Shantell Powell

The scratch mark photo shoot was one which incorporated both the model's skin and its relation to her metal-tipped flogger. The photo I chose for this composition was a simple one, showing the marks on her back. Lighting was afternoon sunlight, and I stood overhead, shooting directly down for this shot:



My first idea was to create a photo montage with the model's skin providing a backdrop (no pun intended) to her portrait.



I ultimately chose against this idea and decided to instead do a bodyscape. I rotated the image and cropped it, leaving the model's waist contrasted against the blanket she was lying on. Then, in order to make the photo match the rest of the editorial spread, I played with curves in Photoshop to shift and distort the colours. The texture of the blanket was too distracting, so I used a smudge tool to change its texture.

The end result is a graphic bodyscape/skyscape/landscape image.

I set up a photoshoot with a play piercing top (Voralis) and bottom (Kai) in Toronto. The plan was to photograph a piercing session in which Voralis would be using shark hooks on Kai's back. The photos were taken in their dungeon, and for lighting, I had coloured LEDs and my portable LED light table. The background was a neutral grey wall. I ended up taking approximately 150 photos during the session.

The room is small, and the ceiling is low, so it was tricky to find good angles with uncluttered backgrounds, so I did the best that I could manage. It was difficult to be far enough back to get full scenes in frame, so for the most part, I did tight shots.

The first photo I chose to work with from the shoot is a portrait in which Kai has ribbons attached to the piercings. The ribbons are attached to a ceiling rig, applying tension to the skin. The light at this time was blue LED with rim lighting and backlighting on the wall done with the portable light table.

Here is the unedited shot:



The preview on my camera showed this in finer detail than it came out as on my computer. In this image, the backlit wall is blown out, and the details on the face are too dark. The architecture of the room is distracting, as well. I played around a bit with Photoshop to see what I could do to correct this. I cropped the image, then used the clone stamp tool to remove the distracting background lines as well as the piercer. Then I started playing with curves on Photoshop to adjust the colour balance and to play with distortion and graininess.

Here is what I came up with:

One of the initial designs I worked on for my logo was the octopus mountain monogram idea. I went through a lot of experimentation with this idea, and also learned more about how to use Adobe Illustrator while I was at it.

Although I ultimately did not choose this idea, the process was educational.

I played around with rough design.



And then I experimented with colour:



When I took it into Illustrator, my first attempts were awful.



But it did get better. For the curved part, instead of just using the shapes or pen tools, I used typography. I grabbed a letter S, turned it into a shape, and modified it.

I didn't have a lot of time to work outdoors this week because of my homework load, and I couldn’t count on shots over the weekend because the weather forecast was unfavourable and my camera is not waterproof. However, I had some time on Friday evening when the weather was mild and clear. Nonetheless, shooting at night necessitated the use of a tripod. I have a tripod, but it is only nominally better than nothing. The legs don't lock into place reliably and there's no way to change the angle from landscape mode to portrait. Although I was told I can borrow a tripod from the school, this is not really a usable option for me. Borrowed equipment must be returned before 8 am on the next school day, and since my classes don't start until 11 am and end at 6, it would mean that I'd have to get up at 5 am and be completely worn out by the time my last class started. So shitty old tripod it was.

I figured that I could at least crop an 8x10 portrait shot out of my landscape shots, so I set out in the dark to the childhood home of Prime Minister William Lyon MacKenzie King. There's a railway bridge there that crosses Wellington street, and I figured I could get some decent street photos from overhead.

I set a remote timer so as not to shake my camera and set it to a ten-second exposure time.

Unfortunately, because my eyesight is crappy, I couldn't tell that my shots were out of focus. This is the best one of the bunch. I discovered that tail lights receding photographed much more interestingly than headlights advancing. So I timed my shot to take place when cars were heading away but none were coming forward.



Next, I returned to the historic house and took some shots up through the trees at Orion and the moon overhead. These appeared nicely in my viewfinder, but came out extremely dark once I loaded them up onto my computer at home. I kept the same ten-second exposure time. Perhaps they needed an even longer one. I tried increasing the brightness on Photoshop, but there were problems with artifacts and corruption showing up, and the moon came out intensely over-exposed.





