I’ve been painting these faces using Chinese Ink, trying to make it a daily thing and seeing if this could evolve into more things for my project. I started off with random ink blotches, and then filling in the whites for the eyes. I then proceed to filling up these faces with various expressions. Would be great if I risoprinted these faces as the colours would turn out very vibrant.
Presenza Degli Antenati, 1970
Presence of the Ancestors
“When my grandmother Luigia would see a newborn baby, she would look him over and then, without taking her eyes off him, would say his nose is like his mother’s, his eyes are like his father’s, but his expression is like Aunt Bernarda’s who lives in Verona and never visits anymore; his ears are like your grandfather’s, his mouth is like my sister Kim’s. The baby would smile and my grandmother would continue: his smile is like your uncle’s whom we haven’t seen since he left town years ago and now works (or so he claims) in Australia, but we haven’t heard a thing from him in ages.
In other words, in a heterozygote, when the gametes are formed through a pair of alleles, half of the gametes contain one of the two alleles, the other half the other allele. According to the second law of Mendel, then, the alleles separate during meiosis, going off into different gametes. Thus the phenotypic division derives from the casual combination of gametes.”
-Pg 262, Far vedere l’aria, Bruno Munari, Air Made Visible, A Visual Reader on Bruno Munari
Munari’s Useless Machines are made of painted cardboard and held together with silk threads.
“The elements of a useless machine, by contrast, all rotate upon and within themselves without touching. They are geometric in origin and exploit the two sides of their rotating elements to create chromatic variations. The public often asks how this idea came to me. This is my response: in 1933 the first abstract paintings were made in Italy; they were nothing more than geometric forms painted in a realistic manner. Morandi, it was said, made abstract pictures using bottles and vases as a formal pretext. In fact, the subject of a picture by Morandi is not the bottles but the painting captured in those spaces. So, it didn’t matter whether he painted bottles or triangles – it was all the same – and the painting was born from the formal and chromatic relationship between the elements that made up the work”
– Pg 40, Useless Machines, Far vedere l’airia, Bruno Munari, Air Made Visible, A Visual Reader on Bruno Munari.
Drawings from Bruno Munari’s Design As Art (1966)
Look Into My Eyes by Bruno Munari
An exercise in seeing the world through the eyes of others. This artist’s book, first published in 1969 as a gift, contains 25 loose colored cards centered around the theme of faces. The pages can be mixed up as to vary their order and clustered into small groups to change the color of the eyes, turning Bruno Munari’s book the into a game of perspective. –Exile Books
I like the way faces are being presented in Munari’s work. The drawings from his book Design as Art could be a useful exercise to get me started with the creation of masks. Look into My Eyes on the other hand is a great way to present these masks in a book format. They have elements of interactivity as well, with each of them having die cuts of eyes and mouths. These elements of the faces remains constant while the faces change and when layered, the eyes could change colour. I find this book so simple yet brilliant.
Masks have evolved from being tangible in early cultures to something intangible in contemporary culture. Social uses differ in present context as compared to earlier context of time. A representation of this could be drawn from the structure of the tree of life, which laid is roots in Dogon culture and African cosmology.
Action: Mobile installation
For this part of a project, I’d like to make a mobil installation to represent the cosmos but could still map out the comparisons between the tangible and intangible. If there are space constraints, I would probably document the process and the installation which would be housed at a bigger space via video. It would be an added bonus if I can find a special site – making the work very site specific.
Objects in Orbit by Chrissie Macdonald Collaboration with Andrew Rae.
Detroit Gallery, Stockholm, 2011
This installation has a constant object that ‘revolves’ around different elements. Instead of making it literally revolve/orbit the constant object is placed in different environments.
Mobiles made from everyday objects by Hanna Sandin
The simplicity and elegance of the mobiles are quite an irony to the everyday objects that were used to make them. The artist has a gift of curating these objects, placing them together to create a visual symphony. From this I learn that balance is an important element for a mobile installation. It is pretty much a floating sculpture and the manipulation of air space is important. Mobiles are constantly moving so there are multiplicities when viewing the art work.
This is a really cute way of creating character drawings out of really random doodlings.
By Faceheads
In Gombrich’s essay, The Mask and the Face: The Perception of Physiognomic Likeness in Life and in Art, masks are seen as “…crude distinctions, the deviations from the norm which mark a person off from others.” Gombrich has revealed another way of seeing a mask. It might not necessarily take on conventional interpretations.
Action: Sculptural series
I would like to interpret this series with illustrative pieces that are converted into various three-dimensional objects. The basis of these sculptures would still be a permanent aspect, which is the face – but altered by displacing the elements or reinterpreting them. These masks/objects would be hung, instead of being worn, the act of viewing serves as a reflection – masks are a reflection of our inner beings.
image found on pinterest:
I love the use of the veil as it shrouds the face without actually covering it. There is an added dimension on the face. The embroided features stands out from the rest of the face – exaggerating the actual features.
Collages done by Trey Wright
The placement of the individual pieces works. Although each of them are flat cut outs, they look rather three-dimensional as they are being propped against a backdrop. I like the idea of using collage to represent the displacement of the face and how the elements could be seen as separate and as one.
études
what was and will be i will never see
by Lou Benesch
These studies done by Benesch are very charming, making use of organic shapes, their placement and composition works somehow. The shapes could be converted into three dimensional objects and arranged physically.
Science shows that we all feel this way — that we’d be much happier with the way we looked if we could adjust a few things just a little bit. Photographer Scott Chasserot investigated what it means for us to feel “ideal” through his project Original Ideal. He took straight-on photographs of a bunch of different people and the manipulated them digitally, offering each of his subjects dozens of manipulated photographs (plus their original photographs) to choose from. Some of these photographs had been manipulated to conform to traditional beauty standards, while others were manipulated so that they conformed less.
Obviously, everyone picked a more ‘ideal’ version of themselves. How was Scott sure their choices were honest? Through science, of course! He hooked each participant up to an EEG headset, which detected brainwaves related to positive emotional reactions as they viewed each image.
Multiple Identities of a Face 