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.