I tried taking more shots, but the cold had drained my camera battery and my night shoot was over.

When I woke up on Saturday, I saw that the forecasted rain had not yet hit, so I bundled up and went back outside to do some shots. I decided to do some tighter shots this time and the photo quality turned out much better. It also helped that since the daylight was bright enough, I no longer needed a tripod and could hold my camera in portrait mode without worrying about blur.

I thought this upward angle of a hole-pocked tree was interesting, but once I printed it out, it didn't look as interesting.



This shot, taken inside a huge hole in a tree, is more interesting, but I'm not completely satisfied with the composition.



These succulents still look juicy and healthy in spite of it being January, but again, the composition didn't appeal to me over all.

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I really like this shot of hens and chicks, but the white leaves are over-exposed, distracting from the gorgeous colours and shape of the plants, and I don't know enough about Photoshop yet to correct the issue.



I'm also fond of this forced perspective shot of pine needles atop a manhole cover, but I don't know if the depth of field would go over as a positive or a negative in class. I like the composition, regardless.



I also like this close-up of a crack in a tree, but again, the blurred edges could potentially detract. I still enjoy the use of line in the shot.



I ultimately chose to submit this close-up of pine tree sap because it incorporates the rule of thirds, and because the colour gradients in the sap are beautiful.



I need to find a way to see better through the viewfinder of my camera at night, but am unsure of how to do that. I also need to find a way to keep my camera running longer in the cold. And, I need to find a better tripod, stat.

For my visual design course, I am to design a logo for a fictitious company. I think it would be more useful for me to design a logo for myself. My creative endeavours have been marketed under The ShanMonster for well over twenty years now, and I've never developed a logo. This could be useful for my website, business cards, etc.

I've used The ShanMonster moniker for such things as DJing (radio and club), clothing and jewellery design, dance performance, visual art, and for my online persona. Since I've used it for so many eclectic, creative endeavours, it makes sense to me that whatever design I use should deal with mutability and creativity. This makes me think of cephalopods, since they are about as creative and mutable as a critter can get.

Possibilities include monograms, but the project requires a graphic mark as a basis. For this project, the logo cannot be purely typographic. So something like a monogram done in the form of an octopus's arms might work. If I do use an octopus, I must be careful to avoid looking too much like other logos which use octopuses, tentacles, or krakens.

So not like this:



Maybe like this? Yes, a tentacle scaling a mountain....



I also don't particularly want to evoke steampunk, and the octopus has been coopted by the steampunk community. So to avoid that, it would be expedient to use a colour palette which isn't steampunk. So I should avoid old-timey browns and sepias. And I should definitely avoid cogs and goggles....

My original plan for my pop-up book was to sew it. I misunderstood the original concept, and thought it only needed to be an interactive book. I wanted to use things like fringe, zippers, etc. combined with sewing techniques (eg. pleating). However, I found out that this didn't meet the project parameters, so I scuttled it. I thought I might still be able to use fabric, but this would likely more than double the amount of work I'd need to do, and I didn't have that much time to devote to the project. I would still like to create this sort of book at another time, though.

So I started investigating a variety of kirigami/origami papercraft techniques. I soon realized that beyond the absolute simplest techniques, I have no natural facility with paper-folding.

After a lot of struggling, I was able to make a kirigami paper sculpture, but I couldn't get it to close again.



I tried making an origami pop-up book, but that didn't go so well. Here are my failed attempts.





I attempted to create a foldout collection of flowers. The tutorial videos I watched made it look relatively simple. The tutorials were a lie! Everything kept exploding, and no fixative seemed powerful enough to maintain structural integrity.



I will attempt paper-folding techniques again when I am not so pressed for time.

Lest I enter a kirigami rage of epic proportions, I instead chose to work with a variety of construction techniques. With my background in sewing and metal arts, construction techniques are more aligned with my skillset. I chose to use illustration board instead of paper since paper isn't sturdy enough to support some of the mechanisms I'd be making.

