Rachel Verhaaren Photography

Continuing with some more consistent posts, here are some images from my studio lighting class this past semester with the wonderful Jonathan Trundle. Normally in studio electives we will have some preliminary assignments to master techniques and then a larger final project that is more conceptual. In studio lighting, however, we chose to work through a variety of techniques during the entirety of the semester and compile a portfolio of examples for our final.

So here are some images from studio lighting!

It turns out that my statement yesterday was incorrect. I have not finished showing all of my work from the end of junior year. I know, I’m a horrible person. I apologize.

This is my Body in Photography final. While I soon hope to have this and other more developed bodies of work on the portfolio section of the site, they’re being blog’d in the mean time.

During my time at MICA I have developed a certain affinity for plaster gauze, as seen in my work in my Accumulation and Metaphor class. So for Body I chose to work with the medium again. I cast certain sections of my body and then posed them in various positions within the confines of my apartment. The work talks about isolation and the removal of identity while still capturing a gesture or personality. I also had a lot of fun covering myself in plaster gauze. Enjoy!

So I’m still very much behind on keeping my blog up to date on the work I’ve been doing. Another semester has passed and I haven’t finished showing work from the semester before. Well, here it is, the last of the work from spring semester 2010.

In the photo dept we have to take a junior seminar class which functions similarly to senior thesis in the sense that we work on a single body of work for the whole semester. For my project I chose to finally culminate all of the work I’ve been doing with optics and the way I see without the aid of glasses or contacts. Below is my artist statement for the project:

Transformation, change, perception. When the simplest of differences can alter your experience.

I have taken photographs of objects and instances that I encounter daily, usually without notice. The one element that has been altered is that I am seeing them without the full capacity of sight. By removing my glasses I have the opportunity to reinvent the world.

The text paired with the images allows the viewer a glimpse into the new reality I have created. Without the words the image is a blurred version of the commonplace but with them, they can understand how impaired sight is not always a hindrance, but a way to heighten our interpretation of the everyday.

And some of the images:

while i am specifically a photography major at the Maryland Institute College of Art, all students at the college are required to take a few studio courses outside of their major. i participated in two theatrical productions for credit and my other two classes were taken within the fibers department. after the required introductory class, i chose to take ‘accumulation and metaphor’ taught by jessica braiterman; a class focused on the variety of ways we experience collecting and the meaning behind it.

because of the time needed to establish any sort of collection, we were given only three assignments during the course of the semester. we were kept very busy, however, with great field trips, short readings and informative in-class demonstrations that related to the coursework. the three assignments were as follows:

accumulation in response to the natural world

accumulation in response to the human condition

a collection of your choosing (the longest of the three- this project spanned the entire semester and was designed to be the most extensive and thoughtful)

i chose to focus on a certain material that i have worked with in the past and has certain significance to me. plaster gauze is an extremely versatile medium and i wanted to explore what is has to offer.

natural world

my response to the natural world began by looking at coral and sea life as well as the human body. while the human condition is another assignment, the human body itself is a natural entity that has evolved and adapted over time. i chose to cast my fingers in plaster gauze and stack them in an almost honeycomb formation. the structure they became speaks to the order that sometimes occurs within the chaos of nature. the plaster gauze was able to cast a general shape (a tapered tube) while also removing some of the evidence that it was my finger.

human condition

balloons have an important role within the human condition. we find them festive and use them on a multitude of occasions. again playing with plaster gauze i wanted to remove and almost negate the identity of the balloon. while i did hang the balloons on the wall to allude to their desired height, they are heavy. they droop and sag. this is not how we know balloons to act. the color and surface of the objects are cold and pock-marked, not bright, shiny and welcoming.

collection

these plaster gauze strips were created as a collection of anxieties. the gauze, used to mend broken bones acted as a band-aid-like coping mechanism for unfortunate occurrences, big and small, that happened within the span of a semester. the grid arrangement, covering a wall floor to ceiling, gives the viewer a glimpse into the overwhelming nature of the events, especially when complied and displayed.

** a de-installation shot. the last balloon was too high and much too artsy to take down. it begged to be photographed and left for the next people that entered the room**

when i first came to MICA the photography class i was most excited to take was alternative processes. i came out of the class not necessarily thrilled with what i learned or what i had produced but i still think it was an important class to have experienced.

we worked on a project that threw me for a bit of a loop at first- a negative exchange during which i was handed abstract pinhole images i had no interest in. but i was on this circle kick and i think these turned out ok. they’re paper negative collages scanned to create digital negatives and then contact printed with the van dyke brown process.

we also had to make images from our own negatives. i printed digital negatives and suspended them by pins away from a cream piece of mat board. these are just the images sans fancy display stuff but i think you get the idea.

for our final i chose to scan 8mm film that my mother gave me. the film is from when my grandparents were young, my family has copied the film onto VHS so i could do whatever i wanted with it. i enlarged the images and made wintergreen transfers of two sections of the film, sixteen frames each since 8mm film runs sixteen frames per second. these are just some selections from one of them. i think it is my grandmother but i’m not sure.

Lynn would give us an assignment and two weeks in which to complete it. we had one week to work on the project on our own before she presented slides of images that related to the assignment. then we would have another week to work before critique. i thought this was a great way to have us think for ourselves as well as showing us inspiring images from other photographers.

so here are some images from the class!

single image narrative

multiple image narrative
*printed twice, viewed both backwards and forwards*

final
images presented in a handmade book

agh! sorry for the image overload! i’m really going to try to update this regularly so it won’t just be a million pictures at once.