Photography

I am everything you don't want. I am everything you left behind #6 /  by Justin Harrison

Street Bag

Inside out
Bowels on public display
Disgorged acts


Vapid Gestures
Regurgitation of yesterday
Putrid nostalgia

Nothing new
Brief performative repetition
Benevolance of dirt

 

Boundaries /  by Justin Harrison

Boundaries
Given space to occupy
Set dwelling
Dry grass, deviod of life
Out of time
Breaking down
In passage

 

Paper Spectres /  by Justin Harrison

I realise I’m missing an opportunity after the MA sessions we have - I need to reflect on the sessions after each one, that I’m missing out on the thoughts and ideas that arise from each Thursday. Sounds obvious now I say it but I’ve been so focussed on my own practice that it didn’t occur to me. Plus I should just pretty much document anything - especially if everything is research.

Thursday’s photographic session was an interesting one as I didn’t have time to think, but just throw stuff together without too much consideration, the speed with which I wanted to work meant that it was very intuitive and unconscious. Normally I would have liked tie to think about what I would do and prepare materials. But coming straight from work and not quiet being sure of what was going to be asked, meant I had to work on the fly.

(((I find an interesting tension between working intentionally and intuitively, I see value in them both, but struggle to reconcile a way to work using both - although I wonder if this is the value to making the ‘little nothings’ that Ursula von Rydingsvard creates.)))

Taking the direnct transfer images I was still working true to my practice taking layered paper and collaging. It’s quiet close to my practice already. Accumulating images and working them back and forth. It’s a part of my visual language t he photographic image. I note how often I use photography as a means to thinking a nd documenting ideas.

What became more interesting was when I collated the images together and place. them as one long block on the Miro board. Putting all the images together made sense of them, the colours and movement through form, with elements being lost and captured.

How the images are captured on the paper has a ‘spectral’ quality (Derrida - Specters Of Marx) , it’s evidence of history, present and future across the same site. Unfixed the image won’t remain, and the image viewed is not how it will be in the future, or how it was. There is a ghostly presence on the paper which cannot be entreated to stay or name itself.

Currently I’m reading - Spectres of Marx by Derrida. I’ve moved onto this text following a conversation with someone more versed in Derrida and other associated writers. There are a number fo terms that Derrida uses in Literary critical analysis, Hymen, Trace, Differance, Spectural. Thera are all similar but different, and I need to get a little more familiar with them for the sake of my research and my sanity.

I’m especially liking the notion of the spectre it’s connects easily to what I am investigating with my research paper and own art practice. More time with it is needed, as there are nuanced motifs in what I am reading that play out in my own work - especially the choice of materials. In discussion with Jonathan during a turutorail we discussed how the history of a material (a fence panel) has a key role for me in the nature and language of the art work I am making. That it becomes woven into the heart of the artwork and it’s integrity, even though it may not be clear to the viewer.

 

Encombre In Autolysis /  by Justin Harrison

It’s as if the house began to consume itself. Autolysis.
The structure that was akin to a vessel or a body - is now aggregate.
I know some of the properties history, a grubby past that is hung upon darker secrets.
There is a little sadness with its passing, more relief.

The site has become passage and place at the same time. Khôra the space outside, a dumping ground and non space or ‘antiland’

What is Khôra? I need to define better.

Division  for generation?

 

Transformation by Aberration /  by Justin Harrison

 

This is kinda ‘off brief’ and unusual for me to work in this fashion, but then I kinda liked the effect. Overshot a. source and forced the camera to over compensate creating aberrations, and then pulled stills from the movie.

It’s ‘little transformation’ of an object which I’m gonna keep a secret, for now.

Light changes fast and the capturing created anomalies, which I find kinda interesting, as the generation is from a inappropriate use of technology.

I wonder how it would work to slow the movie down? Thats the one thing I’m not sure I like is the speed of the changes.

Not sure what any of this has to do with my studio investigations in wood…

 

Gregory Crewdson /  by Justin Harrison

What I am interested in is that moment of transcendence, where one is transported into another place, into a perfect, still world.
Gregory Crewdson - https://gagosian.com/artists/gregory-crewdson/

I find it a little strange to be engaged in sculpture and abstract work, and yet of all the artists right now that I feel any affinity to would be Gregory Crudeson. I’m working through a list of a whole bunch of different artist in my research. However usually I only connect to one or two works of per artist and not so much the body of their work.

