Medium Specificity

A Visible Imagination

Artist Statement

For many years, I have thought that ghosts actually existed because I had seen them in some glamour shots from the 70s while in my younger years; now, after the completing this project I realize it is just Hollywood magic.  My idea for this medium experimentation came as I was at one of the BYU homecoming dances held in the Springville Museum of Art.  I walked through on the museum hallways and there where pictures of waterfalls lining the wall.  They had that soft, white color for the water that looks like it has been painted on.  As my date and I mused about how they make the water look like that, I remembered my brother telling me when we were on a camping trip that if you leave the shutter open and have a tripod you can get that smooth white look on the water.  I accordingly began to preach to my date about the secret of waterfall photography like I actually knew what it was but in reality, I hadn’t experimented much with a camera feature like that before, so I decided I should explore the element more in depth.  In a recent TMA 105 class I learned that shutter speed is what makes it possible to blend images together because the shutter stays open longer, I decided I would try to experiment with my camera to see if I could access the shutter speed and create a foreground that is mobile and a background that is stable.  On my manual settings, I found the controls for f-stop and shutter speed and the rest is displayed above (though it took about 10 different times per shot to get one to finally turn out not blurry or overexposed.

I was inspired to go in a direction similar to what Andy Warhol did with his “Eight Elvises” that we reviewed in class.  Of course, his was a screen print and mine is photography.   I still think the same concept was a commentary on the possibilities of images that could be manipulated to force more things than the viewer expects in them.  In my celebration of shutter speed photos I thought I would like to show a strange figure of our imagination sitting right in the apartment with us, the Gorilla.  I wanted him to still be an imaginary creature though and thus be still transparent and not fully in the house.  I found the tinkering with lighting in the room and elements of photography like shutter speed and the f-stop were indeed a celebration of what can be done in raw photography.  Now that I am aware of this possibility to keep a stable background while having a moving foreground, I want to try more experiments with car lights or lightning and see what stunning raw photos I can come up with.

World Order "AQUARIOUS"
 

 I originally thought we just had to find piece of art that explores a certain medium and write about it, so i was going to do the above dance music video. I thought it would still be enjoyable to see for those who love themselves some creativity in the medium of dance.