The first page is a case in point. It uses a penny slider as a mechanism and demonstrates the design principle of contrast. It shows a contrast of colours, texture, and movement versus stillness.

In order to create the penny slider, I used old arcade tokens and a button (got some sewing notions in there, even if only invisibly!) and affixed them together with rubber cement.



The decorative element of studded wood was cut from a magazine photo and mounted onto thick paper. I used mayfair paper for the black, and left the reverse side of the illustration board alone for its tan colour. The white side of illustration board was used to form the frame for the penny slider.



Here it is, in motion:



The next page uses a simple pop-up concept with paper fold-outs in the shape of three hearts. These are hidden within an even simpler page fold-out. The symmetry of the composition demonstrates the principle of balance



A waterfall page demonstrates the principle of rhythm with a variation on the pull-tab technique. When you pull on the tab, the squares cascade in order. For these I used mayfair paper and repurposed paper from a magazine and a sheet of origami paper obtained at the Design Thinkers conference in Toronto, 2017.



The final page uses a simple fold-out kirigami technique, with right-angle pop-outs of different size demonstrating the effect of scale and proportion. For one of the pop-ups I used a photograph of the moon. For the other, I used a decorative ball. Both images came from recycled magazines/books. The overlay page is made of textured paper I purchased combined with cut-out paper recycled from a magazine. The pink and blue construction paper were purchased. This all rests atop pastel paper.

I continue to experiment and learn as I work on my historical survey of surrealism, and my project grows. What I'd first planned as a simple accordion-style book has turned into a piece of assemblage art. While researching the games and exercises played and implemented by surrealists, I reacquainted myself with Exquisite Corpse, a game I've frequently played throughout my life in visual and textual formats. I realized that the accordion book format is an ideal way to utilize exquisite corpse while simultaneously offering up a cross-selection of drawing styles inspired by various surrealists.

Exquisite corpse, originally called cadavre exquis,
"embodied the surrealist notions of collaboration and chance. Derived in part from a parlor game and in part from a dada game called Little Papers, in which poems were composed from randomly chosen words, the exquisite corpse was "discovered" by the surrealists in 1925 "on one of those idle, weary nights" at the residence of Tanguy, Jacques Prévert, and Marcel Duhamel at 54 rue du Chateau. Acording to Breton, a frequent "player": "What really excited us about these productions was the certainty that, no matter what, they could not possibly have been onjured up by a single brain, and that they possessed to a much greater degree the capacity for 'deviation.'

"Indeed the game's resulting images, which nearly always were anthropomorphic given the seeming preference for the vertical orientation and head-to-toe sequencing, evoke fantastic and often grotesque creatures that defy logical explanation. Since it involved chance and collaboration, the exquisite corpse separated (or at least distanced) the individual player/artist/writer from his or her creative will. And anyone could play. Certainly the naiveté of nonartists would have been welcomed in a circle in which innocence and artlessness were esteemed. But it was not all fun and games, as pointed out by Simone Kahn, Breton's first wife and frequent exquisite corpse collaborator: it was "a method of research, a way to exaltation and stimulation, a mine of numberless inventions, a drug perhaps." Bizarre creatures such as those generated via the exquisite corpse do seem to reappear in artists' individual works, most notably in Victor Brauner's mechanomorphic figures and in the quasi-totemic configurations of Wifredo (sic) Lam.

"The vast number of existing exquisite corpses, executed in a variety of media and types over many years, attest to their addictive quality. The earliest examples were drawn with graphite or ink or colored pencil on common everyday writing paper. Around 1929 to 1930, collaborators began using pastel or tempera on black paper, but because of the paper's fragility, it was often not folded. Instead, small marks to the left and/or right of the sheet indicate the divisions, or registers, of the exquisite corpse. Areas not being drawn were then covered by another sheet of paper to guarantee the chance results" (Jones L., 2012, pp. 31-32).

