Elizabeth Black / Complete Artist Statement

Humans are creatures of patterns and these patterns are visualized in our daily lives. We document our lives through collections of information; we scribble our activities in calendars, store phone numbers in our cell phones, and preserve photographs in beloved photo albums. We record this data without a second thought of its importance in our daily lives, but this build up of information serves to help us remember and make our daily activities easier. Without these storage patterns we would have to rely solely on our memory to store all this important knowledge.

These mechanisms serve to almost “replace” our memory. We the individual are no longer required to retain specific details because we know that we can depend on other modes of storage. Photography especially enforces these ideas and it is the photographic record on which my work is based. People take photographs to remember what to them, are important aspects of their lives. They use the camera because a photograph is assumed to document the subjects and events “truthfully,” unlike a painting or sculpture where the artist can alter the representation. A photograph allows an individual to quickly store a memory as well as have proof of its actual happening, thus there is no need to question if it really occurred because there is proof in the image. Memory by itself is less credible because overtime details may be forgotten or misremembered; memory is subjective. Each person has their own interpretation of the same event, and it is in this sense the photograph is an essential tool in documenting and preserving the perceived truth of people’s lives.

People around the world participate in the act of recording and storing photographs, however there are a few that take this pursuit to a more extreme level, one such person being the photographer Nan Goldin. Goldin began taking photographs when she was a teenager shortly after the death of her sister Barbara Holly. After Barbara Holly’s death, Goldin found it difficult to recall details about her sister, so she decided to take pictures of friends and places she encountered to safeguard her memory. This quickly became an obsession, generating a larger and larger collection photographs.

Nan Goldin considers collection a significant part in her artwork. She doesn’t believe in a single image as a way to describe a person. Instead she advocates the “accumulation of portraits as a representation of a person”(1). In her series, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency Nan Goldin presents this idea in a body of photographs that is based around her life in New York City during the 1980s. This work was very different from anything ever seen before not only for its revealing look at drug culture, but for its unconventional presentation that took the form of a slideshow. These photographs bear “common archetypes, collective memories, and stories with which most of us can identify”(2). This is largely to due to the relationships that Goldin had with her subjects. The people in the photographs were mainly people that were very close to Goldin, and they trusted and allowed her to photograph even the most intimate moments of their lives. This connection was what made her photographs so strong; it was real relationships and real trust that Goldin captured that made photographs so genuine to her audience and intriguing to me.

My artwork is heavily influenced by Nan Goldin. Like her, I am concerned with the preservation of my life whether it is through writing or picture taking. My obsession began when I was in middle school and it has continued to evolve through the years. I started journaling my thoughts, but as the years have passed I moved away from recording my emotions and focused on the events that I encounter. Similarly, my photographic process evolved. I began taking pictures in the eighth-grade with disposable cameras, focusing mainly on my friends. Once I got a digital camera my process drastically changed. I was able to take many more pictures and began capturing the environment and activities around me, not just pictures of my peers.

The reason I record is similar to Goldin’s reasoning—to ensure that my past is not forgotten; I have realized that my memory can be unreliable and I want to protect my past from the perpetual progression of time by collecting proof of its existence. By creating a large collection of evidence of my life, I can keep close to the actual events and suspend the eventuality of losing it forever, at least personally; the more proof I have the harder it is for someone to deny it, and my work will exist as long as someone preserves it. I do not always refer back to the material that I have collected, but it is there when I need it and that is what matters to me.

All artists, by creating work, are documenting a part of the past and therefore art production is an act of recording that, whether deliberate or not, is telling of the times. My artwork directly focuses on capturing experiences and people that are relevant to my everyday; however, this art would not have been possible if it weren’t for my predecessors. The artist’s position in society shapes the context in which they can create. Up until the late 19th century, paintings of grand stories of the past dominated the themes of art. It was not relevant for an artist to create a piece that depicted who they were. This was due in part to the position artists’ occupied. Many artists relied on their patrons for work, so they catered to their tastes. However, as society changed so did the artists’ ability to create, and with the expansion of the industrial revolution, and rise of the middle class, artists began to enjoy more freedoms in the selection of subject matter. The market of painting shifted from a demand in history painting to a demand for “genres of portraiture, landscapes and scenes from daily life”(3). The bourgeois consumer created a market which allowed artists to expand their subject matter and more directly document their everyday.

