Alana Dee Haynes

Alana - who calls herself Dee - combines photography with drawing, creating beautiful images. The majority of Dee's work concentrates on human flesh, and she adds her personal touches through drawing, almost like tattoos, to the print. The effect is really quite impressive.

Check out more of Dee's artwork

Beth Galton

Beth Galton has made a series of, in her words, 'Conceptual' artworks in which she has examined the way we look at food amongst other things. 

Cut Food: Here Beth has taken apart the food we rarely see inside of, such as the favourite pot noodle or ice cream cone

Beth kindly sent me a statement about Cut Food: 


This series was inspired by an assignment in which we were asked to cut a burrito in half for a client.  Normally for a job, we photograph the surface of food occasionally taking a bite or a piece out but rarely the cross section of a finished dish.  Charlotte Omnès, the food stylist and I thought it would be interesting to explore the interiors of various foods particularly items commonplace to our everyday life.  By cutting these items in half we move past the simple appetite appeal we normally try to achieve and explore the interior worlds of these products. I chose to light them with a harder light, and to place them against black.  Daniel Hurlburt composited elements in retouching to achieve the final image. Both Charlotte and I felt that this approach helped highlight our exploration of the world within.

Landscapes: In this series of photographs, Beth zooms into food and captures the different textures we experience with sight instead of touch and taste, creating images which look like abstract landscapes.

Idioms: The last set of images I'm showing is perhaps the most interesting, called idioms. An idiom is a set of words in which the meaning isn't deductible if they are not put together, for example 'raining cats and dogs'. Beth has used this definition to place together  in photographs, things which we put together instantly in our minds, (much like my post on David Schwen a month ago).

Beth has posted loads more of her projects on her website so take a look!

Kiss

Some beautiful watercolours such as the one above can be found on fhgalland.tumblr.com

What is meaning?

How do we decode the things we see? For one of my university essays, I have been reading up on Erwin Panofsky's theory of iconography, the semiotics of images, and how we decode the images we see almost instantaneously, without even thinking about what we are doing. 

In Panofsky's theory, he relates iconography to gesture, in particular the tip of a hat when walking past someone you know as a greeting. The person to whom the hat is tipped recognises this as a greeting, a polite gesture, and in order for them to understand the meaning they would've had to exist in the same cultural and social context. Yet we don't even think about how we interpret the things we see. Another example, as in the book 'Practices of Looking' by Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, is road signs. If we think about road signs, we interpret them quickly and easily, and pretty fast we understand them and don't think twice when we see them. The same relates to images, for example, if I were to show you the image below, you would instantly connect that to the Olympics. Both the symbol of the rings and the word 'Olympics' represent the event, that's semiotics for you.

Although Panofsky's theory is meant for artworks from the Renaissance, lets interpret the Olympic rings using it. 

Breaking down interpretation or meaning:

1) Primary or Natural

- I recognise the shapes and colours

2) Secondary or Conventional

- I recognise the symbol as representation of the Olympics, I recognise the cultural context

- I recognise that the rings mean the 5 competitive continents and the colours (including white) represent the colours of the flags of all competing countries

3) Intrinsic meaning

- The symbol tells us the about the cultural context it was created in

- An age of sport and competition 

- The symbol was created only 100 years ago, so the symbol was created in a fairly contemporary age

Tom Fruin - Watertower on Brooklyn skyline

Artist Tom Fruin is going to build another stain glass water tower in New York after his first one last summer, this one is due to start installation on the 10th May.

Here are some pictures of Watertower I, a beautiful addition to the Brooklyn skyline. Built out of over 1000 pieces of plexiglass and steel, it sits on top of a water station.

I will update you in about a week of the new installation!
www.tomfruin.com

College for Creative Studies

The clever marketing team at the College for Creative Studies have put together this set of humourous advertisements

Le Carnet Noir

Nacho Ormaechea is a Spanish artist who resides in Paris. He says about places which motivate him the most:

'I'm mostly comfortable with cities which I see as perfect theaters full of inspiring yet anonymous characters.'

The people in his series 'Le Carnet Noir' are anonymous characters, a snapshot of a fleeting moment in their day, and taken away from this landscape and replaced with a contrasting image. These characters are the ones which inspire Ormaechea the most, anonymous people who, although they are unknown to most, are involved with and in the day to day running of the city.

lecarnetnoir.com