I thought a lot about the use of still life in art while coming up with my project. It’s something most artists have to engage with, during their education or just in practice. A common subject for a still life is a vase of flowers, but cut flowers are very inconsistent, unless you manage to capture them in a day, you won’t be looking at the same subject you were when you began. An example of this change can be seen in Rachel Ruysch’s painting A Still-life with Flowers
Rachel Ruysch, A Still-Life with Flowers. https://smarthistory.org/ruysch-flower-still-life/
Some of the flowers within the painting have a bright lifelike sense to them, while others seem droopy or brown. This could be the nature of the original subject, or it could be seen as a progression of time. A representation of how long Ruysch spent on the piece.
My piece explores that idea of a timeline by combining a series of images taken over the course of a week. Each image showcases a different state of the bouquet's livelihood, and layering them allows the viewer to see every aspect of that timeline, compared to the progressive nature of a painting or drawing. While creating the image, I degraded the quality of each photo by reducing the sizing while emailing the images to myself. This pulls in Hito Steyerl’s idea that The Poor Image is a protest, a protest of the value assigned to an image's resolution. After layering 5 of my 6 images together, I sent a copy of the draft back and forth between friends through Instagram messaging. Instagram is notorious for degrading photo quality, and it did exactly that.
First image sent via Instagram (left) , last image received via Instagram (right)
The image was passed around, redownloaded, screenshotted, and uploaded numerous times. This process blurred parts of the image and added noise that wasn’t previously there. Once I downloaded the final copy of the shared image, I layered my final image of the flowers on top of that. My final step in degrading the image was emailing it back to myself to finalize the cropping before uploading it to my blog.Hito Steyerl brings forth the idea that The Poor Image is something that defies the boundaries people have for art. My piece challenges a typical representation of a still-life. It showcases the time artists spend, and how fast that time can be lost. We might not take into account every hour spent working until it’s spread out in front of us. The degradation of the images creates a blur and a noise, similar to the blur our minds create as we spend hours of our lives creating a freezeframe of something that degrades naturally before we’re even done preserving it. This is the final image.
