Art Review: William Kentridge's The Refusal of Time

William Kentridge's The Refusal of Time is an installation in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
The exhibition is absolutely brilliant.
There are five projections set up, each depicting a different time or a traveling through time.
Each video is filmed in black and white, and there are different scenes.
William Kentridge himself is shown climbing up chairs and coming back down in what seems to never end. The projections change up and different characters are added and different scenes are displayed. There is also a huge structure that is moving back and forth while what appears to be a metronome ticks away.

Metronome on structure ticks away

The exhibition was visually pleasing and the background music (especially the tuba) gave a lot of life to the videos. The people used in the videos were animated and colorful even though they were shot in black and white. I really enjoyed the energy of this exhibition and a lot of the dancing scenes reminded me of dancing back home in Nigeria.

Time Fictional Documentary: The Real Life of an Art Student

Creating a fictional documentary is challenging because to create a video investigation that is unreal, there needs to be a lot of improvisation and creativity.
My partner, Ishita Mehta and I created a fictional documentary focusing on the real life of an art student. We showed three students "working" on their projects that they had created, not just doing what art students are stereotypically thought to always do: drawing.
Looking back at this video, I wish my partner and I had actually done the opposite: shown an art student as what people think he or she is. That would have made the video seem more fictional.
I also wish we had used better transitions and more footage, and that we had tied up the ending better, instead of letting it end abruptly on a note.

Final Project: Linear Time Graphic Novel

I wanted to explore and express linear time using subway trains. The trains start from their first stop, which one could say is the beginning, and travel down all the way to their last stop. What's interesting is that even after a train has reached its last stop, it reverses and goes back to its starting point and keeps going on in that manner.

I developed a fictional character whose interactions (or lack thereof) with other people on the train imitate the way the train travels. She is a girl who is wanting to interact with someone on the train who is similar to who she is, but doesn't realize as she gets off at the last stop, that there is always someone exactly like her and the process continues.

I was inspired a little bit by Steve McCloud's transitions and I looked at work from Art Spiegelman to see how they created their graphic novels.

If I could go back, I would definitely keep up with the consistency of the yellow panels to signal the train announcements, as well as clean up a bit of the drawing blurs.

A Response to Memento

Christopher Nolan does an excellent job with this film, in my opinion.
Memento is about a man, Leonard (a.k.a Lenny) who has a condition where he has no short memory. To keep track of everything, he constantly takes polaroids and makes notes to himself.

Lenny is trying to find and kill the man who raped and killed his wife. We see his interactions with people who he is close to, but sometimes they turn out to be people he can't trust. One excellent thing about this movie is the fact that the story is told backwards. That way, we're allowed to be forgetful with Lenny. We're not allowed to know more than he does until the end of the movie. 

*ALL GIFS ARE FROM TUMBLR

Sound: Professors

After learning how to cut and manipulate different recorded sounds, I took clips of my professors' voices in class while they taught. I used a lot of repetition to create a somewhat monotonous sound. I tried to play on humor and capture how sometimes it feels like professors are saying the same things over and over again and they all just seem to fade into each other.

Final Project Proposal

I would like to explore the continuity of time in objects by exploring trains and their stops for my final project. I think trains are fascinating because they go from one stop to another and never stop unless major construction is going on. I'll be focusing particularly on the L train which goes from the Rockaway's to 14th Street and 8th Avenue. I will be presenting my final as a short animation/stop motion film that shows a train, the L train, going through different sceneries of different train stop locations. I will mostly shoot in Brooklyn because the train goes above underground at different stops and it will be easier to see side views/perspective of the train from those points.

