FINAL PROJECT: Deliberate Color

Kyle Brown | 110631709 | 12/12/17

“PART TWO”

IDEA

Part Two is the result of exploration into the photographing of shape, color, and texture. I had originally set out to photograph simply color (see results below), but I was unsatisfied by the lack of shape and texture. The images I was creating were too simple. I then began photographing matte-black poles to break up the color and add texture (see below). I was happy with these results, but they felt too similar to past works I had created, at least in the formal sense. I wanted to photograph a different subject that was not so straight and predictable as a metal pole.

After recently creating my project Tape Fabric Light, I was curious to see how I could continue photographing duct tape to achieve different results. I recycled the tape from that installation and created a large tape ball consisting of all 600 yards of duct tape I previously used. Since this past project served as an inspiration, I wanted to make this a physical continuation of that project by physically using the same tape.

As for the color, I stuck mainly with primary colors. The blue does not come through as much is the static images, but it apparent in the video component. The choice of color has no specific metaphorical meaning. My way of using color was to deliberately build shape and form. It did not matter what values these colors took as, as long as their was a distinction between colors to differentiate shape and form.

TECHNICAL

I shot the tape by hanging it from a pole so it hung, suspended in mid air. I then used three different lights to illuminate the tape. There were two equally powered key lights directly left and right of the tape mass. The left side was covered by a blue gel and the right was covered by an light, mint green gel. I combined multiple gels to achieve the proper colors. I knew in post I wanted to invert the image to abstract the textures, so I shot with the blue and green colors in order to properly achieve the final red and yellow colors. The final light was directly facing the front of the tape. It was modified with a snoot to only provide a small amount of fill light. This light was not altered with a gel. It was left natural to achieve some areas of the tape’s regular color. In the post-processing stage, I inverted the image and used a color doge filter to distort the original images. The filtering basically made the already blocky texture of the tape separate into even more solid blocks of color and shape.

For the Video, I used one static image I had taken of the tape mass as a whole. I animated the levels of the image which caused different parts of the tape to appear and disappear through my system of filters. The video takes on an endless loop, repeating between the three primary colors of blue, red, and yellow.

RESEARCH/REFERENCES

I looked at a few different artists for inspiration. I started out by looking at the works of Carmen Herrera. Her paintings are simple and rely on shape and color to create compositions. She was my original source of inspiration. I wanted to go further by adding texture to my pieces. Another artist I looked at was Jill Greenberg and her Painting series. This series was created by photographing liquid paint. I was drawn to her sleek style and use of color to create vibrant, minimal photographs. I also was looking at the works of Walead Beshty. He also created works through the minimal use of color, specifically overlaying transparencies to alter the final color output. Again, I wanted to further my work by adding in a component of texture rather than flat shapes.