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DEE MATTHEWS – WEEK 6 – THE ITALIAN JOB

Your only meant to blow the bl*8dy doors off….

The Italian Job

After getting the film into the Eleanor Worthington Prize, a non-profit organisation based in Urbino, Italy. They contacted me saying the Italian audio description didn’t work and that they wanted a statement about the work, not an artist statement and could they have it in Italian.

While I was at it any chance of Italian subtitles on the film! I took it as a positive sign but as I hadn’t been able to get a translator it was back to Google translate… that was an interesting exercise and again I have no idea if it makes sense but I learnt a lot about Google Drive, Google translate, wave to MP3 files and canvas transformation in InShot, even if it was a right ‘Delore’ (Italian for pain I think) I enjoyed it.

I also borrowed a book from a friend about Urbino, I was hoping she might help with the Italian translation but holiday conversational Italian doesn’t stretch to art film subtitling. Here is the film with Italian subtitles.

 

I started to seriously think about my proposal and its imaginary physical staging. Using the egg/eye at the Arts Centre seems a good option, though I deliberately made the film images in 450dpi so it will take a large-scale projection. Sister Morphine may not be suitable for an underaged audience, privacy has to be a consideration! Though I like the idea of a darkened room.

I’ve come up with an engagement solution for in-person responses to Everyday Pain. ‘Hang out your Pain’ on the anonymous washing line. I thought I could have EP note-lets printed and people could write anonymously and contribute their stories. The only way to see that is to have them printed, hopefully, they will be here next week.

The tutorial with Tim was useful and informative as it made me explain my current art practice to him. I realised I am still painting portraits, but in a digital sense both self-portraits and portraits of others in the most intimate hidden sense. This leads on from my self-directed summer research project, which I undertook to find myself within what I understood of contemporary painting. I asked friends from around the world to send me a video of themselves reading a poem, telling a story, or singing a song that meant something to them. I was exploring the concept of bringing my portrait clients to me and ways of doing that through social media.

I use a mood board to understand and get an insight into my clients’ personalities within my tattooing. I can then design a more relevant piece for them. But this summer I used it to understand my portrait sitters instead.

What I got back was far more exciting than anything I could paint, though I challenged myself to scratch and burn through the surface of contemporary portraiture.… literally…. and although it was all very interesting it still didn’t appeal to me as much as the videos and the process of asking for them and what I got back! I can now see in future their portraits will probably appear in an animation… something I have never considered before. I can feel for the very first time a sense of owning this art practice, that it truly speaks to me and for me. That’s an extraordinary feeling like coming home.

The rest of this week has been me putting a checklist… yes one of those.. for my workshop presentation The Secret Garden

Time Checklist
Room Design Checklist
Project Room

I tried to make the checklists different and visual and I think in the main that’s starting to work and I also added them to my presentation film for tomorrow.

Presentation

Meanwhile my eyes are going bozzy but I think the explanation for that requires a small animation … oooh so much for you to look forward to next week….

During Research for my bibliography for Art History I ended up digging deeper into the practice of Cindy Sherman. I was supposed to be looking at the adaptation of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, however as everything seems to be linked in some way Sherman kept turning up!

MAUER, BARRY J. “The Epistemology of Cindy Sherman: A Research Method for Media and Cultural Studies.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, vol. 38, no. 1, 2005, pp. 93–113. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44030370.

This was a different take on her work and I’ve found more secondary sources so I will be looking at that over the next few weeks as I think it’s going to have a lot of relevance to my own practice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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