New Beginnings

Obviously I have taken a lot of time off from blogging. I needed a break after the huge amount of work that culminated into my thesis. This summer was great. I have not really been shooting except for jobs, and I got to spend relaxing days with my now 5 year old who will be starting kindergarten in a week!!

A lot has changed for me. I am now a photographer for Bella Baby Photography. Thats pretty awesome because I get to take pictures of newborns. :) I started my own business back in May, so Joy Malone Photography is official. Perhaps most importantly I am now an Adjunct Professor at St. John's University. With all of that, I will still do showings of my night work as much as possible. I am also in the beginning stages of planning my next fine art photography project.

As I begin this new chapter in my life and in my photography I promise to blog much much more!!



Should you be in the NY area on September 11th, 2011 stop by the opening reception to my show. Here is the press release: http://www.greenburghartsandculture.org/

Talk to you soon,
Joy :)


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Perception

In my class this week we are having a discussion on perception of the artwork/piece and how viewers react to work. Here is my contribution:

I think my imagery grabs peoples attention within the first few moments they see it, however I keep getting people questioning whether or not it is art. I have not shown many people my thesis work, so these comments came mostly in response to my NYC @ night stuff. The last 4 months or so of last year and the first month and a half of this year I had my work up on a pretty regular basis here in New Rochelle, in Chelsea in Manhattan, and Harlem. I think people look at me, and then question whether or not it is art. I do not dress crazy, I am no longer all pierced up, I am always nice and gracious when I meet people, but I find dialogue about my work to be tedious. I often feel socially awkward and hate public speaking.. I am learning to get over that, but somewhere I am not being artsy enough or something. The reasons I shoot are wrapped around the notions of death, global warming, apocalypse, cruelty of time, beauty of now, questions of reality, science and philosophy, and scary world news stories etc etc. I often feel odd engaging people in this level of conversation. I am socially uncomfortable sharing that side of myself in public. So I think people think I am just shooting pretty colors.
I took an anthropology course here at AAU, and I remember an essay where a woman recounted the friendly empty American social interactions. We are polite on the surface, but the meanings of our words and the meanings of our interactions mean 2 different things. We say hello, how are you? We don't really want to know, and it is hard for me at art openings to become the person who answers truthfully.
So in saying this perception is everything. It starts with whatever the viewer sees first. Artist, building art is housed in, wall composition, and then the piece itself. Everyone is different and so what happens when one is alone with the piece is personal to them. I think so many people have come to understand the art world as exclusionary and do not understand once they choose to engage in it their vote counts too. The idea of the sensitive viewer is a device used to make others feel that because they do not appreciate a piece it is not the piece it is them. Yes it is true that a piece I do not like today I may like tomorrow, but it is also true I may never like the piece.

Also here is last weeks thesis image:

Inspiration

I have been asked a lot lately what inspires me. In conversation I tend to get tongue tied because there are too many things to name. I figured that I would start to share some of my biggest influences here. My inspiration comes to me from everything, I am inspired by books, documentaries, movies, events, colors, light, mood, etc etc.. So as I am consciously inspired by things I will add them to this blog.

Perhaps more than anything else the environment really ignites something within me. I was a part of a group called Earth Force as a child and we flew to Washington D.C. to meet Al Gore before he was V.P. I was also a Girl Scout and so a love of the outdoors was cultivated in me early. I also grew up loving science and actually started college as a biology major, with the intent of becoming an obstetrician, however at 17, the age I started college, I was not interested in devoting the necessary time to chemistry that it would have taken for me to pursue that path. I digress, this documentary on the environment entitled HOME is one of my favorite documentaries for many reasons, the narrative is brilliant and the cinematography is visually delicious. If you find yourself wanting to watch a movie please watch this. It is amazing.

Here's where you can see it for free on youtube.

If you do watch it, please let me know what you think. This movie is a heavy influence in my thesis work.

This weeks Thesis picture/hw assignment

What I got out of Collingwood's theory on art was this idea that art is the expression of emotion. The artist has some inner issue/problem/feeling/desire etc etc that he/she wants to communicate and art is the accurate communication of that feeling. I think that Collingwood is much more successful in his theories then Bell was however, I think they both missed the mark in that art is more of an ideal or virtue. It is indefinable and yet it is.

With that in mind I set out to shoot an image that would clarify my deepest emotions or at least illustrate them. I think overall I am obsessed with philosophy, that was my major as an undergrad and with that I am always questioning everything, especially existence and reality. Perhaps my biggest drivers are the feelings that I associate with death ie. primal fear/embracing/curiosity/hatred/ultimate release. I tried to illustrate my feeling of being set adrift in life with the rolling of the landscape. I also wanted to show a pattern with the graves from an unsettling viewpoint. I wanted it to seem so uniform and neat, this idea of death in a grid on a rolling landscape. Also the grave I focused on was my grandparents and in that this picture was very personal for me to take. My grandmother who lived with my family from my birth until her death in 2005 is buried here and it was a very interesting experience being alone there at night and not feeling the nervousness I would have expected but instead an odd warmth and comfort.

