that I intended to incorporate my work into, and exactly how the past few weeks of research and work have prepared me for this.

Whilst pleased that my work was being well received in the crit, I felt that the feedback it tried to offer was a little toned down and whilst I didn't feel particularly the work deserved negative feedback, just that I was a little wary whilst not been overtly critical of work, which I was wary of how truthful the opinions expressed could have been, as the rest of my group also felt.

Scousebound.

This was my first visit to this bi-annual event and only my 3rd visit to Liverpool and I was lucky enough to have our very own scouse tour guides April and Jaclyne on hand to find all the interesting ports of call, both biennial related and also relevant parts of Liverpool.
The event caters for everyone and a real effort is made in planning a festival which hosts exhibits and events to cater for all tastes, and it was this inclusiveness to all which I found was one of the true successes of the biennial, there was activities and exhibitions to suite every age range and personality, that hardest part was making time for them all, after all this was the 'Biennial' and not the 'Biennale' which a few over cultured people insisted on calling it.

Each Biennial is themed – this year the theme is Touched, which explores not only the idea of being emotionally affected by works of art, but also physical contact with works of art – something you would not necessarily expect to encounter in a museum or art gallery.

Photography prohibited and with a poor online archive of images

Wannes Goetschalckx's exhibit took up a vast part of the Biennial exhibit, showing the various interactions of an individual in a space, using both the space the films where created in and television screens to exhibit.

Interactions within a space

Maria Isabel Gaudinez-Acqilizan/ Alfredeo Juan Acqilizan, Passage (Project Another Country), 2010

Wayne Hemmingway & Son

After the Tate it was off to see an entry into a previous bienniel that has since captured the heart of Liverpool and remained as a permanent piece of work - Richard Wilson's Turning the Place Over.
Although not as impressive as I thought it would be, I put this down to the poor weather and location not being where I imagined it, the work is still an impressive piece perfect for interacting with the public in terms of generating curiosity.

After a quick detour for lunch at the fantastic Eddie Rockets for a 50's diner style Maltshake and a Burger (just like a scene out of Nowhere Boy), it was off to the Walker Gallery.

Similar I guess to Leed's own City Gallery but on a much grander scale, the Walker gallery housed the annual John Moores Painting Prize as well as an exhibit I had been looking forward to, Wolfgang Tilmans.

Whilst photography was prohibited within the John Moore's prize exhibit, there is an extensive online gallery of all the entrants for theis years edition, of which a selection are shown below.

Whilst I am a big fan of photo realist Chuck Close, and could appreciate the immense skill of the artist in order to create this work, I just felt that it didn't add anything more than a photo would have done.

Also in the Walker Gallery was an extensive exhibition taking in the previous John Moore's Prize Winners, including the infamous David Hockney painting 'Peter Getting Out Of Nick's pool' which won the prize in 1967, and is relevant to me as Hockney and in particular his california era work is becoming a topic within my dissertation in relation to his fleeing of his homeland to forge a new identity in America.

Wolfgang Tilmans

Having previously mentioned how much I was looking forward to seeing Tilmans work, known for it's unique display style, I'll have to admit that I was hugely dissapointed with the work on display in the Walker Gallery.

With all the fuss that had been kicked up about having Wolfgagns's work on display,with posters and advertisements everywhere, I was baffled to find the work itself almost impossible to find.

The basic concept it seemed, as that any spare space the gallery had was occupied with a Tilmans work, which meant that I missed a lot of them at first because they were in places that you didn't expect, which may sound good on paper but in practice, to me, failed.

Then it was off for a quick mooch of the great student friendly art shop - Rennie's.

One Year Performance (1980-1981)

Tehching Hsieh is an artist who has been mythologized since retiring from making art in 2000. In 1970s and 1980s New York, he made an exceptional series of artworks: five separate one-year-long performances.

The exhibition will focus on documentation of his performance ‘life work’, One Year Performance 1980-1981 (Time Clock Piece).

For one year, the artist punched a worker’s time clock located in his studio, on the hour, every hour. Marking the occasion by taking a self-portrait on a single frame of 16mm film, the resulting reel documents a year in his life at approximately one second per day – a pace that is polar opposite of the enduring length of the original performance. The punch cards, witnessed by a third party for authenticity, and other ephemera, document Hsieh’s life restructured around this highly repetitive task.

This will be the first exhibition of the Taiwanese-born, New York-city based artist’s work in Europe.

I never realised just how much public art Liverpool had, with images I've seen many times before such as Banksy's 'Rat' suddenly appearing on the corner of an abandoned building.