However with Crewdson I don’t get weary of his work. I find that there is a movie in one photograph, I find enough room in his work to wonder around. And then I discovered the above quote which feels akin to my preoccupations of the Passage and Place of transformation.

I feels like I am witnessing a slow decay in his images, the gradual reduction of a granular world to an exit of some form, either physical or existential. His work carries a romantic sadness that reminds me of ‘Flemish Game’ paintings but goes deeper.

I’m not sure exactly how he connects to the Derrida theory I’ve been reading but intuitively I feel like it’s there.

Also I’ve noticed of late how much I use photography in my blog that it is a natural part of my visual language. I think I should permit it some more space alongside the drawing and making. There is a piece I’d like to shoot that’s been lodged in my brooding, but I worry it’s just a cheap copy. However I’ll at least draw it out to explore it, maybe print it an I can decide on it’s virtue after that.

 

The Colour of Everything Left Behind /  by Justin Harrison

Not sure how much I want to say about this…I could leave it. Just post the image and the title.

Maybe its a piece to show.

But for the sake of my blog, process and the need to document I’ll write.

Disposed of ‘used thinner’ from multiple oil painters, collected and distilled over a period of time. Left to stand, gradually the paint settles as sediment and the thinner can be poured off and reused. Divisable. The sediment normally disposed of. However I realised as I recycled the thinner that there was a uniform colour created each time. The colour of everything left behind.

I collected the sediment in a specimen jar - it seemed appropriate somehow. Something evidential. Something clinical. Dispassionate. Removed.

I wonder if I should use it, make a drawing or print, but for now it doesn’t feel right. I just want to keep the jar. Distilled.

Everything is divisible. (Almost)

Addendum: I’ve come back and posted the image 3 times as I attempted to colour correct the image to get it as faithful as possible, but I’m working with an I-phone 11 and an old Sony 3/4 SLR and a laptop, which doesn’t bode well fo colour correction. George if you read this I know how off things are, please don’t judge me!

 

Process /  by Justin Harrison

Detail from self portrait

I look like shit. I’m seriously behind on sleep. So this seems like a good time to take a self portrait photo for the collaborative project.

I take fairly brutal one straight on, but then I find myself messing with it. I can't help it. We chose the theme 'Awkward' and this can go in many directions, I play with the image till I've almost destroyed it, but then I really like it. It's become something else, it has a Gerhard Richter feel to it and the colours are working for me. I mess with I some more pushing the colours and forms. I like that I don't know where this is going but that the trajectory is interesting, it’s undergoing trnsformation///

/// I send the image and wait to se what I'll get back....

Because I keep on forgetting what I am currently interested in I’m posting now on my blog to try and centralise my resources and focus and who knows it could be useful too.

Decomposition and the science of death.

Derrida - locate a constructive element on the up cycle of deconstruction. Also reading Structure Sign and Play.

Dead horses - find anything and draw/collograph print

Walter Bruggerman - find that book Justin.

South Africa - Finish reading and research further.

 

I am everything you left to decay /  by Justin Harrison

I am everything
You left to decay
As walls fail
And fluids leach
Billions multiply

Out of my body
Yields possibility
I am given up
To the earth
In smaller parts
Than before

(((Discarded squash left on window sill, decaying and desicating.)))

 

Passage between the binary and self-decomposition /  by Justin Harrison

Image my own

This ia an image I took some time ago, but it came to mind after my last blog entry. It’s the limp bird from the game paintings and the glove at the road side.

I previously posted it on Instagram back in October 2019. What’s curious is the entry I made. I wrote “…it’s a preoccupation with transition and being in ‘passage’ - that perhaps there’s a moment between binary markers’

This really is a preoccupation of mine. But why? Why do I focus on this area?

The bird will soon be rendered down to it’s constituent parts, as it gives itself up to the soil, feather and bone to minerals and proteins. Carbon dioxide, water, simple sugars and mineral salts.

I looked up what happens to a body that is decomposing. Breaking down to simpler elements. Then I discovered this delicious passage.

“Decomposition begins several minutes after death, with a process called autolysis, or self-digestion. Soon after the heart stops beating, cells become deprived of oxygen, and their acidity increases as the toxic by-products of chemical reactions begin to accumulate inside them. Enzymes start to digest cell membranes and then leak out as the cells break down. This usually begins in the liver, which is enriched in enzymes, and in the brain, which has high water content; eventually, though, all other tissues and organs begin to break down in this way. Damaged blood cells spill out of broken vessels and, aided by gravity, settle in the capillaries and small veins, discolouring the skin.”

