Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Nina Katchadourian

Our guest speaker on Wesnesday was Nina Katchadourian, a noted visual artist.


Nina showed five works.

1. Gift/Gift - mended spider webs
2. Natural Car Alarms - bird calls used as car alarms
3. Office Semaphore - office signal communication
4. Fall Colors - artificial branch with fall leaves
5. Seat Assignment - various projects made while in flight

http://www.ninakatchadourian.com/

Select two works. Describe what you saw and the reason why you chose these works. Comment and compare how these works use the element of time.



18 comments:

  1. Fall Colors and Seat Assignment. In Fall Colors, Nina made a false branch covered in gloriously bright fall colored leaves. She then stuck it on a tree and had it photographed throughout the year. During most of the seasons, it stuck out greatly, but when fall came around, it blended in. In a way, it marked a passage of time by drawing your attention to how the seasons are changing. I found it quite interesting how she drew attention to the passage of time and made people aware of what's going on around them.
    With Seat Assignment, Nina proactively chose to spend the time she is on a plane doing something productive, rather than just waiting for the time to pass her by. Using her camera phone, she would photograph pieces she made while sitting on the plane, including putting crumbled up food on the in flight magazine and photographing herself in the bathroom with seat covers on her head in the style of old Dutch paintings. I found this one to be highly amusing and clever. The way she uses these long stretches of time to do something productive and interesting really appeals to me. She took this time and chose to embrace it rather than ignore it.

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  2. 1. The first project she showed involved repairing a spiders web that was quite interesting because the spider then rejected the repair. This project was very interesting because it turned from an act of helping the spider, to actually creating more work for it, and unsettling it. I really like being able to view the video, because the interaction that took place was fundamental to the project.
    5. This work was probably my favorite, because it was something taken out of unusual circumstances. She created these great, and whimsical pieces while just sitting on the plane. I feel like that shows true creativity at the most raw and basic form. Pulling art out of no where, and just using what you have around you, which in this case was very limited. The time element in this work was through the hours spent on the plane creating these images.

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  3. Gift/Gift - I really hate spiders. This piece really freaked me out, and that's why I picked it. The use of time is very natural - a tiny spider isn't going to go and attack what is being placed on its web right away. It's going to run, and then come back and fix everything up, because if it didn't have that instinct, well, it would get eaten rather quickly I would think. The word "Gift (Poison)" is an interesting decision; I think that because the web was ruined in the placing of the letters, it was a kind of slow-moving poison that made the spider feel the need to leave its homestead by the next day.

    Natural Car Alarms - I loved listening to the alarms as they were played and recognizing some of the calls (some of which used to wake me up on summer mornings back at my old house in Illinois). Katchadourian told us that the calls were all unedited, except for the timing; while one bird may trill over and over very quickly, some would only make the calls once ever minute or so. By manipulating the timing on some of the longer-spaced calls, she created a sound that we would recognize as something man-made, rather than a natural bird song.

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  4. in Gift/gift Nina showed how she wove replacement webs for spiders with broken webs, and how the spiders reacted by taking them out. I found this very creative and interesting, I had no idea spiders would be so neat. it was pretty weird and i love artists who do weird shit. This used time to show the process of a spider removing the thread from their webs.
    In natural car alarms, Nina replaced car alarms with bird calls, decontextualizing them and blurring the lines between nature and the unnatural. this used many birds with rare, high pitched calls. I found this interesting because by using an image of a car, it allows our minds misinterpret the sound based on the perceived source, in psychology this is known as the McGurk effect. this used time to play sounds.

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  5. In Nina Katchadourian's Gift/Gift work she intricately mended spider webs. I loved her process leading up to the final project, of this compulsive need to repair nature. She used the element of time in Gift/Gift by literally waiting to see what the spider would do and documenting it with video. In her piece Seat Assignment she used her traveling time on airplanes to create works of art. I liked the boundaries of comfort explored and the risk of someone else thinking she was crazy. My favorite of this series was her experiments in the bathrooms with toilet seat covers as a rendition of Flemish self portraits. This piece used element of time because she only had the set time of the flight to complete the work.

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  6. The two works I have chosen are Gift/gift and natural car alarms. When watching Gift/Gift, I was really interested in how the spider interacted with the letters. That the spider pulled the letters off as if saying, I what is this? I dont need your help. And in Natural Car Alarms, I love how she reversed her experience she had by the waterfall, by putting bird calls in actual cars and having the people of New York City recognize the car alarm but have there be something off. The elements of time in each piece are different and interesting. Gift/Gift had to rely on the amount of time it took her to put on the letters and how the spider reacted. But the Natural Car Alarm was on a set time, the length of a car alarm.