I follow in similar footsteps in so far as I am concerned with the everyday and I am concerned with making the routines of our lives something more than an overlooked activity. I want people to appreciate and see the beauty of what we do, as well as let my art serve as a document of our times. I collect information about my life and present the data so that it records my day-to-day activities, while at the same time allows it to be relevant to my audience. The structure and detail of how I record differs from other artists’ approaches, but it functions in a similar way; it is telling of my life and the time I live in.

The visualization of my personal information has always been a common motif in my art, but this body of work takes on a more data-oriented, structured approach. I create ordered, well designed visualizations based on the information I collect, mapping out my day in ways that help me recognize the similarities, differences, and patterns evident in my life, something I find absolutely fascinating. I feel this dichotomy of representation is interesting because I am representing both objective and subjective views of not only my life, but also the goings on around me.

My digital piece, Color Chart—February 8th to April 11th, 2008, exhibits my daily activities in a visual format. I color code my hour-by-hour activities, structuring what I do in a blocking format with each column representing a full day with many days placed-directly next to each other. When ordered this way the patterns of my day-to-day activities are easily realized by the different proportions of color. However, there is no color code for the piece. My audience is persuaded to create their own narratives and predictions of what events took place based on clues such as color, patterns, and dates given in the title. Withholding information, such as a key, from the audience allows the viewer to see past the artwork as just a daily planner, making it an abstract form. This idea is similar to the abstraction of forms found in nature; I want the audience to concentrate on the patterns apparent, rather than trying to figure out what is actually happening. Including a key could potentially distract the viewer, clouding the subtle details that the artwork possesses. Color Chart is about the visualization of information, specifically our daily activities, not a documentary account of my life. The specifics of my day are the basis for the piece and are important to me, but are not needed for the audience’s understanding of the art. Furthermore, the lack of a key allows the viewer to substitute activities and compare their own lives into a similar visual fashion. I know well enough that people do not care as strongly about the details of my everyday, so making it more abstract creates a piece that is relevant to my audience on a broader level.

Another piece relevant to these ideas is Waking Time—February 24th to April 12th, 2008. This piece is a more literal representation of my everyday. I take pictures of the spaces I occupy during each waking day and order them chronologically in a vertical column. Each column of photographs represents the time from when I wake till the time I go to bed, and is placed on a vertical ground representing twenty-four hours. Having the visual columns on a consistent twenty-four hour block allows the audience to realize the ratio of sleep to when I am awake by the absence or presence of an image, providing a more accurate account of my entire day. However, this piece is unlike Color Chart where as the columns are based on a 12 a.m. to 12 a.m. time table; instead, Waking Time uses a 6 a.m. to 6 a.m. scale. This range allows the stacked photographs to remain connected and is a better boundary for how my day is scheduled. Like Color Chart, Waking Time does not have a key. Labeling each hour of the day would not only clutter space, but it would also relate too similarly to the generic format of the graph and a standard measure t of time that bears little resemblance to life’s activities. Instead, I place the days in groupings of seven, representing a week. By ordering them in this fashion the audience can compare the days and create their own understanding of the time presented. This design provides the necessary information, but still intrigues the viewer in a visually stimulating configuration.

The height of each image in Waking Time is determined by the amount of time spent on that specific activity. This weights my activities in a fashion where comparisons can be easily made. Combining the “direct visual evidence of images with the power of diagrams” formulates a successful piece of artwork because it incorporates “image’s representational, local, specific, realistic, unique, detailed qualities…and diagram’s contextualizing, abstracting, focusing, explanatory qualities”(4). When combing the two devices of imagery and diagrams in my artwork my audience is better able to understand the narrative being described. The images are used to place the viewer, giving them my point-of-view, while the diagram alludes to the time of day and order in which these events have occurred. The devices work best together so that the reader receives a more or less comprehensive story.

