"Hill Climbing" is a piece where a man falls and the dog walks up to him and asks if he is okay.
"The Killing Piece" shows an ironic approach to ways of killing. The chair is covered with pink fur with leather straps. The contradiction is very powerful.
"FOREST (for a thousand years...)" Installation was one of my main inspirations for my project. They enhanced the sounds of the woods to where people could not tell what was real or imaginary.
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s art relies on sounds to bring their ideas to life. In order to construct this piece, I wanted to incorporate the beauties of nature on this campus. I decided to record my journey through some of the woods near Buckeye Village. As I filmed and watched back, I was not that happy with the bumpiness of the video. However, after I took a few more shots there were not getting better. I realized that walking through the woods is not going to be smooth anyway especially when there are so many things to look at. The bumpiness grew on me and ultimately gave the piece a sense of reality and suspense. I then wanted to incorporate sounds that would tell the story rather than my video. I was limited with capturing sounds that would not typically be in the woods, therefore I got all of my sounds from freesound.org. I downloaded sounds such as a cow, car horn, lawn mower, and crying baby. I did not have a plan when putting the sounds together. The finished project brought to life a suspenseful, movie-like scene in a bare wooded area.
Throughout this piece, I wanted to explore the idea of sound just like Janet and George do. I wanted to take away the object that was making the noise and place the noises in a scene where one would not typically hear this noise. This way people would have to use their imagination in order to bring this journey through the woods to life. I am communicating these ideas through time-based media by telling a story through sounds juxtaposed with nature.
My artists inspired me to tell a story through sound rather than imagery. Similar to their work, I used the woods as a scene. I also conducted what the viewer sees and hears wile letting the audience bring their imagination to life. Instead of making an installation like Janet and George usually do, I took a few videos of the scene incorporating borrowed sounds in premiere.
For my installation, I decided to use the woods near the soccer fields. What mainly attracted me to this location were the numerous amounts of beautiful trees lined up. I also loved how the sun only came through the trees making the scene peaceful. It was also very quiet in this part of the woods with the occasionally bird or gust of wind coming through, which made it very easy to work. The exact location I worked on is where a few logs had fallen or were previously placed against a big tree in a teepee shape. While making my installation, I began finding more logs to add to the teepee shape. I carried more logs and lined them up to give the piece more shape. I also added a few logs horizontally in the middle to form an ‘A’ shape. This took most of my time out of the whole project. Then, I went and gathered many rocks the size of my hand or bigger to build in a pile at the bottom of the tree. Lastly I wanted the piece to have more colors incorporated into it. To bring it together in the end I found many green leaves that had fallen from all of the trees and placed them in the middle of the ‘A’ shape I created with the logs. I also added a few leaves on top of the rocks. Throughout making this piece, my biggest problem I encountered was that some of the smaller logs would keep falling down causing many of the leaves to fall down in the process. The leaves also fell down because of the wind and lack of support. My finished piece is something that definitely would not go unnoticed if someone were to walk through the woods. It is a giant piece that many animals such as squirrels and birds could enjoy as well as all the bugs and spiders. While creating my piece, it was hard not to put in a lot of effort to create it, even though I would only see it maybe once again and some of it would probably be destroyed. After I was done, I did feel a sense of accomplishment and wanted a lot of people to see what I did. The pictures and videos do not do enough justice for the beauty of it in person.
