Time is On My Side. And On My Floor. And in My Trash.

This next project is a pinhole camera, also known as a “time changer.”  That title is accurate, as time has definitely changed since I started it in March, and finished it in May.  We began this project just before Spring Break, as butterflies danced atop the heads of dandelions reaching towards the sun, like arms, emerging from a verdant sea.   Birds were singing, rainbows straddled the horizon line, and all around, the inescapable promise of life born anew! 

Now we’re in the midst of a global pandemic.  Those verdant fields have been replaced with crimson streets awash in blood, the sunshine, with rains of smoldering ash.  I fall asleep to distant screams and wake up to cacophonous silence.  The apocalypse has come.  Is this blog post still a homework assignment, or an epitaph for mankind?

In all seriousness, it feels like a lifetime has passed over the course of this project.  When I brought it home from school, it was a fairly intricate clay sculpture: A monstrous head, sitting upon a column wrapped in a twisting knot of intertwined appendages.  When I took it out of its box last week, it looked like a tin can sitting on a pile of cocaine.  Within 2 months, all of the clay had disintegrated into dust.

The focus of my work thus far has been on technology addiction, so my original concept involved a beast covered in eyeballs holding a dozen or so digital devices around its periphery.  I was trying to communicate a sense of stimulus overload.  When it broke, I needed to come up with a more abstract method of conveying the same idea, but using the limited number of supplies available to me during quarantine.  Was there a way I could rebuild this with 17 cases of Diet Dr. Pepper and a monolith of empty pizza boxes?  Ultimately, what I settled on was covering the tin can with broken shards of old CDs and the salvageable clay eyeballs I had leftover from my previous attempt.  I liked the way the shiny surfaces of the CDs acted like dozens of small mirrors, catching and reflecting light and images, providing too many sources of information to focus on.  I also appreciated that the CDs represent an archaic form of digital media, used to construct a relic of a digital culture.  It’s awesome when I blindly stumble into unintended metaphorical gravitas. 

(Click to advance images)

This isn’t what I had in mind when I started, it was much more difficult to execute than I imagined, I made a huge mess, and went through a lot of frustration and discarded materials to get here, but I made something.  This seems to be the recurring theme of all of my projects this semester.  And yet, I’m not complaining.  I’m a control freak and impossible to please.  In the end, learning to let go, embrace failure, and make the best of a limited skillset will probably be the most valuable thing I’ll have taken from this class.

In (This) Space, No One Can Hear You Scream

One of the blog post requirements for class was to share our workspace. Oof, this is going to be a disaster. Before the pandemic, I had a pretty nice set up going. In the den of our tiny apartment I had a drafting table, bins full of supplies, canvases, a custom made, wall mounted drawing board, stacks of sketchbooks and pads of paper, a smaller drawing table, lightboxes…just tons and tons of stuff. It was a lot, but it was organized and relatively neat. As I took these photos, my “studio” looks like it was tossed by the mob looking for the Maltese falcon. It’s in total disarray. In very short order, this had to become my office for work, which meant shoving things aside and bringing in a computer, a different chair, installing more practical lighting, running cables across the room etc. A couple of weeks into things, I remembered I’m still a student, and I needed to reclaim some of that space for homework projects. This meant shoving more things aside, and putting the stuff I need in a place where I can get it, and use it, with more thought put into ease of access than feng shui, aesthetic appeal, or common decency. Scatter a few animal skeletons, and you’d think a cave troll lives here.

A few more weeks of working from home, and one might.

Anyway, here’s my half impractical, barely functional studio, half impractical, barely functional office space.

(Click to advance images)

Contemporary Artists and Technology

Originally, the concept I wanted to explore for our “imaginary culture” revolved around technology addiction.   Admittedly, this was just a thinly veiled excuse for me to continue my elitist, condescending, holier-than-though crusade against people I think spend too much time glued to their phones.  I’ve ranted enough about this in the past that, for now, I’ll be succinct:  I worry that too much time spent absorbed in devices leads to serious social/developmental failures.  Technology is not inherently bad.  There is a healthy, responsible amount of time to spend on a device and it just so happens to be the exact amount of time that I personally engage in.  I’m a jerk.

