In my piece, “Same in Life as in Death,” packaged scans of meat surround a place setting all on a blue and white tablecloth. Each package contains a print of a scan of various types of meat, such as cow, pig, chicken, and even human, folded and padded to imitate a three-dimensional consumer product. These packages look similar to a package of meat that anyone could find at a grocery store. One difference I made was that the pieces of meat are irregularly jumbled on the tray. I chose to do this to better imitate the crowded spaces for the animals within their pens long before deaths. Each image connects to the next by the way each is similarly scanned, similarly packaged with a black styrofoam tray wrapped in plastic wrap, and similarly labelled with the meat inspection stamp, barcode, and warning description. These trays surround a yellow, ceramic plate, accompanied by a knife and fork, the utensils necessary for eating meat, and a napkin containing the same information as on the labels. The entire ensemble hangs against a blue and white fabric made to imitate a tablecloth. This piece helps contain the installation and adds another factor of cohesiveness.
The two individuals who share the same interests in my work are Upton Sinclai and Jo-Anne McArther. Upton Sinclair, a journalist and writer in the late 1800s and early 1900s, wrote a novel, “The Jungle” in 1906 in which he illustrates the poor opportunities of the aspiring immigrant of the time. In his story, he describes the life of a newly married couple, Jurgis and Ona, in which Jugis comes to find work in a meat packing company. His experience at his job shocked the readers and has made the book a classic. Jo-Anne McArther takes another approach on mass animal farming as a photographer who focuses solely on animal-human interactions. In her photographic book “We Animals,” McArther displays the different instances in which humans use and interact with animals such as bullfighting, oil spills, circuses, racing, poaching, and even companionship. In addition, and more specifically towards my work, she has a series of images that display the poor living conditions of animals in CAFOs around the world. Sinclair focuses largely on the worker, and McArther emphasizes the animals’ perspectives. I chose to combine both due to the fact that both factors influenced me into choosing to refrain from eating factory farmed meat. One hundred years ago, Sinclair showed the world what was going on behind the delicious food consumers eat every day in hopes that something would change. Unfortunately, Jo-Anne McArther, along with many other concerned individuals, have proven that these issues are still very prevalent. Animals are cruelly grown in environments that do not enhance that animal’s health. Because these animals are receiving poor care, the diseases and bacteria spread to the world of the consumer, both through ingestion, pollution, and depletion of resources. I chose to focus my information on the conditions within the CAFOs and use the imagery to explain the transition to the world of the consumer. I chose to include the human hands as a meat product to introduce the poor conditions of the workers in a way that would shock the viewer. By including the human arms as a product to be eaten, I also hint at the concept of speciesism, the notion that some species are superior to others. I not only include the poor working conditions of CAFOs, but I also present the human hands to familiarize the viewer to the animals. This way, the viewer is forced to consider the animals in the same context as humans, the viewer is encouraged to see the animals as living, thinking, feeling creatures.
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In my series, “Fate,” one woman personifies the perception of fate throughout historical cultures, particularly Greek, Roman, and Nordic cultures. The images each contain an older woman interacting with the objects, the viewer, or even herself/ her fellow sisters.
The images contain a surreal quality due to the colors I painted into both the backgrounds, the subject, and her surrounding objects. I chose to paint in these images so that I could have control of the mood of the pieces. I created these images by using the montage approach, adding in symbolic objects and landscapes that I thought would best portray Fate and her personalities. Each montage contains the same woman, Fate, in a space relating to the major regional influence of her story. The artist that most influenced the style of my work is Maggie Taylor. In her work, she makes very surreal environments in which the subject is often interacting with other objects and creatures in unnatural ways. I was interested in Fate recently from some literature I had been reading and mythologies that I had learned. All my life, I’ve taken control of my situations and have made decisions independently, and when I imagine that my life is already in the hands of Fate, I imagine her in this powerful, soulful, inhuman, stoic, and unyielding entity. Seeing her as a female throughout history was also very interesting to me because she/ the sisters, would often dictate over even the highest of the gods, for example, the Moirai never needed to submit their wills to Zeus. In addition, the idea of domesticity also belonged with the Fates, evolving as spinning, measuring, and snipping. All in all, I wanted my work to convey the convergence of my own interpretation with Fate and the historic examples of her in mythology. Her influence on each of us influences how we interpret our situations as well as our deaths. My series of twelve photographs, “Howe House,” depicts various objects in and around the historical Howe House farmstead. Many of the objects are everyday items that have been preserved and displayed. Other objects are more modern and still used today. It is easy to see that the family members wanted tools with great quality that would work well and last for a long time. While taking the photographs, I often framed in objects so that the entire object isn’t visible. I made this choice partially because I was interested in the composition and line of the entire image instead of the object itself. This also helps draw the viewer to a focal point and adds intrigue and ambiguity to an otherwise straightforward tool. By closing in on each tool, it also shows the viewer a sense of the personal connection the past family would have had with each object, almost as if the object were in a hand, used close to the body. One artist that influenced my work, Christopher Payne, focuses on color, line, texture, and repetition in his photographs of spaces. Even though my framing is drastically more zoomed in, I paid attention to the subtle colors and textures around the Howe farmstead. His subject matter tends to be manufactured and industrial. In general, my interest in the objects of the area influenced the direction of my work. The preservation of the objects to describe the life of a family of the past brought me to focus on these objects in an attempt to understand the Howe family and the time period. As I continued to take photographs, I began to see a connection between the past and the present when I noticed a groundskeeper’s impact on the area. I later learned that the groundskeeper had been an aid during the last years of the last relative in the Howe family, and therefore acts as a literal connection between these two periods. |
AuthorFall 2016 Photography 2 Course Archives
December 2016
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