It's been awhile...

Ok so I took a bit of a hiatus from my blog but I figure I need to start posting more... I had a lets say very interesting and eye opening winter break, and it is part of the reason I have not posted.

I figure with the new semester underway and in what feels like FULL SWING that I might post my thesis work as I complete it weekly to get feedback.. here is this weeks image... my focus was on form as defined by Clive Bell.

For this image I wanted to shoot nature with man's imprint. From far away this is a scene of trees clustered together in a snowy park somewhere at the water's edge. Up close the footprints in the snow become clear and it becomes a scene that many people enjoyed recently. The houses become clear through the trees and the colors (I hope) show an unnatural color looming on the horizon, where all the streetlights are causing an orange haze on the horizon.

When reading Bell's theory on how all official art work displays significant form, I realized that my thesis fits within the framework of Bell's theory on art being significant form because of what is said on pg 18 of "The Art Question". Basically Cezanne's work is an ideal model for Bell's theory of significant form because Cezanne does not sacrifice form for nature but actually does the exact opposite and sacrifices nature for form. My thesis does exactly this in 2 obvious areas, where if I conversely focused on nature over form I would have compiled a completely different set of imagery thus far.

The first example of where form is more a priority then nature is in my depiction of 360 degrees. I am showing my environments not as a smooth transition, or dome that wraps around on itself but instead as 6 separate images within a flat panoramic where form dictates how the shots are ordered.

The second area is in my treatment of color/or the night's lighting. I am obviously not showing the scene as it appears naturally to the naked eye, I am instead opening the shadows to my discretion and dimming the bright areas once again to my discretion and showing the different areas/objects in the images within the color palettes I choose. I am also over saturating the colors to give a feeling of hyper-reality. The only kind of reality I have ever known and suspect most of my generation/American peers has ever known. This reality where you exist alongside or in the same construct as facebook, terrorist attacks, satellite's, Oprah/Gates, global warming, swine flu, Ipods, Disney, Nickelodeon, MTV, Tsunamis, kids starving in Africa (India, Korea, Bangkok, South America, down the street), where the priorities it would seem are in keeping up with the Jonses, being brainwashed that aging is bad, fat is bad, #3's are good (McD's), alongside Paris Hilton, 9/11, AIDS, Cancer, cell phones, youtube, History, Science, Dieting, Math, E=MC2, hug a tree, serial killers, Nuclear threats, asteroids, the holocaust in this culture nearing 2012... I could go on but fear I went on too long here already.. regardless you get my drift.. what do you focus on? When do you start mistaking justified personal fears for conspiracy theories and predictions for prophecy, is our destiny really written? could be. Or it could be that just one text of trillions made it through until today, and maybe it is just a work of fiction (talking about Nostradamus).. anyway I digress, the coloring of my images, obviously does not illustrate all of that, however the coloring does illustrate my notion of a hyper-reality, where you can seek knowledge in almost any direction and satiate yourself, and the more and more you gain obviously the more learned become, however, once you pass a certain capacity of knowledge the very structures laid out before you become more and more false, and the less the nature of things matters visually, visually the flat piece becomes about creative composition and how well the artist does this.

And with that I will stop. I do not want to ramble too much.

My Thesis Work this semester

Ok so here goes my second post...

I am working on my thesis for my MFA in photography and thought that it might be of interest to some exactly what the process is when one is working on their thesis. Today my final was due for my directed study class. It consisted of having to hand in a professional artist resume, a concise artist statement (I have a hard time with concise anything), and 10 images that I felt were the best that I created this semester. I created about 17 six panel pieces this semester. So anyway here is without further ado some images from the final 10, with my artistic statement as well as my artist resume. Hope these can be of help to any aspiring or emerging artists out there as to what is expected of you. I will let you know what grade I receive on this work when the grades come in, in a few days.






Artistic Statement:

The visual subject matter of my thesis is the suburbs where I grew up and now currently reside. The meaning of the work, however, is still something I am struggling to define. I have come to a point where I see that my thesis is more about how the suburbs of Westchester NY are this familiar place of comfort for me, which I am no longer finding comfortable.

Growing up, the American dream for me was a reality, and for various reasons personal and impersonal this reality no longer exists as it did for me just a few years ago. The comfort-induced state of ignorant bliss I grew up with is now replaced with the thoughts of someone who is rejecting this culture of consumption the way an organ recipient might reject a new heart. I need it, it is of me and vital to my survival, but my very DNA does not agree with the foreign body and wants to do away with it.