"Cadavre exquis drawings were inspired by an old parlour game. One evening at 54 rue du Chateau, a Surrealist meeting place in Paris between 1924-8, Jacques Prévert wrote on a piece of paper "Le cadavre exquis," folded the paper, and passed it around the room for others to write the words in their minds. The result was the powerful sentence "le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau" which astounded those present . Another night, they tried using imagery: one artist would draw three or four lines which would extend beyond the fold, and the next person would continue the lines until shapes emerged. Finally, this game was played by simply covering areas of the sheet.... The final result was a composition of interconnected images derived from the subconscious ideas of the artists. Simone Kahn wrote that the final results of this practice were 'creatures none of us had foreseen'" (from the Research Report for Cadavre Exquis c. 1931 obtained at The Marvin Gelber Print and Drawing Study Centre, AGO).

I chose to incorporate a cross-selections of paintings and drawings for this exquisite corpse method of delivery. The order of influences goes as follows:

1. A drawing inspired by René Magritte's The Son of Man
   
2. H. R. Giger's illustration for the cover of Danzig's album How the Gods Kill
   
3. Marion Adnam's L' Infante Egaree
   
4. Bridget Bate Tachenor's Velador
   
5. Roberto Matta's drawing for Les Chants de Maldoror
   
6. Giorgio de Chiroco's Two Mannequin Heads
   
7. Salvador Dali's Venus With Drawers
   
8. Hans Bellmer's La Poupée
   

Aside from searching online and in libraries for information pertinent to surrealism, I also travelled to Toronto on several occasions to visit the AGO. I took photographs and made sketches of original works at the Guillermo del Toro exhibition, and also visited The Marvin Gelber Print and Drawing Study Centre, AGO. There I spoke with the curator of the studio about my interest, and with the assistance of the archivists, was able to study two remarkable pieces up close and personal.

The first piece I studied is an example of cadavre exquis. It was created by Valentine Hugo, Tristan Tzara, Yves Tanguy, Paul Eluard, and Nusch Eluard circa 1931. This is a fascinating piece, not only to look at, but also from a historical perspective. It is a rare piece, as only a few were executed on black paper. The inscription on the reverse indicated which images each artist made. Valentine Hugo did the writing and the bird's head. Tzara drew the scissors. Tanguy drew the cliff and chameleon. Paul and Nusch Eluard did the rest.



The second piece I studied in detail is Two Mannequin Heads by Giorgio de Chirico. This drawing fascinated me because it is much more mechanical-looking than the majority of pieces I've studied by other surrealists. It is a beautiful drawing with excellent lines, and I decided to incorporate elements of it in my exquisite corpse study.



I want to go with the working title Body of Work. The play on words references Exquisite Corpse, the surrealists' fascination with the body, as well as the body of work put out by the surrealist movement. I have been looking at surrealists from around the world, and have been working at getting a good cross-selection of international artists. I have also been researching female surrealists, since men are more heavily represented in studies despite there having been plenty of highly-skilled and esteemed women within the movement. Some of the artists did not call themselves surrealists, but were claimed by the movement (eg. Frida Kahlo). Some dissociated themselves from the movement, but are surrealists nonetheless (eg. Salvador Dali).

With my research, I have expanded my original concept to something larger than just a book. I am creating a box to contain the book. The box contains elements of other surrealists.

I was inspired by the three-dimensional work of Méret Oppenheim, a surrealist more famous because she modelled for Man Ray than she is famous for her own works. This is unfortunate, as she was a skilled and imaginative artist in her own right. She created a fur-covered cup and saucer, and also made a diorama including feathers. I followed her influence to make an inset in my box including feathers.

Another part of the box incorporates elements of cut-up poetry. Tristan Tzara, who I discovered courtesy of the Exquisite Corpse, is considered to have been the progenitor of cut-up poetry. In 1920, "Tristan Tzara publishes 'To Make a Dadaist Poem' which instructs the reader to cut out words from a newspaper article, put them in a bag, shake, and then remove individually and compose a poem ' conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag'" (Jones, 2012, p. 63). I used this inspiration to create a poem, and combined it with collage.

The outside of the box is découpaged to continue with the surrealist theme of collage.

Jones, Leslie. Drawing Surrealism. Los Angeles, CA : Los Angeles County Museum of Art, [2012]. from pp 31-32