Show Photos

Took some pictures of my show wall before taking it down last Friday. Also went ahead and took some photos while in Boston this past weekend - some following the same theme of alienation and isolated places, others based on some of the (unexpected) conversations at my show with people coming up and discussing alien conspiracies with me. I liked some of the photos where the focus or lighting was misinterpreted by my phone's autofocus feature, which led to some washed out or blurry photos that I feel play into that idea of alien conspiracies and the idea of the unknown that people want to believe in anyway. Not sure what I might do with them further down the line, but that might be a way to incorporate type into my idea over time without getting too personal with it - which is what happened with my prior text and hence why I shied away from using it for the show since it was too raw for me to feel comfortable having in a public showing.

Updates

So for this week I've spent a lot of time getting things ready to order/print/make for the show, so I don't have a whole lot of new work to show at the moment, but I'll post the progress I've made on said things so far.

First, I reformatted the alien heads from last week to have a higher dpi so I can use them in more applications without worrying about losing quality if I decide to print them larger. I also created a new one, as well as fixed one of the older ones to be a bit less busy and convoluted in design.

Fixed this one up from a prior design and increased the saturation all around

This is a new design based on something I was working on with a more retro feeling

Secondly, I decided to make stickers to sell at the show using some of these more complicated, vector based designs since I think those will be more truly represented in a digital form rather than trying to print them by hand with so many layers involved. Die cut stickers seems like a good option since they are small and relatively inexpensive so I feel they would be popular in this form, especially given the nature of the designs floating on empty space as they are now. Below is a mock up sheet of the stickers I'm planning on having made (the blue line is for the manufacturer, not part of the final designs).  They are each about 2.25x3" with a 5pt white border around the edges.

I've also updated my thesis with a really short summary. If it needs to be longer, I can definitely
expand on it but I wasn't sure how much would be too much, so I kept it short and simple. I also wrote it in the third person since it felt more applicable to something like a press release or website post which is what it sounded like the gallery needed it for.

Alienation is a body of work by Liam St.Laurent that uses extraterrestrial imagery and photographs of empty streets and rainy days to explore the artist's relationship with feelings of isolation. The photographs capturing singular moments in time are offset by screen printing, where the individualized nature of each hand-pulled print reflects the turbulent nature of life.

That's most of what I visibly have done this week, as the rest of it is just formatting images and making sure resolutions and dpi's are at a good point to print at a large enough scale for the show, or turning the high contrast and "grungy" ufo images into bitmaps so that I can retain their old film look when screen printing them over the weekend and into next week. Going on John's suggestion about how to simplify printing, I am going to have 12 aqua-colored shirts at the show that have one of the "photo" based prints on them for sale as well in solid black ink. I've also contacted Andy Bablo about vinyl for the show and will be working with him this week as well to get some type printed as well as the possibility of one of the alien head designs at a larger scale.

More design ideas

Based on the interest in the alien head design that was on one of the book layout pages, I decided to play with some previous and current imagery in a similar way to see how it would look. I think these are pretty interesting, and I think I might order some as stickers to sell at the show. These could be done as either screen prints or digital prints for the show, though I'm not sure if I'd want to do a series like this or keep it to only one or two combined with the photos and other imagery I have from this semester. If I do a series, screen printing would be a pretty easy way to go about it while incorporating the medium I prefer to work with. I've also been thinking about it and wondering if I should spend these next few weeks prior to the show focusing more on bringing my older ideas together with my current work for the show rather than working on a book, since I find the challenge of integrating the two ideas in a way that both looks good and makes sense more interesting than the book I had been toying around with last week, as I think it would be a better use of my time and would make my show wall feel less like "this, that, and the other thing" and more like an overview of what I've been working on for the last year without coming across like a yard sale of varying ideas and mediums which is how it feels to me at the moment and has been frustrating me for the past few weeks as the show draws closer. Also I could experiment with some of the other alien head shapes I had created for last semester, I just used this one initially since it's easily recognizable and I wanted to see how they would look if they were all based on the same shape.

The alien head from the book page in case anyone wanted a closer look at the details

The photo manipulation from earlier this week with the added u.f.o.

