14
Sep
Liou is a contemporary artist who currently teaches photography at the University of Florida. He uses a variety of mediums for his artwork which show his flexibility and knowledge of the work he does. In his early works, he focused on photography, but recently he has switched to digital art and manipulation. He incorporates his life experiences into his work, mainly the event of his daughter getting leukemia. This caused him to work on his latest project entitled Blood Work which was an installation that included audio and visual interpretations. Another one of his more recent projects is called Improbable Waves which deals with wave-like textured photographs that emphasize movement.
I like the range of mediums he uses because I can relate. I tend to not focus on a specific medium and use any and all means available to me. Not to say that I don’t have favorite, because I do, but I enjoy working with more than one medium as a focus. I like how he takes his life experiences and finds a way for it to appear in his work which give it a more emotional feeling, especially when you know more about his life and it affects your view on the piece. Seeing the development of his work throughout time is really interesting because you see original ways of art meshing in with the new technological ways.
Blood Work
9
Sep
7
Sep
Siber is a photographer based in Chicago. Some of his projects include the Untitled project, Floating Logos and Compare to… The Untitled Project involves photographs with all text removed from them, and then the text without the photos. In the Floating Logos project, signs and billboards have had their poles removed from the photo to give the appearance of a floating sign, creating a surreal type of photograph. For Compare to.. Siber uses commonly recognized containers and labels created by name brands to create “off-brand” products testing the viewer.
I really enjoy all of Siber’s work. The Untitled Project is really clever, not only because you can see the polarity of the advertisements with text and the text without advertisements, but it really makes you think about the commercial aspect of industry and how we interpret it. The Floating Logos project feels really whimsical and intriguing. The Compare to.. project is really neat, and being able to recognize the brand names for the items is kind of culturally shocking.
Burger King
7
Sep
Whitmore is a photographer based in Chicago who currently has three main projects he has worked on. The first of these projects is a collection of photos entitled “Nowhere” which deals with the theme of nature and how it plays a part in our lives and our modern society. Although our society keeps on progressing, there will always be nature present, abundant or scarce and that we should play a more vital role in tending to how much nature influences the choices we make as a society. The second project entitled “Channels” involves pictures of rooms based on the person who lives in them, and a screen (usually a tv or a computer) that shows the person without them actually being there. The third project involves his help with a magazine called Vague Paper, which involves photos of average woman and normal articles untypical of the usual fashion magazines and the like.
I really enjoyed his Channels project and how each room represented a separate personality, and by looking at the person through the screen, you could tell that it fit them. I liked the feeling of seeing an empty room but still experiencing the feeling of someone being present in the room itself. I grasped the concept of the Nowhere project, but I didn’t really like it as it did not entice an emotional response from me. The Vague Paper concept is pretty cool considering how other magazines focus on perfection and stupid fluffy articles while this one focused on average and normal and something that every day people can relate to.
Channels
7
Sep
Gitelson is a contemporary artist based in Chicago. He mainly works with photography, but also dabbles in book making and film. Gitelson often creates his projects based on ordinary things, be it conversation, found items, or particular events occurring in his life. For one of his projects, he used him quitting smoking as a theme and incorporated this idea into a book (made out of cigarettes and a cigarette box) a poster ( with pictures throughout his day of him smoking the cigarette and what he was doing at the time of each smoke ) along with a video of him smoking his last cigarette ( during two different years ). He used these three mediums to tell a story that the viewers of his work would be able to understand better due to each aspect of his storytelling.
I really enjoy how Gitelson tells the stories of mundane things of everyday life. He uses each medium very well to tell the stories that pique his interest and in a way that makes it very entertaining to the viewer. I thought the staring contest project was pretty clever, although I feel like the blinking shouldn’t have been edited out and instead a “tournament” style of video be made in which three staring contests take place and whoever wins two out of the three would win. I liked the feeling of awkwardness when looking at his projects. For example, watching the people try on the hat in the garbage cans bugged me and I had to stop watching it because the awkward hurt my soul.
“The Quitter”
