Exhibition Imminent

Regulars at Gray's will have already seen this plastered all over the building ad nauseum, but here it is to lend official-ness to this post. 

This week had been all about the lead-up to the showing. Monday I scouted out the area that my series is based at and shot preliminary images. Later I ate a mountain of haggis on a plate, and was coerced by my Indian flatmate and the people in my flat to eat more, a chapati with delicious home-cooked curry.  Thoroughly stuffed and nearly immobile, I converted the excessive food-energy into creative power for putting together the above poster. 

Yesterday after throwing the posters up around Gray's with Sam, I shot the images that I'll use for the exhibition. I'm pretty proud with the way they turned out. Printing them for tomorrow is now under way. Tonight I'm going to try shooting some video for the exhibition, so I may have a screen running depending on whether the quality turns out to be satisfactory.

Accompanying the images I'll have an elegant little quote from Calvino's Invisible Cities, a book seemingly designed to deliver eminently quotable profundities at least six times per page. Also I thought I'd put up here the following select quotes; I think they deal with what's going on in my exhibition work much more deftly than all that nebulous rubbish I spouted in the last post. I don't think I'll put these up for the exhibition as it would just make it seem bloated and didactic, but they give good background context in a blog setting:

"Besides the notion of the everyday, the term 'generic' has cropped up in various discussions of contemporary urban space. Thus, instead of zooming in on unique elements, such as historical monuments or geographical peculiarities that establish the identity of places, architects and urban planners have come to devote considerable attention to generic elements. Although these elements are essentially exchangeable and can be located anywhere, they determine the outlook and the functioning of a city to a large extent. (...) 

This interest in exchangeable components of present-day cityscapes stands in diametrical opposition the strong emphasis that was still put on the significance of "place" in architectural theories of the 1970s. In both Kevin Lynch's empirically oriented research and Christian Norberg-Schulz's ideas influenced by Heideggerian phenomenology, it is above all the importance of the genius loci that was stressed. Marking a place as unique was even considered to be the archetypical architectural act and the true raison d'être of architecture."

- Steven Jacobs,  Post-Ex-Sub-Dis (Introduction)

"The new suburbs are no longer just soulless places – anonymous, standardized and uniform – they have in fact developed their own identities. But these identities are fashioned from whole cloth, like movie sets(...) Developments usually have no connection to the original context of the sites where they are built, they are amalgams of cultural, imaginary and borrowed identities. The housing in these places suffers the same fate and is full of grafted-on symbols and references to histories that have nothing to do with our own. We are witness to the appearance of simulated villages, a style that could be called fake-authentic, a pastiche of vanished ways of life. Picturesque features are fabricated, pseudo-heritage values are invented and the target is clients who like to think they are buying something special with a local flavour. Some people even think that these artificial landscapes are real, leading to confusion between what is really part of our cultural heritage and what is only the market value of substitution. This generates false perceptions of who we are."

- Isabelle Hayeur,  Model Homes artist statement

"While authors such as Lynch and Norberg-Schulz considered the identity of a place to be vital to the quality of the city, (architect and writer Rem Koolhaas) sees identity as paralysing: 'The stronger identity, the more it imprisons, the more it resists expansion, interpretation, renewal, contradiction. Identity becomes like a lighthouse- fixed, overdetermined; it can change its position or the pattern it omits only at the cost of destabilising navigation. (Paris can only become more Parisian - it is already on its way to becoming hyper-Paris, a polished caricature)' "

- Steven Jacobs (quoting Rem Koolhaas' S,M,L,XL p.1248),  Post-Ex-Sub-Dis (Introduction)

This historical identity/generic space debate I find quite fascinating, and I'll put together a more in-depth take on the subject in a later post. For now though, go see our exhibition! 

For folks reading this from back across the pond or anyone else who can't make it, pictures/documentation will go up afterward.

Idea

I've been wanting to try something different from solely working on my composites for the past while. I'm certainly not giving up on them, but I've just been starting to feel as though they've been my straightjacket preventing me from trying out new things.

