Research Assignment – MULTIPLES, FAMILIARS, HYBRIDS, CASTING
Uncomfortable Art
- What makes us uncomfortable about artwork? The unexpected, topics that hit close to home. Horror, preconceived notions about the purpose of commonplace objects. ‘Funniness’ or strangeness can be uncomfortable.
- My initial reactions to some of the contemporary works on (the uncomfortable.com) are that, it’s not necessarily a kind of artwork I would’ve been drawn to conceptually. I feel like in terms of conceptual modern art, some of my favourites to learn about revolved around performance art and human nature in responding.
- In correlation to that, these artworks feel like an experiment in how we respond in human nature and playing with the response of feeling uncomfortable. When people view the artwork, do they stop to reflect on how they feel, or do they simply feel uncomfortable and move on to the next artwork?
- It is also interesting to make artwork which considers discomfort in a culture where we may experience a lot of sensory overstimulation, even sometimes in our homes and our choices around that. Screens, loud noises, people coming and going, living with multiple roommates, or traffic and deadlines.
Cris Tufiño
Dancing at the End of the World 2019
- First Solo Show in Mexico
- Materials both solid & incorporeal
- Collaboration with the School of Smell, Fragrances of the Caribbean (nostalgic & almost funerary by the school of smell)
- What I like about this artwork is that it feels as if viewing it brings a sense of joy and humour. I almost forgot that it was monochromatic looking at it because of the play of light and shadow where it is displayed.
- The spikes logically seem like they would come from the shoes, but are attached to the feet instead like thorns or tentacles. Toes are overgrown over the edge, and this made me feel as though someone ‘wearing’ these would have a type of awkward gait. It has adopted characteristics or a sense of character.
- Although I can only imagine or speculate about the meaning behind the pieces, some of my impressions are a sort of transience between these ‘material’ realms of artificial and organic, and exploring this theme through different pieces within the collection.
- The arm feels like a dismantling or hybrid of organic forms that we see in nature, but also possibly something more technological like a keyboard. The two parts feel ‘infused’ in a way which makes the other abstracted and not entirely recognizable.
- Within the collection and looking at it together, I feel as though colour and material choices were very deliberate or carefully considered; instead of comparing paint swatches, choosing with organics that are available or organics that have a specific meaning to us our perhaps cultural significance, or none at all.
- The face on the bucket above feels intentional, as does the intentional creation of perhaps a casted object we would normally find for $5 in a hardware store made into art instead; customized colour – finding a new home, some intention in which it still holds, but not for an industrial purpose or something that is a chore.
- The reflection in the design is interesting to me because it makes me feel as if, I get an impression from all of these items together as a garden, but it’s missing something like a lake or a pond that the bucket is sitting in, and it’s not actually a bucket we are staring at, but the water.
- When I look at the collection together, I see strange and unexpected items and also customized casts which seem to repurpose something that is ‘supposed’ to be common place. The hands felt strange and isolated at first (as if that was the artist intention,) but looking at it again after having thought about it more I feel like they were a choice to include almost without a significant afterthought, as if the collection is about a process of “yes, this is industrial,” and “it’s not industrial at all, but it was put here like everything else.”
If it is a garden, it raises questions about ‘why’ of the dismembered head objects and the ‘why’ of the organic shapes and textures of the (pink) aquatic-looking shape in the back, which again has transcended the other creations by its nature alone. - So, in a sense, I feel included are items that stretch the possibilities of reality, objects which should be plastic and industrial, but aren’t, organic forms which are clearly not industrial by nature, and objects which again appear as organic shapes and forms, but aren’t organic, living, breathing forms either. For each object is a varied degree of appearing ‘finished,’ without hyper realism being shoved down anyone’s throats because it is realism and isn’t at the same time.
- This collection invites me to see something different, because I feel as if I’m trying to put together the puzzle pieces of someone else’s daydream. I feel as if I’m being invited to a conversation about what someone else’s life feels like. I feel invited to ask them questions about it and to get to know them. I don’t feel so much invited to a garden that they personally work in day in and day out, but into their dreamscape version of a garden. I feel as though I am experiencing their love, insecurity, feelings towards themselves and even their self-image. I sense a strange amount of cleanness and tidiness for something which otherwise might sometimes feel unruly or out of control. Gardens feel like a place that have seasons; a season where gardeners work, plan and prune, and also periods in which they may simply be enjoyed, or stared at. In this instance, the ‘garden’ feels more lived-in somehow, and like it is a part of a person’s life and being rather than an after-thought, a task, an errand, a chore.
Research on Dancing at the End of the World 2019
“Right behind her, in the video Dear Pilar, the artist led us through her memories, telling us of her late grandma, the ruins of a nineteenth-century leper colony on Isla de Cabras at the mouth of San Juan Bay in her native Puerto Rico, her travels to Tokyo and Paris when she was younger. She spoke over images she either created or pulled from the internet, explaining her interest in certain enigmatic feminine figures- sphinxes and models—in a tender whisper that evoked Lana del Rey singing the songs of the end of our world, an end that is always coming, for someone, somewhere. The women Tufiño depicts have identities so fluid they spill over into nonhuman territory, surrounded by flowers, by
scents, by furry creatures. They evoke disembodiment, disassociation, virtuality—
techniques through which humans have always sought to transcend the banality of our
material bodies to communicate with whatever is out there, beyond us.”
(Gaby Cepeda) – https://www.cristinatufino.com/4004336-press
- Reflection for Research:
Can we instigate an experimental approach to 3D art and design, inspired by aspects of familiar objects, as a means of considering how we live our lives? - What if the creative proposition of a sculptural object was to bring us into a new relation with possibilities, with different perspectives, aimed at dismantling day-to-day routines and revisions of user experiences.
- What if we were to imagine the reinvention of the everyday, starting with the visioning of ‘unthinkable ideas’ and objects, as proposed by Katerina Kamprani? What if…