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Art trumps ads by just a whisper

11/1/2013

They say if you want someone's attention, whisper. Or maybe that was just a line from a Whisper pantyhose commercial back in the '70s.

Whispering to get attention isn't easy in an image-packed urban landscape where slick marketing messages infiltrate our entire field of vision, from pop-up ads on our screens to the clutter of billboards.

There's so much of it that we subconsciously absorb, dismiss then ignore each image as we move through the visual bombardment. And we wonder why we're mentally exhausted at the end of the day.

That's what makes the experience of public artwork in the city landscape so compelling. No call to buy or to back a product or political organization or private enterprise. With no aspirational words (Believe! Passion! Simplify!) or branded images, logos, phrases or text of any kind to cue our automatic-piloted brain to overlook the visual image, a slight confusion sets in. Whoa. What the hell is that?

First comes the double-take, then out comes the smart-phone camera. The proof of the attention-grabbing power of commercial-free artwork on the city environment can be measured by the number of similar google images. You'd be hard pressed to find that Telus panda ad on a Flicker photo stream, but you'll run across multiple images of a single public artwork, like this giant macrame-esque installation created by Jasminka Miletic-Prelovac, at the only tall building (for now) at Main and Broadway. Or Edward Burtynsky's images on Pattison billboards (spotted along West 4th Avenue, below).

These message-free images that appropriate buildings and billboards are enough to compel viewers to investigate further. Turns out Miletic-Prelovac's work was this year's commission to highlight the livable laneways movement. And Burtynsky's images are from his latest book and new documentary, Watermark.

No logos. No brands. No text. These are whispers that can create a small roar.

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Stumped again by basic rules of composition

6/14/2013

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It's funny how some learning moments can be instantly locked into your hard drive forever while others will keep smacking you in the face, like Sideshow Bob stepping on rakes.

I look forward to the day when basic rules of composition come naturally, but until then I will continue to waste a lot of time and materials creating visual fields that are uncomfortable, underwhelming and just... wrong, somehow.

Take this photo I took a couple of weeks ago. (Please!) Why do I insist on hacking up the space with a dead-centre subject? I literally can't see the forest for the trees here. It takes this special kind of inability to reduce this giant 500-year-old living Sitka spruce to just another stump.

But the bigger problem here is lack of scale. I may have felt insignificant beside this ancient giant organism, but it sure doesn't show it. I'd like to blame my basic lack of compositional abilities on my focus on patterns over subjects, but that's pretty much a cop-out.

Meanwhile, Mr. I Don't Take The Photos managed to capture all the scale and detail in one take, and was clearly not fixated on including the whole trunk in the view-finder.

Scale can be critical in an art practice. It's everything to Ontario photographer and artist Edward Burtynsky, who captured China's massive scale in Manufactured Landscapes (Burtynsky talks about the Canadian landscape inspired him, in this Ted Talk.)

I have to remind myself that scale is not about size, but size differential. This 20-year old table-top spruce bonsai "developed" by a German bonsai master (below) possesses its own tiny might. But here again I'm a little lost. Would including the hand of the grower (stunter?) emphasize the scale or reduce the potency of the image?

As an exercise, I've been wrestling with scale using four-inch acrylic cubes. In this one, a toy airplane gives a mass of orange wool gains scale — and narrative.

Does understanding scale take some innate way of seeing the world, as in Burtynsky's work? Or is it just about learning to avoid the usual mistakes, like getting sucked into iPhone's panorama camera feature?

Or scribbling 18" instead of 18' on the back of napkin that resulted in an underwhelming Stonehenge prop:

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Art trumps ads by just a whisper

Stumped again by basic rules of composition

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