About a week ago I wasn't entirely sure what sort of different things I'd do for the exhibition coming up, besides the fact that they would be less labour-intensive than the landscapes.
Yesterday morning however, as I was walking to school I came upon an idea which I think is pretty quality. I don't want to get too much into specifics yet since I don't have anything concrete that I've done on it so far and things may change. But I will say this:

The images will again blend my own photography with photoshop manipulations. They will be shot in urban environments of the interchangeable type, "non-places" (a type of setting that I've been reading about in my CCS research). They will use the amplified abstraction inherent to such places as a starting point to contort reality as depicted in the photographic image. I'm feeling excited to get my CCS finally out of the way so I can get to work on this new idea. Should I manage to pull it off as I imagine it, it should be of some quality.

Xian Ren Qiao - The Colossal Arch

Photos by Gunter Welz and Ray Millar, from NABS

布柳河仙人橋 - Xian Ren Qiao - Fairy Bridge. Despite it's impressively unimpressive English name, it is the world's largest natural arch, spanning somewhere around 400 feet. It towers over the Buliu River in a remote part of southwestern China's Guangxi province. Fairy Bridge is amazing, not only in the unbelievability of its geological presence, but for the circumstances surrounding its discovery by those outside of China.

The National Arch and Bridge Society (NABS) takes the credit for revealing the existence of the Fairy Bridge to the West in an official manner. It did not do this in the nineteenth century. Neither was the arch recognized in the twentieth. How was this titan arch first detected by a westerner? Using Google Earth. 

One day in 2009, a dude from NABS named Jay Wilbur was poring over the contours of the digital globe and saw something that looked like a proper massive arch:

This led him to Panoramio here, where a Chinese photographer had uploaded his picture of the arch, confirming Wilbur's suspicion. Promptly, NABS organized an expedition to measure the thing. Their first attempt in 2009 failed (not sure why, but indicative of the difficulty of travelling in the region), but they were back out in a 7 person team just last October, with success this time. You can read the illustrated diary of their expedition here, if you want.

So far, NABS's efforts haven't seemed to have bolstered the reputation of Fairy Bridge outside  of China much. Wikipedia's entry for the arch is humorously pitiful: described as the "world's largest natural ark", with zero images and only one link. For more fun, try this: type in "Fairy Bridge arch China" into Google Image Search. Then try "布柳河仙人橋" in the same field. The English name yields a grand total of 2 non-duplicate images of the actual place, while the Chinese name offers up pages of images.  

I just can't get over the strange fact that this thing was first revealed to the wider world not by some kind of Fridtjof Nansen or Aurel Stein exploring on foot in the early twentieth century, but by a guy in a volunteer organization exploring through a computer in the early twenty-first. I like to think it's an effective rebuttal against all those who jadedly bemoan the fact that everything in the world has been already discovered, named, and de-mystified. In my opinion, there still is -and will always be- secrets of the landscape, cityscape, any-scape. Even when (or if) the natural world has been completely mapped, when the last inch of the remotest oceanic trench has been plotted, photographed, and tourist-ed, there will still be unknown aspects of places with which we are familiar and those we are not. Spaces will always hold their secrets, lurking beyond the boundaries of their existing descriptions in in word and image.

2011-03-30 Update (belatedly upped 04-01)

Here's the latest stage of the image I've been working on this week. Posting this a few days late but figured it's a fairly important step and should still go up.

Changed the sky again, I'm pretty sure this one is going to stay. I've also been working on making the top structures look like they're being subsumed back into the landscape, but it's fairly tricky business. I don't like the way the earth on top of the right of the structures looks, the parts where the earth meets the objects will probably take a lot more work before it looks decently convincing. I'm thinking I might want to try and look up images showing natural accumulation on and around existing ruins for reference.

I've also made the scale of the middle buildings considerably smaller. I took another look at the image I started this composition from and realized that the buildings I'd put there were too large for that perspective. Building the middle portion into a town is also proving to be difficult, as I don't have a lot of images to work from that fit that description. I'm hoping for another sunny day to come along so I can go around and shoot some more images that I can use to shape together a bustling little village.

Another part I've neglected thus far is the pit itself. I still need some kind of border to make the pit edge a better join. Below, I'll build something occupying the shadowed pit wall, the curious gazes of the figures on the edge seem to beckon some sort of intrigue.