You’ve got to check out John Goto

by zenzaura

Another week rolls around, and there’s good reason to be excited down here in Cornwall, the sun has finally decided to show itself again. Friday was the first day of the year on which we could legitimately play the ELO song Mr. Blue sky; and boy did we play it loud.

Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday were incredibly tough sledging as confidence levels took on an all time low. Being in third year is a stressful experience as everything you now produce, you feel, has to be the constantly the best work that you’ve produced at uni. Always in the back of your mind is the end of year show and you want to hang something that is both strong visually and also interesting. I spent the three days trying to create some of my own work, using the old postcards that I’ve bought as the base background images while forming digital composites with the images that I myself have taken on top. If I’m honest I was fairly pleased with the way in which the pieces turned out.

Thursday led to me having a tutorial with the tutors in order to seek approval for the direction in which I was taking the project forward. It proved to be quite informative, as she helped me to understand a way in which to look at my work conceptually in a contemporary scenario. We spoke about how the images are talking about the sense of time and memory. We feel like we see memories vividly but really over time they fade and some parts can become distorted. Memories of places are usually weighted negatively or positively depending on how the experience with the place in question went. Sometimes its possible to have ideas and memories blend into one another, as I for one tend not to think of memories as stills but rather in a more cinematic way, like replaying parts of a film. (I realise I used the word memories close to a thousand times in the last two sentences). Working in this form of montage I was wary of mimicking the style of the 1920’s-40’s Dadaist movement by artists such as a the previously written about John Heartfield or Hannah Hoch. That style appears to be very surreal and bizarre as you see many many images spliced together to create one larger piece of work. As much as I admire the work that was produced in that time period I wanted my own to be less busy visually, more sedate, with an air of understated majesty. I have been looking to mainly play on the way one vision can merge into another and have therefore been experimenting with the way that that can be achieved and I have found that using pathways and lines to be the most effective of doing so. As the pathway leads from past to a new present, the memories of a place get overwritten and replaced by the small incremental changes that occur in the world that surrounds us. In order to create my images I have decided to try and allow some elements of the older postcards images to flow through into my own images, and to make sure that there is a distinctive way of telling where one boundary of an image ends I decided to include the edge of the images so that there is always a faded square visible in the images to denote the separation.

Friday was music filled as we enjoyed the weather listened to some tunes. In the evening I had another badminton match, annoyingly it was against the team at the top of the table and we lost quite comfortably. So ends the winning streak of two weeks. I didn’t play anyway near to the standard that I wanted to either which was again annoying. After that defeat the only student way I could think of was to drown in the sorrows and so went out into town with some of the people from badminton. A good night was had by all. I don’t think you could ever class a night that includes table fussball as a bad one.

Yesterday was a glorious sunny day so a trip to the beach felt necessary. You would never have guessed that it was early march by the way the people were crammed onto Gylly beach. The evening entailed the badminton AGM, which is basically a way of making sure that the club continues in good hands next year. We elected new captains and what not, and I feel that the club will be even stronger next year.

My practitioner of the week is a man called John Goto. Goto creates montage photographic images that have a satirical edge to them. His work is not out and out seamless merging of two or three places but is instead fitted together in a far more obvious and noticeable manner. Yet as the viewer see’s the work they are immediately able to relate to the image and it suddenly doesn’t matter how obvious the combination may be, but rather focuses on how believable the situation is. The reason I personally like Goto’s work is down to the way in which he includes classical architecture into one of his projects. ‘Navigating by Hesperus’ looks at the way the world can be created through the power of imagination. He creates images of what he believes America looks like from previous imagery he has seen or literature that he has read. The results of this are really interesting to look at as we can see elements of American cities in the work and yet find it laughable at some of the inclusions that he puts in the work. There is a weird sense of juxtaposition in the images as we see modern qualities, through maybe the architecture, and the square digital, pixel-esque blocks, which are meant to represent the way in which the mind has gaps in the memory, or at least that’s what I’ve read them as, they could also be just a reference to the whole side of digital creation, reminding the viewer of the origins of the work.

However, my favourite series that he has done is one entitled ‘High Summer’, which is where I feel I have adopted the style of my current work from. The series is comprised of images that look at bringing in elements of early beautiful landscape painting while including modern land use elements too. The images for me are really balanced pieces that raise questions regarding the current state of the land we live in, while also reminding us of how magnificent it was, still is, and can be in the future. I’m particularly enamoured by the inclusion of the classical architecture as I said previously, as I see it as a strong addition to the work, and I personally don’t get tired of viewing it, as the buildings mirror the beauty of the landscape.

I’m going to include lots of images today, some from both of Goto’s projects I have just spoken about and some of own current work.

A big thank you to those of you still reading SIX MONTHS in since I started writing the blog.

Have a dandy week.

Adam