dioramas

I'm currently researching dioramas as a form of analog virtual reality. Before anyone dreamed of CGI or virtual reality googles, dioramas allowed viewers to project themselves into a simulated space for purposes of entertainment or education. An image in three dimensions, the space inside a diorama functions like a complete world. To the imagination this space extends beyond the boundaries of its container. We enter it through our eyes and in some ways, it becomes more real that what is around it.


Grey wolf diorama from the American Museum of Natural History

Photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto described his first experience of the natural history dioramas as hallucinogenic. "When I first saw them I felt as if I'd taken drugs . . . Perhaps the whole world around me might be completely dead."


Photograph by Hiroshi Sugimoto

pages are cabinets

Here are some images I've collected of instances where the page functions as a cabinet or container for a collection:










This method of presentation seems obvious at first, but there are interesting patterns at work here:
1. The objects are removed from context and placed in a neutral plane parallel to and doubling the page. The space is flat or very shallow.
2. The objects are scaled to fit within the page. Relative sizes are maintained within the collection.
3. They are organized by physical characteristics such as size, shape, or color.
4. Text, which can't exist within the same "reality" as the image, is given its own space (as in the case of the butterfly collection), made to fit (rosettes & scissors), or exists on another plane (fake flowers). I would argue that the last tactic, where text actually overlaps with the image, is possible only because the flower image is a photograph. With a graphic image, overlaid text would break the illusion that the image is an object that exists in space.

more virtual collecting

Concerning the collections we're unaware we're making. Flickr automatically generates a list of the all the tags for the photos I've uploaded:



The size of the word corresponds to its frequency. (I store the documentation of my artwork on the site, which is why my name is so big.) It's a little odd for me to see this, because it totally exposes my interests and obsessions. The largest tags tend to be large, abstract concepts that indicate general areas of study (graphic design, nature, collection, etc.) The smaller tags, which might relate to only one or two images in my photostream, are even more personal and specific. Fantasy and escapism seem to be reoccurring themes (celebration, illusion, magic, nostalgia, party, spectacle, toy, whimsy.) Sex and gender are also prominent (boy, boy girl, female, gender, men, sex, women.) According to this list, I have an equal interest in hat and money.

For purposes of comparison, here are the tags from the flick accounts of two friends, Hannah Brancato and Payton Turner:

Victorian Photocollage

I'm super excited about the Victorian Photocollage show at the Art Institute. I love how the formality of the portraits is subverted by the artists' whimsical hand. Here, family photographs are treated not as precious objects, but as media for artmaking. Through cutting and pasting, images of stern people in uncomfortable clothing are re-imagined as characters in surreal spaces. In one particularly strange image, family members become spiders and insects on a web.
The work feels contemporary, despite the fact that it was made by society ladies in the mid nineteenth century. It represents an non-neutral approach to framing a collection. Rather than simply present the photographs in a traditional album format, the women responsible for the collages created worlds around the images, thus injecting them with a highly personal narrative.