I forced myself to have a hiatus from Preretrospect to try and gain a fresh perspective on the project. As can be seen in previous posts, I had essentially reached a brick wall. By spending a couple of weeks doing small projects, catching up on reading/exhibitions, and helping out with unrelated projects to my own work, I successfully induced the 'shower effect'. I'm not sure if that is a legitimate psychological term, but I use it to refer to the way in which distraction by mundane/unrelated activities clears your mind - often leading to the solution to a problem you were stuck trying to solve. Apologies if that is academically incorrect. But before I post about the breakthrough itself, and the work that has since proceeded it, here are some of the contributing artists/exhibitions/books which helped me get there.
JOHN MAEDA
John Maeda is a world-renowned graphic designer, visual artist, and computer scientist at the MIT Media Lab. He is one of those influences which you are never content knowing enough about. Especially as I am a firm believer that you should always try and uncover what inspires those who inspire you. What has been the main connection to Maeda for me is the way that his work is also heavily based on the process, science, mathematics and data. However all of his work ends up being visually interesting and aesthetically pleasing. As I was finding myself getting so caught up in the theory behind Preretrospect, it really helped finding someone who continually managed to bring back their work to a visual place. He helped restore my faith a little. Check out Maeda's work HERE.
JOHN BALDESSARI
In particular Baldassari's, California Map Project, 1969, really resonated with me. Here Baldessari re-visualized the landscape based on a drawing that we all know and recognize - a map of California. There are two different versions of place represented. He also meddles with the land to create his letters which are so far from the original scale of the map "alphabet," it can't help but be seen as comical.
NEAL FREEMAN
Left: Identically Named Places Connected (USA). All identically named places (cities, towns, village) in the United States connected by a line.
Right: United Kingdom, Centered. All of the units of the UK Census (output areas), horizontally and vertically centered. Commissioned by Northampton Arts as part of the exhibition "Census and the art of capturing data."
Above:
1-3
All the Streets, Centered. All of the streets in selected cities, horizontally and vertically centred.
1) New York 2) Chicago 3) Los Angeles
6) Skyscrapers over 100m connected in height order. Chicago, 239 buildings, tallest: 442m.
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Public Schools in Order, 2006. Straight lines drawn between public schools in numerical order.
5) Queens, 167 schools, 2 - 226 6) Staten Island, 41 schools, 1 - 69 7) The Bronx, 144 schools, 1 - 396 8) Brooklyn, 241 schools, 1 - 811
Slightly frustratingly I only came across this work by Freeman in the last few weeks. Although both our work has created these net like images there are differences. The obvious one being that my work is focused on mental processes. Whereas Freeman's work that seems visually similar, concentrates on physical places/objects. However, I found the way in which he has manipulated the original data/nets by centering/rotating them to a interesting and refreshing approach. It helped me to look at mine own work past the shapes that the data created.
DAVID HOCKNEY
I went to the David Hockney exhibition, A Bigger Picture, at the Royal Academy without expecting it to massively influence Preretrospect. As it turns out I was wrong. Hockney's collection of paintings entitled Tunnels, is a time based collection. He revisited the same place in Yorkshire at various points throughout an entire year. Keeping the frame the same, and painting exactly what was in front of him. Now although I do not have a year, or even a month that I can dedicate to this piece at present, it got me thinking about time on a smaller scale. for example, if you did the same thing many times during one day, you would still have an obvious contrast due to light levels.
The other part of the exhibition that I was drawn to was Hockney's multiple camera film pieces. I don't think that by splitting up a canvas into multiple ones will add to my work at all, but I shouldn't necessarily limit myself to a singular final piece. A triptych might even work better. Especially when you consider the past, present, future element to this project.