When taking these photographs I do not rearrange the setting around me. I take my camera and shoot from my point-of-view. It is a fact that is recorded by the camera and then presented to the viewer. I am about taking pictures of truth and what exists, rather than setting up an environment to create a beautiful or “artistic” photograph. “Good composition” aims to prolong the gaze of the viewer and may only be a device to keep a viewer interested longer. I work with this idea of keeping the viewer interested, but I do not solely rely on the composition of objects in my photographs to attain this goal. I use the accumulation of many photographs and layout of the actual photographs to contribute to the prolonged gaze of the viewer. With this additional information the work has more facets to explore, therefore intriguing and prolonging the gaze of my audience.

I tend to avoid people when taking photographs for Waking Time. The presence of individuals would direct the focus to them rather than the environment and the events taking place. In Waking Time I am focused on remembering the places I encounter because they are usually overlooked. In addition, I refrain from incorporating too many people because it would hinder the audiences’ experience of my work. It would personalize the art to a degree, making it harder for a viewer to insert themselves in the art. By removing specific people the viewer no longer is confronted with unfamiliar figures and can better substitute themselves into my position.

There are numerous artists that document and preserve aspects of their life as part of their work. However, the artists that have had the most significant impact on my art and process are On Kawara and Ellie Harrison.

The longevity of On Kawara’s Date Painting and his impressive accumulation of works is what makes him standout from the rest. Kawara has been creating a painting everyday since 1979 and intends to create them until his death. He documents each day by creating a painting that contains the month abbreviation, date, and year the painting is completed. He determines the font based on the type used in the local newspaper, so depending on his location the font varies. The paintings also vary in size and colors. Each piece of his collection is important because it informs the viewer, but the real power lies within the larger body of work. It is necessary to have more than one Date Painting in order to make significant comparisons between the works of art. This is where Kawara’s on going project and my own bear the most resemblance. Each individual piece of our artworks is informative, but what allows it to be successful is the sum of its parts.

Ellie Harrison focuses on documenting and translating data into understandable visual structures. Information about almost every detail of Harrison’s life is collected and incorporated into her artwork. Her dedication to recording her daily activities has created multiple bodies of work documenting an assortment of activities including food consumption, gaseous emissions, and spending habits. In a piece she did for the magazine Print, Harrison photographs all the items that she consumed in a week. She then organized them into a grid, occasionally slipping in some text to indicate the day of the week.

Harrison approaches her art in a direct analytical fashion. She incorporates keys into many of her pieces, integrating more of a graphical and data-oriented way of communication over a solely visual one. She creatively displays these ideas in an assortment of formats that keep her audiences occupied and interested, whether it through photographs, sculpture, or digital media. Moreover, the way she displays her activities diverges from my own work. In her piece, Timelines, Harrison horizontally represents each day, while I vertically organize my information in Color Chart and Waking Time. The difference of each individual’s thinking process is exemplified here, and is further rationale for presenting my outlook. There may be others who have never thought to organize themselves in these ways and I want to explain to them how I see the world.

I realize that the power my work holds with me does not necessarily resonate with every audience member, but viewers can at least appreciate their own lives when viewing these works. When seeing my days visualized, I hope audiences reevaluate their daily patterns. I want viewers to realize this so they are able to appreciate what they do with their day and have the ability to make changes in their routines. When looking back at my own artwork, I realized that much of my time is spent inside on computers. After I recognized this pattern, I began to make a conscious effort to avoid computers and make a better effort to enjoy the outdoors more.

My work is personal because it is based on my daily life, yet it is relatable to my audience because of it open-endedness. It is abstract, yet understandable because of its clear structure and subtle clues. It is a look into my life so that I am able to preserve this time forever, but it also serves to spark other people’s curiosity about how their own lives may be visualized. My hope is that people will be able to better perceive these aspects when seeing my life visualized as a whole, taking notice of the mundane and overlooked activities of our daily lives that add up and changing themselves for the better. By making audiences think in this fashion my artwork is functional and therefore successful, evading the fate of being just another object on the wall.

(1) Nan Goldin, interview with David Armstrong and Walter Keller, New York, New York, July 11-12, 1996.

(2) Guido Costa, Nan Goldin. (New York, NY: Phaidon, 2005).

(3) H.H. Arnason and Peter Kalb. History of Modern Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Photography (Fifth Edition). (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2004) p. 15.

(4) Edward R. Tufte, Beautiful Evidence. (Cheshire: Graphics Press, 2006) p. 45.

