Observational Camo Photographs

In the style of Robert Rauschenberg and Stephen J Shanabrook (use of modern unorthodox art) I decided to take photographs of people, for the figurative element that I'm focusing on from Derek Hess with a camouflage on top.

To do this I used a projector to project the image on top of real people's faces, the result was successful and I chose to further study these in my sketchbooks.

A critique of these photographs, for me, is that they haven't come out in a photograph in the same effective way that they were in person. The texture is quite flat and too indistinct on the face to be a recognisable texture.

An idea to combat this is to make the texture smaller on the projection - to cover only the face, I could also play around with the settings on the camera to increase the effectiveness.

Chocolate-Covered Toy Soldiers

September 21, 2009, 3:10 pm   3 Comments

Photographs: Raphael Brion

Currently on display at the Daneyal Mahmood gallery in New York City is the installation "Battle of Losers and Lovers" by Stephen J Shanabrook (also see our recent post about his other chocolate and food-based work). In this installation, Shanabrook covers (or entombs) common plastic toy soldiers in actual dark chocolate, flooding the gallery with the heady and comforting aroma that's decidedly at odds with the display of carnage. The soldiers, fighting an unknown enemy, are laid out on stacked office tables, and serve in an exploration of identity, death, desire, fear, and violence. In the show's press release, Shanabrook gives some background :

Shanabrook remembers reading an account of a field medic from the Vietnam War. "He was explaining what he carried with him in his medic satchel, these bare necessities as he called them included: gauze, morphine, tape, comic books and M&Ms. The candies were for the mortally wounded soldiers, the ones that would never make it to the field hospitals. For these soldiers the candy was a way to satisfy a simple desire to feel closer to home, before they slipped away into that unknown jungle."

Photographs: Raphael Brion

Photographs: Raphael Brion

Photographs: Raphael Brion

Photographs: Raphael Brion

Photographs: Raphael Brion

Photographs: Raphael Brion

Photographs: Raphael Brion

Photographs: Raphael Brion

Photographs: Raphael Brion

Photographs: Raphael Brion

Photographs: Raphael Brion

In addition, the gallery has a series of sculptures by Shanabrook made from melted plastic prescription pill bottles that are then pressed into Easter bunny molds, but we'll get to that in a later post.

We've covered previous exhibits at the same gallery including "Meat After Meat Joy", a group exhibit of artists who used meat in their art work, and Stephen J Shanabrook's chocolate waterboarding sculptures.

http://www.eatmedaily.com/2009/09/chocolate-covered-toy-soldiers-by-stephen-j-shannabrook-food-art/


These Chocolate Covered toy soldiers are part of Stephen J Shanabrook's instillation, "The battle of Lovers and Losers"

Interview with Stephen J Shanabrook - Raw Research

Jurij Krpan:                 I've seen some early projects dealing with sugar and sweets in your portfolio, but exhibition of chocolates named " Unknown Resurrections " showed in Kapelica Gallery is not alike to any of them.  Why you decided to overexpose the almost banal material of chocolate with such a radical topics?  Was that fact also a statement considering your former, much easier works?

Stephen j  Shanabrook: It is exactly the banality of the chocolate that makes the image so powerful because the viewer is caught off guard.  The familiarity, smell and the hidden psychological effect of chocolate are the most influential aspect of the morgue chocolate series.  By exhibiting wounds in a chocolate box motif, the mold of a shotgun wound to the face becomes desirable to the viewer.  Even though one would not admit it, the desire is there, and so begins the conflict for the viewer.  This smell is overpowering to the point were one can not come to grips with what one is seeing.  So much so that you begin to wonder what you are really looking at.  How is it that we should desire to eat the representation of another’s pain.  The chocolates are made in sense to be digested mentally or physically removed for the living to process again, but not to acquaint us with death per say but to nourish life, in the sense of connection to.  " Consumption alone has become the manner in which life is sustained.  In this state life's processes can not come full circle.  Upended in a single direction, movements both physical and psychological become stilted and reactionary." (from " Morgue Chocolates" series statement  SjS ). 

         Furthermore, chocolate and blood function at similar temperatures and as fluids they both have come down through history as offerings to the gods or at least as remedies for curing some inner melancholy.

http://www.stephenshanabrook.com/profile.htm#INTERVIEW

An insight into why Shanabrook uses unusual and original materials, such as chocolate, cotton candy amongst others, from his own point of view.

Combining Famous 'War Photographer' and Stephen J Shanabrook's work

One of my three focus artists, Stephen J Shanabrook, looks at unveiling the 'horrors' of war and conflict through the use of associational objects and materials with comfort and health, such as chocolate, and using these materials to paint "the ugly truth" and to emphasise the disturbing nature, highlighted through the use of disrupting our comfort. In my opinion this is used to show us how we have comforts in this country, however those inflicted by war and conflict are forced away from their comforts such as their home, shelter, bed etc.

In one of the few exhibitions that Shanabrook has in the UK, he's used chocolate to show his depiction of a war photo of a child dying on the floor, hit by a roadside bomb. The use of this material is for the point made above, and to show the art slowly melt, to show how the child is slowly dying.

"On the road to heaven, highway to hell"

I could combine Shanabrook's art to James Nachtwey, a famous war photographer's work, in which he is famous for traveling to the most hostile locations to capture the effects of war and conflict on the innocent people, the everyday residents of the country who are displaced and stricken by war physically.

A few images of James Nachtwey's work.

"Bandaged" Stephen J Shanabrook Raw Research

BANDAGED

bandaged is a performance in the metaphorical sense about the discontinuity in living portrayed through an action of pure experience with its aesthetic roots in childhood. Bandaging a wound is the first step in the recognition of, and the commitment to, hope and a step forward.  After the bandage is removed the wounds' memory stays with us in the form of a scar, which becomes a permanent reminder.

           The cotton-candy machine comes from the celebrative and festive times of the formative years, the dog days of pure experience.  By wrapping my hands in cotton-candy (sugar) that consequently is liquefied by the sun I propose an opening to past pure experiences. The sugar sticky syrup like blood eventually becomes crusty, a scab that forms giving way to the scar. This action searches at the points where reality exchanges with the events and ideas of the past, thus are negating the action to the point where it ceases to be relevant.

The event begins when the hands of the Boxer are wrapped, it ends when he has fallen to the ground, in the bright lights he holds his position until the gloves melt away gradually with the regaining of consciousness.  Inherent in this action is a simple directness that leaves open a mind path for the viewer, giving their ideas a space to ferment.

Texas 1995,  NYC 2000

http://www.stephenshanabrook.com/cottoncandy2.htm

http://www.stephenshanabrook.com/profile.htm#bandaged

Stephen J Shanabrook - Raw Research

Stephen j Shanabrook     works in a disparity, a space of unexpected associations, altered perception and exsquisite entropy. In all his undertakings, there is the process of evisceration and a search within process for a different aspect of beauty. Abstracted upon the experience of daily reality, his inveterate and mysterious works leave one with an intensely evocative, sometimes disquieting, yet ultimately peaceful sensibility.


Extract from Shanabrook's website, about himself as an artist.
http://www.stephenshanabrook.com/profile.htm