TACHELES

PASSFOTOAUTOMAT

BERLIN FEBRUARY 2011

Ben Pepper.

At one96A where a few of us Interactive Arters help out, we had the opportunity to work with the artist Ben Pepper, who makes temporary street sculptures, design prints, paintings and sometimes specialized metal works. He has worked with a few global brands and had a few of his prints made into t-shirts, and designed his own snowboard carry case. 

He uses the image of the heart a lot in his work, and quoted here is the reason towards it:

"My Art is about Life and that is why I use the heart as a symbol in what I make and develop. It is about the relationship between ourselves and this historic symbol and our feelings when we look at it different times of our lives."

When we worked with him, we were screen printing the image above; monopoly money based on the idea of life, so that when he went to Berlin- where he currently is at the moment; he could hang all the different colour monopoly money up for a 48 hour installation and leave them for passers by to pick up. 

The fact it's monopoly money has generated this idea that paper money is worthless- as it's just paper. 

I thought it was a really interesting concept, seeing the way the economy in Britain is looking now.

He said to us that when he gets back from Berlin and then Switzerland he wants us to work with him again, which is another great opportunity.

He actually gave us a signed print just to show us the gratitude of us helping him out and making his art into a reality. 

Here is a photograph he took of us helping out in the studio:

The installation in Berlin:

And some more photographs of his other work:

Dali and Disney

Salvador Dali collaborated with Walt Disney originally in 1945 for this short animation which eventually took 58 years towards it's completion. It is a work of sheer brilliance and really shows Dali's mind in cartoon form.
I love the use of ballet and classical music to really show the creativity flowing as one.
My love for Dali's work really grows.

2 day project

About 2 weeks ago we were given a 2 day project by our 3rd year tutors which was one day of disassembling something and then the next reassemble. We got put with 2 other people we wouldn't normally work with which was good to experiment with different people. I actually thought that both days we would be working on our own work, but on the 2nd day we had to reassemble someone else's work.
So on day one, we had a few ideas at first involving mis-matching the body and the face, with like a flipping book to create entirely new bodies/faces with everyone's features combined. But we decided to make it simple. Even though it wasn't simple at first as every computer we used wouldn't print our photos off!
We decided to take portraits of people in the studio and guillotine all the images into little strips of paper.
We then mixed all the little bits up and stuck them on the wall. I went for all the eyes, and noses, and mouths, beards, chins, and everything else and grouped them together generally. The finishing result looked really funny. However I did wonder how another group would reassemble our work!
The next day we were given the work of a group who created a hand done tea factory with all it's ingredients to make a cup of tea de-constructed. We then decided to put all these teabags, loose tea, milk and sugar in one big mug of tea. (personally I don't like sugar in tea!) So we grabbed a big bowl and sewed the teabags together to create one massive teabag, and then put the tea on top and poured the water, milk and sugar in. It did collapse in the end, but it wasn't to be taken seriously. Was enjoyable to try something different and laugh about it. I guess that's the point of the project- to not take it too seriously. That's pretty much how I view art anyway, something to play with. :)

DALI PERMANENT EXHIBITION

I personally love Salvador Dali as an artist so when I picked up a leaflet about the exhibition in Berlin, I was thrilled, as I've only seen a couple of his works in galleries, not a load in one place. It was quite expensive but I thought it'd be worth it, and it definitely was. It has a lot of artwork the public doesn't normally see, so was extraordinary looking at all these paintings, sculptures, films, illustrations etc of his all in one place. Because I've already written an essay about him, I knew all about his crazy character and the kind of things he creates. I loved looking deeply into each wonderful piece of his art and looking at the intricate detail and wondering how the hell he transfers it from mind to paper.. I would perhaps go as far as saying in my mind he is a pure genius, purely for his wide range of talent. I couldn't stop thinking how much I want to get into illustration again. For my newish project I have been drawing a fair bit, but I can't help but find it a bit more difficult this time round. I used to do it a lot, but creating big monsters from my mind isn't as easy because I'm used to observational drawing- which also I haven't done in a while. Dali makes it look so easy; especially his use of brush/pen strokes, even simple things like cross-hatching. But hey, it's all testing and trying, with time I can only get better. Doesn't stop me idolising Dali as an artist though. Shame we couldn't take any photos though as that way I would remember everything that was in there. Still, memory doesn't hurt.

Holocaust Memorial

Here are some photographs I took at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. Absolutely fascinating.

My sister's late birthday present.

Painted by yours truly. X

Long exposures

I was talking to my housemate Joel just before Christmas about light drawings, and he'd never actually tried them before or known how to, so I demonstrated on my SLR, and the results weren't that great at first, it was just getting to grips with it again. Me and Joel dominated the art of it in the end though! 

When I was in South Africa in the Drakensburg mountains I did a couple of my own with my sisters which was a lot of fun too. I shall post a few of them here. :)

Back to the future

I came across this artist the other day called Irina Werning who is doing an ongoing project called 'Back to the Future.'
I thought it was a really interesting idea- she has basically used old photos of kids and tried to recreate them with the same person, pose, clothes, background, everything. I think the results are really interesting. There is something about the photos that is really captivating- maybe it's reliving our childhood years in just one photograph and seeing how different or how similar we look to how we used to look as children.
Id love to try this idea someday as a gimmick, just to see how different I used to look to how I do now.

Here's her website:
http://irinawerning.com/back-to-the-fut/back-to-the-future/