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  7. I really liked the fall colors and seat assignment project. For fall colors, I liked the work because it was creating a very short moment in nature that many people enjoy and making it timeless. For this project, Nina created a metal branch with fake red fall leaves on it. The idea was no matter how the seasons changed the fall leaves would remain making it seem out of place. However, when fall came, it blended right in. This place with the idea of time because it made a part of fall timeless and constant. As for Seat Assignment, Nina created a goal in which she tried to be as productive as she could be during her time on the plane. She would create mini assignments for herself on the plane ride and in the end she had numerous pieces of productive work. In this project, she was taking the time on the plane, which many people try to make go away, and turning into a productive time to study and get a lot of work done. I thought this was very interesting because so many times on the plane I sleep away 3 or 4 hours when I during a week I would be wishing I had those hours.

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  8. 1. Gift/Gift - mended spider webs
    2. Natural Car Alarms - bird calls used as car alarms

    In Nina's Gift/Gift, she was in her home in finland and sought out broken spider webs to mend. She did this with her 'spiderweb mending kit' and she took bits of red thread and put it into multiple spiders webs'. After doing so, she would return to the webs the next day only to find that her red threads she used for mending had been thrown to the ground. She saved the bits and displayed them as art later on. In addition, Nina made a quick video that showed her giving one spider a 'gift'. she spelled out the letters of gift but they were soon taken down by the spider who lived on that web.

    In Nina's Natural Car Alarms, she was inspired by exotic bird sounds she her while vacationing and she came to the conclusion that many of the sounds resembled car alarms. She then got sounds of numerous different birds and replaced car alarms with their sounds and then put the vehicles out on display with a set timer to make the alarms go off.

    Both of these works use the elements of time because both of them have patterns that only develop over time. In Gift/Gift, the pattern was that the spider would remove the piece put into its web over a period of time, and in Natural Car Alarms, the sound of the alarm was a pattern of sounds set to go off at a regulated time.

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  9. Gift is a project of Nina's where she would try to help fix a spiders web outside of her home. She makes her own spiderweb repair kit and tried to place the word 'gift' in the web. After just a short time the spider would come a literally throw her letters out of the web.
    Seat assignment is a project of hers as well that revolves around time. Over some amount of years Nina takes as much stuff around her on planes(magazines, toilet liners, peanuts etc) and takes pictures of herself or makeshift scenes on her camera phone. Mostly her Seat Assignment work results in religious or cultural images but sometimes they can be disaster scenes too.
    I chose both these works because they are the most unique to me and therefore really stuck in my brain! While gift took some time to complete, Seat Assignment took years.

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  10. In her work "Gift", Nina used threads to mend broken spiderwebs. The video was of little letters that she had formed to spell out "gift" and then began placing into the spider's web. the spider ran away, but then came back and began trying to rip out the letters as Nina was still trying to put them in. Once all the letters were put in, the spider went and- in order- cut out all the letters and threw them down to the ground. The video dealt with time because of the time that it took to to put the letters into the web, and the time it took the spider to rip them out. The video was in real-time, so we were able to watch the spider's process, unaltered by video editing.
    In her work "Seat Assignment" Nina passes the time she spends on planes by making art with the things that she finds around her and using them in new unique ways, like putting crushed peanuts on the covers of travel magazines to make it look like an avalanche was occurring. She takes all pictures with her cell phone, because she wants to look like she is any bored passenger just looking to pass the time, and not someone who is trying to make art.

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  11. In Nina's piece, "Fall Colors", she chose a tree and attached a branch, whose leaves were always fall colors, onto it. It was very interesting seeing the tree throughout all four seasons. When fall came around, you could not tell that the tree had a different branch. But when all the leaves fell, the fake branch of leaves was still there. It gave this sense of beauty through time. It never had to die like the other leaves.

    Nina's "Seat Assignment" was very creative and pretty funny as well. It had a lot to do with how we pass the time. In the piece, Nina, who was on an airplane, would take whatever was around her, make a scene and then shoot it with her camera phone. She also started to take pictures of herself in the bathroom wearing toilet seat covers, blankets or anything she could find to wear to make renaissance looking photos. This was all to show what people will come up with when they are bored. Nina has spent a lot of time flying and says that to pass the time, she just started to make art.

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  12. Gift/Gift was one of the works that I thought was very interesting because it was very clever. She played with the word "gift"- meaning both a present and also poison at the same time in different languages. I also enjoyed how she made it a video out of it and took the time to film the way the spider reacted when she kept on trying to force on the letters on to the web. It seemed like a simple gesture to nature- it was amusing but it was also clever in that she took what was something (spider, spider web) that people usually are scared of, or do not care much about and put a certain value and meaning into it.

    Seat Assignment was also one of the pieces that intrigued me. When she explained how there is a sense of freedom and also confinement on a plane ride I could directly relate to her as I fly a lot as well. It was interesting to see how she took the limited amount of material and time she had on a plane and really opened her mind to be creative. I thought it was also amusing yet clever in that she used certain materials such as the seat belt buckle, pretzels, travel magazines, head rests and so on. To find such creativity in places or objects that people normally will not really impressed me and it made me even a little more open minded to open my perspective into nature and my surroundings.

