Saturday, 29 September 2012

Them and Us...

Born in California in 1971, Patrick Jacobs currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Jacobs earned his BFA from the University of West Florida in 1994 and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999.
He works with these diorama models which are made in a way to create an illusion of a landscape, his works are actually really impressive in a way that the objects he creates are made up of totally artificial material, but eventually they create a illusion of landscape....

How does he do it
He first set up the lenses, a platform for the scene behind the lenses and LED lighting. Using tweezers, pliers, brushes, knives. He builds the model while viewing it through the lenses. The scenes are both foreshortened and elongated to counteract the distortion of the lenses.

Materials used
He uses different types of hair, depending upon the piece. Fluffy dandelion seed heads, for example, are made out of various sizes of white hairs from cat fur. According to him a cluster can take weeks to complete...Damnn. Other materials include neoprene, wax, copper wire, and gampi tissue paper, vellum, paper clay, foam, and aluminum foil for creating plants, leaves, flowers as well as bodies of water and mountains. He also use hemp fibers and vellum for creating various sizes of grasses. Impressively most often the cheapest and the most available materials could do so much to the works he produces for making these piece...




 When i see works like these produced in the other parts of the world, being an artist i ask myself the question, why don't artists in Pakistan produce works that  are so impressive and uses technology...although this one does not uses so much of technology....for the answer i think its the galleries or the art collectors that vary from place to place...although in our times art is a global language(as they say), but eventually as we a under developed people have to some how think and create the works that could sell...Its because of the situation that surrounds us, the corruption, inflation, currency prices and so an so. Galleries and collectors only invest on the works that had the selling power in them..

Let me narrate this with an example...
These are the most well known contemporary Paki-based artist that works with experimental mediums
Hamra abass, Faiza Butt, Rashid Rana and a few of more including Nusra Latif...
These Paki based artist mostly live abroad, work abroad and sell abroad...May be that is the reason we living in Pakistan get to see very less work that falls under new media category.

Tuesday, 25 September 2012

Diaorama Photogarphy

I had spend all of my teenage and childhood fascinated by these dramatic scenes that had been shown in movies, For instance a scene in which  flood is coming and the buildings are cracking down due to earthquake...I had been wondering if the cinematographers had been spending so much on re-creating a distruction scene...not anymore
The technique used in creating such enormous scene is called Diorama or Diorama photography...well for this post i am posting some works of the Photographer Lori Nix...



These images has been created in a way that they look real but actually there are mini scape or mini sculptures that are set in a way that they look real...when i first  looked at these works it appeared to me so natural and was so keen to know more and more about it, the next time i post i would be looking forward to post about the images that look so dramatic that one could literally think that they are computer generated images but they are diorama photography images...looking forward to your suggestions.