School of Art - Theses

Permanent URI for this collection

http://hdl.handle.net/11343/344

Filters

2011 1
1
Reset filters

Settings
Statistics
Citations
Author: NOWICKA, ZOFIA × End date: 2018 × Start date: 2010 × Subject: art × Subject: photography ×

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    Framing the spectacle
    NOWICKA, ZOFIA ( 2011)
    My project Framing the Spectacle focuses on examining the cultural and aesthetic dimensions of the representation of crowd scenes. The aim of the project is to represent, through photography, a common humanity that knows no borders and presents no stereotypes of racial, sexual and religious division. In the paper I reflect on the influences that resonate in my work and which were formed by my experience in growing up in Poland. Formal and conceptual aspects of crowd scenes were investigated in the photographic material taken in a variety of confined and open spaces in Melbourne, Hong Kong and Macau. The crowds are unified by the urban context and their desire for entertainment - to escape from the everyday. This series arose in part from my initial interest in the abstract character of my carpet designs. The images of the crowds, in their very structure, in their ‘grids’, draw upon the notion of singularity within the mass, as well as continuity and the idea of ‘infiniteness’. In the works I attempt to refer to humanity that extends not only to the present but embraces as well the past; the absent crowd. In this thesis I have discussed the theoretical ideas of Rosalind Krauss1 and the notion of the grid within the context of my past artistic practice and the current photographic work. I examined how the grid evolved from the simple carpet designs and later, in the structure of the woven object to the more complex digitalized form of grid-matrix. The digital camera and the telephoto lens are critical to the development and to the visual character of my images. The final image is constructed out of a limited number of shots. It is flattened and abstracted; it moves away from the ‘reality’ to a constructed reality in which there is no hierarchy, and like the grid structure, has no beginning, no middle and no end. There are a number of Polish artists working across different media; film, theatre and sculpture, whose work has been influential in my development as an artist. Amongst them: film director Andrzej Wajda, sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz and theatre director Tadeusz Kantor. Some of the contemporary photographers whose work I found useful to reflect on in my own work are: Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky, Gregory Crewdson and Philip-Lorca diCorcia. Large, panoramic format digitally based prints were made in the studio. Digital marks were woven into the photographic surface of the printed canvas.