Mo Costandi - 25 May 2015 Guardian Online.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/neurophilosophy/2015/may/05/life-after-death

It’s like poetry.

Still Life with Dead Game, a Monkey, a Parrot, and a Dog
Frans Snyders

 

Encombre 3 /  by Justin Harrison

 

It’s the orange glove, otherwise I might have skipped the scene, as just repeating previous work. But there’s this disembodied skin again - cast against the fragments stone and grit, lying prone, limp and deflated. It had purpose, briefly, visceral and present, now it’s passing through. The black plastic is encroaching, soon to suffocate everything that has been rendered.

Passage and place. Briefly.

Now limp like a dead game bird from a flemish painting.

 

Encombre #2 Continued /  by Justin Harrison

Encombre #2 broken landscapes. With an odd, but makes sense to me reference to the movie the Joker, (previously touched upon in a blog on the 13th of October)

It’s the colours the stark muted tones dropping to black, but punctuated by a stark vibrant and synthetic yellow. In the movie it jars along with the narrative.

In the street images the yellow road markings sit incongruous, whilst a greater drama ensues. One of transformation in what has become a liminal place, or perhaps a liminal moment>>>

Images///

Image stil - taken from movie: Joker
Directed and produced by Todd Phillips 2019
Joker was produced by Warner Bros. Pictures and DC Films in association with Village Roadshow Pictures, Bron Creative and Joint Effort.

All other images my own.


 

Sadness comes from quiet place. /  by Justin Harrison

Just cos I like the imagery. Found haunting footage of a submerged deer dancing, dead but moving through the water held in the jaws of an alligator, something saddening and beautiful simultaneously.
Instagram Video Posted by Real Nature on the 20/01/22

It touches on the dead horse again and death as transformation, a point of liminal exchange. Here the alligator becomes a ‘master of ceremonies’ or maybe the ferryman.

Then a tube poster that just pleased a deeper part of me. The aesthetics.

 

Dead Horses /  by Justin Harrison

I am everything you don’t want. I am everything you leave behind.
(I realise that the sofa comes under this title too)

Ok so been having a little fun researching dead horses. I’m still stuck on the discarded sofa I found in Brighton. The strong connection to dead horses. Especially with it’s four legs stiffly jutting out like rigamortis. Covered in layers of fabric like skin and fat.

My favourite of all the artists had to be Berlindfe De Brukyer, her relationship to the materials she uses is potent and I’m left unnerved and beguiled at the same time. Visceral and cruel her work is quiet matter fo fact and yet more subtle codes are embedded in her layers.

Some of my deep fears and darker encounters seem to reside somewhere in her work to, unsettled Want to leave yet continue to look, like a bad dream that I can’t leave.

https://www.galleriacontinua.com/artists/berlinde-de-bruyckere-21

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Points I’m mulling over in connection to my research questions:

What does it mean to be transformed? How does this occur?

To Discover Temporal and spacial locations in which a form of transformation happens. 

What are the consequences?

Why are the outcomes?

Can we influence the process?

When does it occur naturally?

When has it happened in history?

How do other artists engage with transformation?

Are liminal places key in all this?

IMAGES USED>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

A DEAD HORSE - (JEAN-LOUIS-THÉODORE GÉRICAULT)

Untitled (desiccated horse carcass sitting up) - Sidney Nolan (Australian, 1917-1992)

Hungry ones in Petrograd dividing a dead horse in the street (1917) - Ivan Vladimirov

Berlinde De Bruyckere
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPJwkXf5RK4
https://www.galleriacontinua.com/artists/berlinde-de-bruyckere-21
No Life Lost II, 2015
https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/berlinde-de-bruyckere-at-hauser-wirth-new-york-6097/

 

Encombrer /  by Justin Harrison

I walked past the scene and had to return and photograph it. There was something desperate and poetic about it for me. The ground had be broken up overturned and left naked and encumbered. Exposed and discarded.

It was though It had been dismantled in an arbitrary way. Difficult in it’s intentional disinterest.

Another road victim, but this time it’s the road.

A division of the aggregate, once homologous, now rendered to parts.
It could b rendered down further, smaller lumps then stones lacquered with bitumen, then stone chips and oil, dust and liquid///