My thesis imagery is about the fracturing of my youth before my very eyes. I am torn between my foundations vs. my current beliefs. Torn by the knowledge that places like this, the American suburb, are one of the main reasons for so many of the worlds problems. We are alive in precarious times, and having witnessed the last decade on TV, I am no longer able to sit back and consume. Reality TV, new clothes, and technology no longer pacify me. I am realizing time is a precious commodity and the large majority of the free time that the American dream has provided its people has been wasted, and that is what I think is one of the direct causes of what we are seeing today.




My 6 panel pieces are quite literally the environments of my personal experiences within my own American dream. My pieces are 360 degrees of these fleeting moments in these all encompassing environments captured, as much as I can capture anything, and then torn at a few seams and laid out flat before me to put back together again.


Art Resume

Joy Malone
Fine Art Photographer
914.879.5265 • JoyMPhoto@gmail.com • www.JoyMalone.com


Education
2010 – MFA in Photography from Academy of the Arts University, San Francisco CA
2005 – BA in Philosophy from St. John’s University, Jamaica NY


Selected Solo Exhibitions
2010:
• Billies Black Restaurant Harlem NY - Current night work (Jan 29 - Feb 28)


Selected Group Exhibitions
2009:
• New Century Artists, Inc. New York NY – “NRAA in NYC” (Nov 3 - 14)
• Avalon Apartment Complex New Rochelle NY – “New Rochelle Home Tour” (Oct 21 – Dec 10)
• New Rochelle Library New Rochelle NY – “94th Annual Open Juried Exhibition” (Sep 12 - Oct 24)
• Gallery 542 New Rochelle NY – “Urban Magic” (Sep 12 -?)
• New Rochelle Library New Rochelle NY – “Jules Bauer Award Show” (Mar 27 - ?)

2008:
• New Rochelle Library New Rochelle NY – “93rd Annual Open Juried Exhibition” (Sep 20 - Oct 18)
• New Rochelle Library New Rochelle NY – “Jules Bauer Award Show”

2005:
• New Rochelle Library New Rochelle NY – “90th Annual Open Juried Exhibition” (Sep 17 - Oct 15)

2004:
• St. John’s University Jamaica NY – Student Show (Apr – May)
• The Jean Monet Fiap Paris France – “Documenting Paris” (Aug 24 - ?)


Work History
6/09 – 8/09 Mount Vernon Family YMCA Day Camp Mount Vernon, NY
Seasonal Photography Instructor (Summer Camp)
• Taught children to shoot and develop B&W film
• Taught children to print images using the wet darkroom
• Organized exhibition of their prints in a show for their parents

6/01 – 8/07 Girl Scouts of Westchester Putnam Pleasantville, NY
Seasonal Photography Instructor (Summer Camp)
• Built and developed a darkroom and photography program
• Taught the children to shoot and develop B&W film
• Taught children to print images using the wet darkroom
• Organized exhibition of their prints in a show for their parents


10/05 – 4/06 Foxton’s West Long Branch, NJ
Protographer
• Blueprinted homes for sale
• Shot interior shots and exterior shots for the website and home brochures

8/05 – 10/05 Davis Studio Mamaroneck, NY
School Photographer
• Shot portraits of children and teenagers
• Set up and maintained lighting equipment

10/03 – 4/05 Ritz Camera Scarsdale, NY
Key Lab Tech/Sales Associate
• Printed Photo orders in 1 hour or less
• Performed intermediate level maintenance on the film and photo processors
• Kept the stores books and sales records


Awards/Honors
2009:
• 2nd Place in the Photography Category “94th Annual Open Juried Exhibition”
• NY State Assembly Certificate of Merit for “Urban Magic” group show
• Certificate of Recognition for documenting the Mount Vernon Family YMCA’s Playground build
• Honorable Mention in “Photographer Forum’s 29th Annual Spring Photography Contest
• Best in Show & 1st Place in Photography Category “Jules Bauer Award Show”

2008:
• 1st Place in Photography Category “93rd Annual Open Juried Exhibition”
• Honorable Mention “Jules Bauer Award Show”

2004:
• Ritz Camera Award for Lab Excellence
• Honorable Mention in the “2004 North American Amateur Photography Competition”


Published Works
2009:
• “Best of Photography 2009” image included is 42nd Street from NYC at Night series


Memberships
• New Rochelle Art Association from 2008 - present

Here I go...

Everywhere I look I see blog this and blog that... I do not have any particular blogs that I follow on a regular, so I am kind of jumping right into this with no real ideas of what I am supposed to do.

A little about me I am a photographer who shoots at night mostly. I am in the final year of my MFA studies. I reside in NY close to NYC, I am a 29 year old single mother, and love all things art, philosophy, and history.

I guess ultimately this blog will be about photography, art, documentaries, etc etc all the things that I think matter, all the things I think are worth blogging about, I guess that's what all blogs are aren't they. I will post some of my personal work here, and the work of others.

Here we go...