ELIZABETH BLACK ST. MARY'S PROJECT, 2008
	Artist Statement Bibliography Image Gallery Home Close Portfolio (And Return to SMP 2008 Index)	The Visualization of Organized Information Liz Black’s Artist Statement Humans are creatures of patterns and these patterns are visualized in our daily lives. We document our lives through collections of information; we scribble our activities in calendars, store phone numbers in our cell phones, and preserve photographs in beloved photo albums. We record this data without a second thought of its importance in our daily lives, but this build up of information serves to help us remember and make our daily activities easier. Without these storage patterns we would have to rely solely on our memory to store all this important knowledge. These mechanisms serve to almost “replace” our memory. We the individual are no longer required to retain specific details because we know that we can depend on other modes of storage. Photography especially enforces these ideas and it is the photographic record on which my work is based. People take photographs to remember what to them, are important aspects of their lives. They use the camera because a photograph is assumed to document the subjects and events “truthfully,” unlike a painting or sculpture where the artist can alter the representation. A photograph allows an individual to quickly store a memory as well as have proof of its actual happening, thus there is no need to question if it really occurred because there is proof in the image. Memory by itself is less credible because overtime details may be forgotten or misremembered; memory is subjective. Each person has their own interpretation of the same event, and it is in this sense the photograph is an essential tool in documenting and preserving the perceived truth of people’s lives. People around the world participate in the act of recording and storing photographs, however there are a few that take this pursuit to a more extreme level, one such person being the photographer Nan Goldin. Goldin began taking photographs when she was a teenager shortly after the death of her sister Barbara Holly. After Barbara Holly’s death, Goldin found it difficult to recall details about her sister, so she decided to take pictures of friends and places she encountered to safeguard her memory. This quickly became an obsession, generating a larger and larger collection photographs. Nan Goldin considers collection a significant part in her artwork. She doesn’t believe in a single image as a way to describe a person. Instead she advocates the “accumulation of portraits as a representation of a person”(1). In her series, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency Nan Goldin presents this idea in a body of photographs that is based around her life in New York City during the 1980s. This work was very different from anything ever seen before not only for its revealing look at drug culture, but for its unconventional presentation that took the form of a slideshow. These photographs bear “common archetypes, collective memories, and stories with which most of us can identify”(2). This is largely to due to the relationships that Goldin had with her subjects. The people in the photographs were mainly people that were very close to Goldin, and they trusted and allowed her to photograph even the most intimate moments of their lives. This connection was what made her photographs so strong; it was real relationships and real trust that Goldin captured that made photographs so genuine to her audience and intriguing to me. My artwork is heavily influenced by Nan Goldin. Like her, I am concerned with the preservation of my life whether it is through writing or picture taking. My obsession began when I was in middle school and it has continued to evolve through the years. I started journaling my thoughts, but as the years have passed I moved away from recording my emotions and focused on the events that I encounter. Similarly, my photographic process evolved. I began taking pictures in the eighth-grade with disposable cameras, focusing mainly on my friends. Once I got a digital camera my process drastically changed. I was able to take many more pictures and began capturing the environment and activities around me, not just pictures of my peers. The reason I record is similar to Goldin’s reasoning—to ensure that my past is not forgotten; I have realized that my memory can be unreliable and I want to protect my past from the perpetual progression of time by collecting proof of its existence. By creating a large collection of evidence of my life, I can keep close to the actual events and suspend the eventuality of losing it forever, at least personally; the more proof I have the harder it is for someone to deny it, and my work will exist as long as someone preserves it. I do not always refer back to the material that I have collected, but it is there when I need it and that is what matters to me. All artists, by creating work, are documenting a part of the past and therefore art production is an act of recording that, whether deliberate or not, is telling of the times. My artwork directly focuses on capturing experiences and people that are relevant to my everyday; however, this art would not have been possible if it weren’t for my predecessors. The artist’s position in society shapes the context in which they can create. Up until the late 19th century, paintings of grand stories of the past dominated the themes of art. It was not relevant for an artist to create a piece that depicted who they were. This was due in part to the position artists’ occupied. Many artists relied on their patrons for work, so they catered to their tastes. However, as society changed so did the artists’ ability to create, and with the expansion of the industrial revolution, and