Labyrinths: Response to short stories by Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges was a poet and it is evident in the way he writes his short stories "Circular Ruins" and "Library of Babel". His colorful vocabulary and brilliant imagery made reading enjoyable.
In his short story, "Circular Ruins", Borges tells of a wizard who spends most of his hours asleep in an old destroyed temple so that he can dream about and eventually create a human being. He takes two years to finally complete this process; starting to form the man from his internal organs to eventually having him as an apprentice. One day, the old wizard dies by fire, but not without first realizing that he is also a dreamed up man. Borges uses dreams as a labyrinth of time, suggesting that the new dreamed up man may dream up a new human being and the cycle would be continuos.
His other story "Library of Babel", tells of the world as an infinite library with human beings living on shelves and no one completely understanding the past or being able to decipher the future. At the end of the story, the narrator suggests that the same events that took place in the past are possibly repeating themselves or are going to repeat themselves in the future, and that is order.
Borges uses time as a labyrinth by looping intricate and complex series of events that have to happen in a certain way before they can move on to the next stage of being repeated.
This is not too different form Sisyphus from Ancient Greek Mythology, whose punishment was to roll up a rock to the top of the hill, only to have it fall back down, creating an eventual loop of terror.
Jorge Luis Borges was interesting to read and "Circular Ruins" particularly appealed to me because the ending came as unexpected to me.

Sequential Time: Playing Piano Animation

Animators can make an animation scene come alive by simply manipulating one of the parts of the entire drawing. I attempted to do just that by only manipulating the fingers in this animation.

I drew the piece using only charcoal, and erased and redrew the fingers; each time photographing a different position to make the animation look sequential.

I wish I had paid attention also to the shadows below the fingers on the thighs; I think manipulating those as well would've added more to then overall production.

Graphic Novel: African Hair Story

A graphic novel is challenging and takes time to create, but I enjoyed working on this. I used Illustrator to illustrate pictures of myself and InDesign to lay the comic strip out.

I decided to focus on illustrating a story about my hair. Every morning, I wake up wondering how to style my hair for the day. Girls of African descent have naturally kinky or curly hair that takes time and proper maintenance to be maintained. I decided to illustrate a simple cartoon of myself managing my hair.

Inspired somewhat by Scott McCloud, I attempted to use action-to-action and scene-to-scene progressions to show time passing.

Looking back, I wish I had spent more time on this really developing the illustrations. I would like to turn this into more than a two-page spread. I am especially proud of the design of the cover: I think it looks very African.

Time Documentary: Storyboard

The life of an art student is often stereotyped; and as is often with stereotypes, no one really knows all that art students do.  Do art students really draw all the time? Do they dress differently from other kids of students? Do they have work in unorganized workspaces? Do they really not sleep? In our documentary, not only do Ishita and I hope to address all the amusing stereotypes of how an art student lives, we also hope to complete them by showing how art students actually find ways to better the world we live in.

Time Map

The Sandwich
We go by performing our daily actions without thinking of their processes. We tie our shoelaces. We drink our tea. We wash our hair. We do these things to get them "done"; but are never quite present during the "doing". I chose to photograph an act as simple as making myself a sandwich. I took quite twenty photographs in sets of twos, the photo to the left showing my hand doing the action, such as adding lettuce, cheese or dressing, and the photo on the right showing the finished action. Going through the process and taking time to stop and take photographs made me spend more time on making the sandwich and eating it afterwards was equally satisfying.

Long/Short Time

The Flame Tree
Over the years, as time passes by, we see progression and changes. Old technology is left on the shelves. The elderly remember the good old days. Children are hopeful for the future which seems far away. One example of change in time is the way we provide light for ourselves when it is dark. Back in primitive age, fire was used as a source of light. I wanted to create a tree that was burning, but instead of using fire I wanted flames to be represented by our technology for providing light today: lightbulbs. The first picture are the branches at the early stages of catching "fire" and the second picture shows how the flames have spread.

Time Lapse

Colorless Conversations
My roommate and my two suitemates are very outgoing people. I am very introverted. I often sit in my room alone working with my laptop sipping tea while they chat away in our common room/living area. Sometimes they have friends come over. Most of these friends are boys from The New School of Jazz and Contemporary Music. Last week, my suitemate Kayla's friend Eli came over and I was very interested in their conversation. So I set up my camera and took pictures of them talking. They talked about Facebook friends, Zac Efron's nipples, etc. I noticed that my suitemate Kayla moved around a lot when she talked. She braided her hair. She sipped her tea. She threw her head back when she laughed. Eli, on the other hand, sat in the same position and did nothing more than stroke his chin and crouch down to laugh a few times. I shot this conversation in black and white because I wanted the livelihood of this odd yet amusing conversation to be the 'color' the photographs.