Advisor meeting Nov 1 blog

I had my advisor meeting with Andrew Cooks on October 19^th. As I had written in my October 15^th post I had been thinking of converting my suggested sound piece project into a video.

I have sounds of Hitler’s speech and the interview I did with the Holocaust survivor, yet I wanted in my juxtaposition of Holocaust experiences also show images of right wing extremists demonstrating in Dresden’s streets. Since these new right wing extremists are now fighting against refugees from Syria to come to Germany, I had the idea to interweave an interview I had done with a refugee from Syria in Berlin in the spring of this year and show images of Syria and the war. I am playing with this idea and over the past weeks have started to put this together as a video piece. So I discussed this idea with Andrew and he said I should go ahead and experiment with that video. I will hopefully be able to post that video in a more 'finished' form on November 15^th.

I introduced Andrew to my studio and the paintings I had started and been working on during the past weeks. (Two finished paintings were already sent to Edmonton in the second week of October). From one of my painting’s colour palette we came to talk about DeKooning. We discussed my black and white painting in which I had overlaid the maps of two buildings. The black shape representing a former building of the camp, the white line representing the factory building that is there today. We discussed my underlying brushwork and Andrew suggested that next time I should use a wider brush for those random strokes to differentiate from the width of my lines. We also discussed the work of Albert Oehlen, Sigmar Polke and David Hockney, (the first and the last also in the context of computer animated drawings). We also briefly discussed Simon Shama’s Power of Art BBC films.

Then we discussed that I would like to bring structure in the painting I had started. I had started with chaos and now want to go away from the maps and rather experiment with parts of a building. When I said I would like to add structure of the factory building I was not sure yet, what that could possibly look like. I need to experiment with that and am thinking of ‘unfolding’ walls of the factory building.
I am currently experimenting with those shapes.

Andrew encouraged me to push my work further, go ‘crazy’, maybe pour paint on canvas and then add the order. Thinking of maybe using my left hand for the lines, thinking of dominant and non dominant hands and indulge in what I do!

After our meeting Andrew sent me several links among them some of painters such as Richter, deKooning, Rauschenberg and also some links to Boltanski about whom I will be writing my first paper. 

The conversation was great and helpful and encouraging!