Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2015

I have just completed my entry for Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2015, submitting my digital art and animations this year, so it will be interesting to see how they contend. Here's hoping I get selected two years in a row!

 

 

AdamWallace.Art

This blog is no longer being updated regularly. If you want to follow my practice, and see more examples of my work, please visit the Adam Wallace Art site. Look forward to seeing you there, and at future shows which I plan to be part of.

Nicola Samori

Interesting artist working across multiple media types, including collage, [which is what originally led me to him]. Can't help but wonder if its his work being appropriated by the Chapman brothers

"makes seductive, profound paintings by layering and fusing images on canvas, wood or copper and then obliterating them by scratching, erasing, fingering and painting over the surfaces multiple times. By violating the golden rule of all museums (“Please do not touch the artwork.”) Samorìis making art history by corrupting his own work and imposing a new Samorì on top. The resulting layers of paint create a new skin that bears the bruises and permanent marks of all prior creative efforts.
Selecting portraits and still life’s from classical paintings but also sourcing random faces and images from the Web, Samorì is engaged in a project about time and corrosion." http://beautifuldecay.com/category/collage/page/26/

Leibl, 2011, oil on wood, 27 x 19 cm

Carmine,

2007/2008, mixed technique on paper applied on canvas, 230 x 150 cm

installation view

Il vizio della Croce, 2014, Aurora Onyx, steel, 81 x 34 x 31,5 cm (detail)

exhibition view

 

MRI Scans of Fruit and Veg

Came across this while looking for animation artists whose work might be inspiring for my own. They are images of fruit & vegetables placed in an MRI scanner, taken by British MRI technician Andy Elison. He discovered their surreal yet somewhat disturbing beauty after scanning an orange to calibrate the machine. Thereafter he began bringing produce to work and scanning it & posting the images on his blog http://insideinsides.blogspot.co.uk/

"The high-resolution black and white sequences apply the imaging tool to the arts, highlighting the geometrical perfection of organic objects. The slow motion animations are imbued with a sense of life and vitality; like pumping ventricles, the matrices of a pineapple seem to gape open and shut. A tomato resembles a microscopic cell, seemingly splitting and reproducing with astonishing speed, and a head of garlic seems to emerge, its cloves flawlessly woven together, from nothingness.
Ellison’s slow motion animation allows mesmerized viewers to be seduced by the rhythmic revelations, and the everyday is elevated to cosmic levels; an scanned eggplant seems to explode into a complex network of stars. These food products, these mundane miracles, get a moment to shine in the imaging machine’s dense whites and pure, weightless blacks. The uniqueness of each fruit takes center stage (can you find the bruised onion?), and together, they paint a rich portrait of the natural world. These elegant plant structures, viewed in this way, don’t seem so different from our very own organs. So the next time you stroll down the produce aisle, take a moment to consider the miraculous visions that lurk beneath the surface. (via Salon and Offbeat)"

Incidental Animation

I've been working some incidental animation effects into the space frames between my animations, so that rather than just seeing a black screen for a few seconds between each one there can be a variety of transitions which help with the overall effect. I'm influenced in this by what I saw at the Benedict Drew show, which involved a number of transition effects -coloured bars floating across the screen, text, and realised as soon as I saw them that this was a way to make my overall presentation much more interesting. Below are some screenshots of the first one I've created. Its the second frame of the reel, and gives the viewer a textual input of the three core concepts involved in the work.

 

 

 

The animation techniques involved are basic Flash timeline work, creating a symbol, within the symbol creating a motion 'tween, and then placing the symbol onstage, but the devil is always in the detail -in this case making sure that they all travel across the screen at the same speed, and align nicely at the end. Then it was just a matter of writing code to stop the "playhead", and adding a new layer with the text in a keyframe above where the 'tween ends. Its necessary to place the text in a keyframe so it doesn't appear until the very end of the tween.

I think these effects are important to the overall look of the piece. I have chosen, [with one exception], to use black backgrounds for my animations, so anything which breaks that up and gives some colour to the work is, I think positive.

Easter Bunny show

The day after the dissertation deadline was our Easter Bunny show. I had hardly any time to prepare for the show, because I had been unwell the last fortnight, and anyway I had to focus on finishing my dissertation and handing it in.

Unfortunately, this meant I wasn't able to test my ideas for installing my animations, by building a smaller structure around a single monitor, which would be covered with detritus and objects. Instead I brought in a old Apple G4 and a monitor, balanced the monitor on top of the Mac, and set it up to play a loop of several of my animation continuously throughout the evening.

The work seemed to be received really well. I noticed groups of people standing round the screen, watching them play, and laughing at their horrible absurdity, proving once again that they are a really effective way of mediating my ideas to the viewer. I would like to have had the time to build a structure around the monitor, and cover it with objects, as that would have provided the context for the work that I want to achieve.

Ive tried really hard to find someone who had images from the night, but no one seems to have taken any, and the video footage I took on my mobile is so dark as to be unusable.

Resizing Blues.....

Rennay Maturin just emailed me with the answer to a question I have been dreading.....what is the native resolution of the TV sets I plan to use in the final show. The answer is 768 x 576 pixels. Which means that I need to resize every one of my animations to be sure the will display correctly.

Sounds  simple? Not really, because each animation contains up to ten separate frames, which each need resizing individually.Ok, so I can open and resize them as a batch in Photoshop, but I then have to update each one of the frames in Flash for the newly resized image, and then resize the stage to 768x576. Just in case there are any problems, once I have done the resizing I'm saving each Flash file under a new name, so as to keep the original in case of any problems. I've also emailed Rennay back to ask for the loan of a single TV set asap, so that I can test resolution output directly..........

A Telly