sam taylor-wood / decay.

thinking through my time & memory project some more, i think using food as my "unrelated & isolated" material of representation lends itself to showing memory decay, literally through process of decay.

i was thinking of the work of sam taylor-wood and her beautiful scenes of death in organic still lifes:

still life (2001)


a little death (2002)


the distortion of time in these is probably what makes them most powerful. its a process we know comes to us all but when it's laid out for you, it seems too intimate and personal. viewing almost becomes uncomfortable.

i now want to experiment with time lapse within the scenes i am photographing. in a finished project hopefully the time lapse would compliment the still images.
memories die, in exactly the same way as organic bodies.

kubrick: 2001 a space odyssey & a clockwork orange.

a visual genius and easily one of the most inspiring directors/cinematographers/photographers of the modern age.
i have finished the main bulk of essay writing, but found it a real task to write about just two films in 2000 words. i have concentrated mostly on 2001: a space odyssey but have mentioned the haunting intro and the ultraviolence scene of a clockwork orange as its pretty much the hallmark of all kubrickisms.

a clockwork orange



2001: a space odyssey
the start of science-fiction as we know it

kubrick.

kubrick, i am finding it difficult to logically and clearly explain your genius in 2000 words.

time & memory // initial output

i'm really struggling with this. as usual i am failing to get what is in my head actually into reality. i just cannot find a way to do it. it also takes longer to actually "make" the props than you would think. i thought i'd learnt this on my FMP in 2008 but you forget.

isolated & unrelated objects as memory representation




anyway this still needs a lot of work. just feeling a little overwhelmed with early mornings, work, essays and never ending reading lists.

the tell-tale heart, edgar allan poe

TRUE! nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why WILL you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How then am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily, how calmly, I can tell you the whole story.

time & memory ; minimalism & impressionism.

i am no skilled artist and/or painter by any stretch of the imagination, but watercolours are the only medium really lending themselves to my ideas at the moment.
as contradictory as it sounds, minimalism and impressionism have become important lines of research. they both have qualities that when dissected and interweaved back together, give a good impression of what i currently believe memories to actually "look like". in a painting this ultimately gives a childlike looking expression.


1&2 show how important blue & orange (opposites) are to my childhood memory, and a detachment from my younger self.
3&4 are school memories. i found these harder to paint because of the emotional attachments i have with these moments.

key elements
minimalism; order, simplicity, geometry, structure, "a highly purified form of beauty"
minimalism can most commonly be associated with installations and white walls. this could be another route of memory representation.

impressionism; light, colour, brushwork, atmosphere, dream.
i am not so much interested in the subject matter - more the style and use. impressionist paintings can be distinctly complex in their simplicity - they are built by single brush strokes, each one integral.

my project is becoming more a study in the essence of memory, rather than the specific memories in themselves.

harry potter 7 part 1 premiere.

yes. that's right, boffin & i attended our second potter premiere last night.
six hours stood in the same spot was totally worth it. you cannot imagine how mental these events are like until you've been there.

saatchi gallery.

regina spektor // us.

this week I watched #6

eternal sunshine of the spotless mind.

eternal sunshine of the spotless mind is pretty much a perfect representation of how i envisage the loss and active deletion of memory. memories are hand in hand with dreams, the dependability of a "memory" i believe is almost exactly the same as a dream. how much do you remember of your dreams?

you know when you dream you're in, for example, school. the school is probably different in your mind than it actually is in 'reality', but it's only in retrospect you notice this. only upon waking do you notice how surreal that dream really was.






these first caps are examples of "conflicting" memories and/or dreams, where elements from several places are sewn into one. surreal only in retrospect.







a visual representation of the "deletion" of memory. this is perhaps where i'm most likely headed with my own project. were these small details ever remembered, or were they really deleted?





and finally, the representation of childhood memory. it's never that detailed. it's stripped down to vivid colour and geometrics. further proof, here is the "actuality" of the film which you can compare to the previous childhood visuals.



the scene is packed with details and, just, stuff. stuff that even the human brain cannot store fully.

delusions.

gran gave these (amongst copious others) to my sister to help with our family tree. gran saved them from the landfill after my great-grandad tried to throw them out.



what interests me perhaps a strange amount is the physical condition of a photograph. some are neatly preserved inside cardboard holders. some are inside individual envelopes. some are left, brown and ripped and decaying, with tea stains and blurred faces. the physical condition of a photograph to symbolise the reliability of human cognitive processes.