rise of the middle class, artists began to enjoy more freedoms in the selection of subject matter. The market of painting shifted from a demand in history painting to a demand for “genres of portraiture, landscapes and scenes from daily life”(3). The bourgeois consumer created a market which allowed artists to expand their subject matter and more directly document their everyday. I follow in similar footsteps in so far as I am concerned with the everyday and I am concerned with making the routines of our lives something more than an overlooked activity. I want people to appreciate and see the beauty of what we do, as well as let my art serve as a document of our times. I collect information about my life and present the data so that it records my day-to-day activities, while at the same time allows it to be relevant to my audience. The structure and detail of how I record differs from other artists’ approaches, but it functions in a similar way; it is telling of my life and the time I live in. The visualization of my personal information has always been a common motif in my art, but this body of work takes on a more data-oriented, structured approach. I create ordered, well designed visualizations based on the information I collect, mapping out my day in ways that help me recognize the similarities, differences, and patterns evident in my life, something I find absolutely fascinating. I feel this dichotomy of representation is interesting because I am representing both objective and subjective views of not only my life, but also the goings on around me. My digital piece, Color Chart—February 8th to April 11th, 2008, exhibits my daily activities in a visual format. I color code my hour-by-hour activities, structuring what I do in a blocking format with each column representing a full day with many days placed-directly next to each other. When ordered this way the patterns of my day-to-day activities are easily realized by the different proportions of color. However, there is no color code for the piece. My audience is persuaded to create their own narratives and predictions of what events took place based on clues such as color, patterns, and dates given in the title. Withholding information, such as a key, from the audience allows the viewer to see past the artwork as just a daily planner, making it an abstract form. This idea is similar to the abstraction of forms found in nature; I want the audience to concentrate on the patterns apparent, rather than trying to figure out what is actually happening. Including a key could potentially distract the viewer, clouding the subtle details that the artwork possesses. Color Chart is about the visualization of information, specifically our daily activities, not a documentary account of my life. The specifics of my day are the basis for the piece and are important to me, but are not needed for the audience’s understanding of the art. Furthermore, the lack of a key allows the viewer to substitute activities and compare their own lives into a similar visual fashion. I know well enough that people do not care as strongly about the details of my everyday, so making it more abstract creates a piece that is relevant to my audience on a broader level. Another piece relevant to these ideas is Waking Time—February 24th to April 12th, 2008. This piece is a more literal representation of my everyday. I take pictures of the spaces I occupy during each waking day and order them chronologically in a vertical column. Each column of photographs represents the time from when I wake till the time I go to bed, and is placed on a vertical ground representing twenty-four hours. Having the visual columns on a consistent twenty-four hour block allows the audience to realize the ratio of sleep to when I am awake by the absence or presence of an image, providing a more accurate account of my entire day. However, this piece is unlike Color Chart where as the columns are based on a 12 a.m. to 12 a.m. time table; instead, Waking Time uses a 6 a.m. to 6 a.m. scale. This range allows the stacked photographs to remain connected and is a better boundary for how my day is scheduled. Like Color Chart, Waking Time does not have a key. Labeling each hour of the day would not only clutter space, but it would also relate too similarly to the generic format of the graph and a standard measure t of time that bears little resemblance to life’s activities. Instead, I place the days in groupings of seven, representing a week. By ordering them in this fashion the audience can compare the days and create their own understanding of the time presented. This design provides the necessary information, but still intrigues the viewer in a visually stimulating configuration. The height of each image in Waking Time is determined by the amount of time spent on that specific activity. This weights my activities in a fashion where comparisons can be easily made. Combining the “direct visual evidence of images with the power of diagrams” formulates a successful piece of artwork because it incorporates “image’s representational, local, specific, realistic, unique, detailed qualities…and diagram’s contextualizing, abstracting, focusing, explanatory qualities”(4). When combing the two devices of imagery and diagrams in my artwork my audience is better able to understand the narrative being described. The images are used to place the viewer, giving them my point-of-view, while the diagram alludes to the time of day and order in which these events have occurred. The devices work best together so that the reader receives a more or less comprehensive story. When taking these photographs I do not rearrange the setting around me. I take my camera and shoot from my point-of-view. It is a fact that is recorded by the camera and then presented to the viewer. I am about taking