Carrie Mae Weems - Project 1

The artist I chose is Carrie Mae Weems. She is a photographer. I chose her because the content of her photos are easy for me to relate to I say this because they are photos of African Americans. I like her photos because their depictions of reality, life, scenes you could pick out from videotaping a person’s life. She also includes text in some of her photos as well which in turn become a part of the piece. These texts are what in the news world would be called captions.

I focused on her self portraits where she is the subject as she photographs herself in the mirror. Each image is accompanied by text that adds meaning to the picture.

With my video I used the idea of self reflection and self criticism. I filmed myself in the bathroom mirror two times. I used the concept from the caption in the picture above. To me it means that because she was an African American she was not looked at as a possible medium for popular artists. She might have even been trying to determine her self worth as well. It reminded me of how I feel when I wear my hair in its natural state there is an inner battle to be myself and to not conform to society's definition of beauty.

In my video I have two scenes one is "Not Manet's type". Here I am seen combing and designing my natural hair. To increase the meaning I used music of African drums and I wore an African skirt. In the second scene, "Mante's Type", I straighten my hair and I'm wearing normal "Urban" clothing and I'm playing Hip Hop music a remake of the song "Pretty Girls". The music in this piece can be correlated to the text in the photograph; it adds meaning to the piece.

Article response

From the article it is important to understand what makes video so different from other art forms. The idea of time and space and medium are different. Once an artist is finished a work like a painting or sculpture it is complete. But with video time and space play a huge role. There were examples of videos that described works were the technique of mirror reflection was used. For example, in “Now” one work was created then playing back that video and recorded a new one with that footage in the background plays with this concept of time because “Now” gives the illusion that both are happening simultaneously. In the article it calls such action “squeezing out real space”.

Overall, this article was hard to fully understand but once we could actually see the video footage the ideas were easier to understand. The article also explained the relationship between the camera, the viewer, and the artist. For example, in “Centers” he used the video monitor as a mirror. Using these elements brought up role of psychology in video that had not occurred to me before. It talks about this relationship as the body being between two machines the camera and the monitor and the production of instant feedback all which played a part in the examples of effecting the viewer’s perception of what’s real time.