This virus/social isolation ordeal we’ve collectively been going through has recalibrated my stance on technology.  When the internet felt like a luxury, it was easy to criticize those I thought guilty of frivolous over-indulgence.  Today, it feels like a necessity.  I myself have gone from maybe an hour a day of online activity in my personal time to spending, conservatively, 36 hours a day in front of a screen.  It’s how I do my job, attend classes, do my shopping, keep informed, check in with family…it’s become the platform through which I entirely function.  If a person wants more stimulus from life than what can be had bouncing a tennis ball off of four walls, getting online is practically mandatory.  Who am I to begrudge someone for wanting to connect to a thriving virtual world rather than endure the anxiety inducing nightmare that is the real one?  I think I can cool it on the smug criticism for awhile.

The contemporary artists I chose for this assignment were selected before the outbreak.  As a result, they feel like a time capsule now.  A relic of a time when the greatest existential threat I was facing was Tik-Tok or Instagram.  I’m going to speak of what originally drew me to them, with the caveat that what once felt like scathing social commentary to me, now reads more like needless party pooping.

Pawel Kuczynski

https://www.pictorem.com/profile/Pawel.Kuczynski

Pawel Kuczynski is an illustrator from Poznan, Poland.  As I don’t speak Polish, I have little insight into his thought process other than what his work tells me.  That’s fine, as his clear, satirical images are able to communicate plenty.  Kuczynski targets a lot of the same sources of skepticism that I share, and does so through a sharp, observational sense of humor.  Something about the way he frames a scene, renders the human figure, and delivers a visual “punch line” in his paintings makes me think of Gary Larson’s “The Far Side” comics.

“Confessional” is as mystified as I am with the way people seem perfectly content to air their dirty laundry through social media channels such as Facebook, effectively shouting their personal problems and failures to their friends, family, employers, and strangers.

A similar idea is reflected in “Watcher” in which the Facebook “f” logo is portrayed as a surveillance camera.  Everything we do on Facebook is public, who knows who is watching, or what they are doing with that information?

In “Gossip” salacious hearsay passed along in hushed tones is converted into a tweet and sent out to the world at large through Twitter.  In a connected society, any information you choose to share with others is susceptible to unrestricted dissemination. 

These three pieces are a small sampling of the way Kuczynski comments on our willingness to sacrifice our privacy in exchange for social media access.  My topic was on technology addiction, and this is the behavior of addicts:  Self-destructive decisions blindly made in pursuit of an object of desire.

John Holcroft

https://www.johnholcroft.com

John Holcroft is a commercial and freelance illustrator from the UK.  His work is digital, presumably vector based, which adds a layer of irony as his subject matter is frequently critical of an over-dependence on technology.  While not as overtly humorous as the work of Pawel Kuczynski, his pieces are clever, and colorful, imbuing them with a sense of playfulness. 

The messages he sends can be metaphorical, as in the scene of a man filling his ego with a bowl full of Facebook “likes” or literal, in which a baby chooses a smartphone over a rattle.  The relationship between children and technology, in particular, seems to be a concern of Holcroft.  In one piece, a small boy is gripped by tentacles physically emanating from his tablet.  In another, a young girl has grown foliage from sitting motionless in front of her phone for so long.  My personal favorite features a teenager on his phone, encased in a wall made of Lego bricks.  His parents are building the wall, or possibly trying to break it down, but in either scenario the sense of separation and isolation conveyed by a person constantly engrossed in their device is clearly communicated. 

When viewing his work as a whole, John Holcroft revisits themes of social media being addictive, in some cases a literal trap, and potentially harmful to our youth.  As a commercial illustrator, it could be argued that these are evidence of the client’s feelings more than Holcroft’s.  I am of the mind that even freelance artists are drawn to the projects that are of personal interest to them, and the repetitive themes of this artist’s work can be trusted to reflect his own beliefs.