pictures of truth and what exists, rather than setting up an environment to create a beautiful or “artistic” photograph. “Good composition” aims to prolong the gaze of the viewer and may only be a device to keep a viewer interested longer. I work with this idea of keeping the viewer interested, but I do not solely rely on the composition of objects in my photographs to attain this goal. I use the accumulation of many photographs and layout of the actual photographs to contribute to the prolonged gaze of the viewer. With this additional information the work has more facets to explore, therefore intriguing and prolonging the gaze of my audience. I tend to avoid people when taking photographs for Waking Time. The presence of individuals would direct the focus to them rather than the environment and the events taking place. In Waking Time I am focused on remembering the places I encounter because they are usually overlooked. In addition, I refrain from incorporating too many people because it would hinder the audiences’ experience of my work. It would personalize the art to a degree, making it harder for a viewer to insert themselves in the art. By removing specific people the viewer no longer is confronted with unfamiliar figures and can better substitute themselves into my position. There are numerous artists that document and preserve aspects of their life as part of their work. However, the artists that have had the most significant impact on my art and process are On Kawara and Ellie Harrison. The longevity of On Kawara’s Date Painting and his impressive accumulation of works is what makes him standout from the rest. Kawara has been creating a painting everyday since 1979 and intends to create them until his death. He documents each day by creating a painting that contains the month abbreviation, date, and year the painting is completed. He determines the font based on the type used in the local newspaper, so depending on his location the font varies. The paintings also vary in size and colors. Each piece of his collection is important because it informs the viewer, but the real power lies within the larger body of work. It is necessary to have more than one Date Painting in order to make significant comparisons between the works of art. This is where Kawara’s on going project and my own bear the most resemblance. Each individual piece of our artworks is informative, but what allows it to be successful is the sum of its parts. Ellie Harrison focuses on documenting and translating data into understandable visual structures. Information about almost every detail of Harrison’s life is collected and incorporated into her artwork. Her dedication to recording her daily activities has created multiple bodies of work documenting an assortment of activities including food consumption, gaseous emissions, and spending habits. In a piece she did for the magazine Print, Harrison photographs all the items that she consumed in a week. She then organized them into a grid, occasionally slipping in some text to indicate the day of the week. Harrison approaches her art in a direct analytical fashion. She incorporates keys into many of her pieces, integrating more of a graphical and data-oriented way of communication over a solely visual one. She creatively displays these ideas in an assortment of formats that keep her audiences occupied and interested, whether it through photographs, sculpture, or digital media. Moreover, the way she displays her activities diverges from my own work. In her piece, Timelines, Harrison horizontally represents each day, while I vertically organize my information in Color Chart and Waking Time. The difference of each individual’s thinking process is exemplified here, and is further rationale for presenting my outlook. There may be others who have never thought to organize themselves in these ways and I want to explain to them how I see the world. I realize that the power my work holds with me does not necessarily resonate with every audience member, but viewers can at least appreciate their own lives when viewing these works. When seeing my days visualized, I hope audiences reevaluate their daily patterns. I want viewers to realize this so they are able to appreciate what they do with their day and have the ability to make changes in their routines. When looking back at my own artwork, I realized that much of my time is spent inside on computers. After I recognized this pattern, I began to make a conscious effort to avoid computers and make a better effort to enjoy the outdoors more. My work is personal because it is based on my daily life, yet it is relatable to my audience because of it open-endedness. It is abstract, yet understandable because of its clear structure and subtle clues. It is a look into my life so that I am able to preserve this time forever, but it also serves to spark other people’s curiosity about how their own lives may be visualized. My hope is that people will be able to better perceive these aspects when seeing my life visualized as a whole, taking notice of the mundane and overlooked activities of our daily lives that add up and changing themselves for the better. By making audiences think in this fashion my artwork is functional and therefore successful, evading the fate of being just another object on the wall. Footnotes: (1) Nan Goldin, interview with David Armstrong and Walter Keller, New York, New York, July 11-12, 1996. (2) Guido Costa, Nan Goldin. (New York, NY: Phaidon, 2005). (3) H.H. Arnason and Peter Kalb. History of Modern Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Photography (Fifth Edition). (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2004) p. 15. (4) Edward R. Tufte, Beautiful Evidence. (Cheshire: Graphics Press, 2006) p. 45.
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