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  13. Gift/Gift is a video about the "battle" she has with a spider, whose web she was trying to fix; as she was putting the word "gift" in threads onto the web, the spider tries to undo her efforts. Natural car alarms are birds' voices as car alarms because while she was working in the forest, she realized how similar the sounds birds make are to car alarms. She tried to give that sense of hearing something foreign---natural in an urban setting, an opposite of how she felt when she first heard these sounds in the forest, hearing something that she associates with urban life (and mimics sounds in urban life) in nature. I chose these works because they deal with the clash of humans and nature, or man-made and natural elements. Gift/Gift uses time to show the distinctions between man-made and natural processes. In Natural Car Alarms, she manipulated with the rhythms of birds' voices to make them sound like man-made car alarms.

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  14. Nina's work differs from that of many artists because she doesn't limit herself to one medium, one category of work, or mediums and categories at all. She chooses to use whatever best conveys her concept, even if that is only what she has on her at the time. In "Natural Car Alarms," Nina used samples of bird callings that resembled car alarm noises. She then mixed the sounds to make one alarm "track" with 6 birds and installed fake alarm systems in a set of cars. This project bridges the gap between sounds of nature and the environment of these birds, and that of urban life and the environment of Nina, being a New Yorker. It is time-based in the sense that it uses a track of sounds.

    "Seat Assignment" is a work that is ongoing. In Nina's fiddlings with her airplane surroundings, she doesn't necessarily create masterpiece compositions, rather I see her work as an unconventional documentation of her flights. It is time based in the sense that it is ongoing and she doesn't necessarily know when it will end.

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  15. I loved "Natural Car Alarms" and "Seat Assignment" by Nina Katchadourian. I realized all of her works are very experimental. In Natural Car Alarms, she presented numerous different sounds of birds. It was really loud and clear so all the sounds burned into my memory. She said she was inspired by exotic bird sounds. She thought they are somewhat similar to car alarms. She did not edit the sound and she just edit the period of bird chirping. I think it was a great choice because without special editing, I could differentiate each bird's own sound easily.
    I inspired through Seat Assignment a lot. The works of Seat Assignment are all made during her flight. She explained that although there is limited amount of material and space, there is a sense of freedom in flight. The explanation of her using cell phone to take a picture was also interesting. She did it because she did not want the others to think that she is doing an art but she is just experimenting. A picture with a straw looked as if it was taken in some other places other than flight. A picture with 2 cookies was the most interesting piece because it reminded 911. It was much more meaningful to take pictures in the plane than just random places. I loved her works and I want to explore art with open minded as she did.

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  16. The two pieces that called the most attention to me were gift/gift and fall colors. Gift/gift really caught my attention for a few reasons. First of all the whole phenomenon of being scared of spiders has never really phased me. While watching her try to put the spider onto the letters, it really got me thinking about how we interact with nature. It was extremely interesting to see how she was trying to repair the web and how she was ultimately rebuilding it. In the second piece, Fall Colors, it somehwat reminded me of works we learn about in ADP 3. This is because it was a persons relationship with nature. The artist tried to continue the season by making the leaves a certain color. Which when the seasons then did change, the branch seemed almost shop dropped

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  17. Gift/Gift and seat assignment. I have seen Gift/Gift before, but did not know who the artist was. It was amazing to hear her talk about how it came to be. The way she spoke about it made it seem like it was a natural thing to do when you come across a broken or damaged web. My favorite was the interaction with the spider in the video where it seemed almost annoyed to have the "gift" put on it's web. Her explanation of the double-meaning behind the word choice was also very effective.
    In Seat Assignment I was actually amazed at the images she was able to produce. It seemed so playful and almost childish, yet the images were often quite well done. It really made me think about how I don't need to plan my art and have to be in a studio space. I can create anywhere, I just need to challenge myself. I also need to grow more comfortable with my creativity so that I am not embarrassed or self-conscious when doing my work in front of strangers. For these reasons I found this piece very inspiring.

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  18. In the Gift/Gift video, i saw Nina working with a spider to create a piece of artwork. Initially, she didnt know what she was getting herself into, but as she continued to work with the spider she realized the effect it was having on the animal. Nina decided to write the word gift into the web and as she so delicately tried to sew each word into the web, the spider would take time to undo it and "flick" them off of its web. When she returned the next day, the spider had fled the web.
    In Natural Car Alarms, Nina put animal noises into car alarms to see how people would react. I was able to easily relate to this video because so often i mistake sounds or objects for something else but never would i have thought to have done it on purpose. Hearing these bird sounds in cars was not such a crazy idea because often times car alarms are easily mistaken for a different noise. It was ironic to me because Nina was able to merge technology and the natural environment to merge one type of noise.

    Shelby Danow

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