Based on a piece I was working on earlier this year for another class

Another photo manipulation - I kept the eyes more subtle in this one

Playing with another design - I like the gradient effect on the eyes in this one

Making the book, playing with photo editing

Spent this past week gathering all of my pictures and narrowing them down to the ones I like most, or best capture the mood I'm going for in relation to the text I have. The text is about eighty percent ready to go, I just need to go through one last edit and then pair them with the most appropriate photos within the book, as well as choose some highlights to put up on the show wall in vinyl type to give people a preview of what they'll find in the book. I've begun to format the book with photos and text with a few different layouts that repeat in order to keep it a little more interesting than a photo and text on facing pages throughout the whole design. It still needs tweaking, but I think its a decent start at least in order to visualize the rest of it. So far it looks like 40 pages should be a good length with the current layout, but it could also be adapted should I stumble upon a different design solution that works better with a different page count.

I also gave more thought on how I want to incorporate screen printing into the show, as I know it isn't necessary to show everything you do at the show, but as someone who predominately uses silkscreen as a medium, I would really like to showcase some of my abilities, and I think I have found a way to incorporate it that utilizes my skills combined with the photos I'm currently working with. I was playing around with the levels and contrast in photoshop and found that some of the photos I had looked really striking when reduced down to pure black and white imagery. After placing them over a colored background out of curiosity, I realized this was a great way to incorporate silkscreen. I wouldn't do many, probably just two or three for the show wall, though I'd consider possibly printing an edition to sell depending on how well they turn out. I'm set to begin printing them by the end of this week provided school doesn't get canceled with the impending snow.

With these I also began to toy with the idea of further distressing them to match some of the photos I have from earlier this semester where things are grainy and out of focus, or play with depth of field to create somewhat vague imagery, as well as combining them with the "alien" elements of "alienation", to give a nod to the work of last semester and my other classes. So I ended up making these to look sort of like those old photos of supposed UFO's from the 50's and 60's. I had a lot of fun with them and think these might be more what I'd like to screen print for the show, but I'm not sure if the distressing is the best effect or if I should just keep them clean like the imagery up above.

Potential Layouts

Just playing with a couple different layout ideas for the show wall. I think the alien would be an interesting addition if it could possibly be done on vinyl or something similar so it could be a free floating shape as opposed to a rectangular image like the other photos would be. Not sure if there's a practical solution to that though. I think having a few (maybe 2 or 3) copies of the book below for people to look through would be good, so I can still utilize the narratives I've created without having to plaster all of them across the wall of the gallery. I think it lends better to the personal and "intimate" (for lack of a better word) nature of the narrative. Still wondering if it would be a good idea/how to execute placing text on the wall in addition to the photographs. Any feedback would be appreciated, since I'm not completely satisfied with these as they are now, but I figured it's a good place to start at least.

Note: The text for now is just place holder text to get an idea of where I might want to place the final chosen text later.

Photos and playing around with ideas

More photos taken after the washed out weather of this weekend - found some interesting stuff washed up on the beach, and cloudy days made for good sky photographs. As mentioned last week, I'm trying to figure out how to incorporate screen printing back into my work in order to have a print or two up on the wall of my show, so I played around with some of the iconography I worked with last semester (namely the "schwa" alien head at the moment since it's a very simple shape) to see if I liked the idea of creating prints with a similar look. Not entirely sure if it's where I want to go with it, but figured it was a good place to start. Even if not screen printed, I think they ended up being kind of interesting in their own right, and I might use some similar techniques to break up the photos I plan on putting in the book so they're not all the same size, same format on each page. Also interesting to note looking at them together now that a lot of the photos this week unconsciously involve things that are broken, like trees, fences, and the Hardie elevator.

I mentioned working on a narrative, but I realize now it's become kind of a cross between the abstract nature of the thoughts on the post-its and a fully blown narrative. So it's turning out to be more of a book of "journal entires" so to speak - short snippets, from a couple sentences up to a paragraph, that tell about bits of my day or just recording my thoughts in specific moments in time.

Decided to use the "I exist" phrase from last semester below the aliens out of curiosity of incorporating more elements of prior work. I tried these out just to see how the alien head would work with the photos taken to evoke that same feeling of "alienation". I think they're interesting, though I'm not entirely sure what I could do with these aside from vary up the format of photos in the book or display them on the wall as a unique shape versus a standard rectangular image. Made 4 variations with different photos to play with color and shapes. I prefer the ones on the white background, I think they look better floating in space, so I might make them all on white or transparent backgrounds if I alter more photos in this same vein.