The Georgia Straight - Visual Arts
Paulo Majano
By robin laurence
Publish Date: 16-Sep-2004
It's possible, Paulo Majano acknowledges, that his peripatetic early years conditioned his adult art. An interest in the dynamics between people and place, our relationship to the natural landscape and the built environment, and our longing to project ourselves from familiar to exotic locations--these themes recur in his art.
Born in El Salvador in 1966, Majano moved as a young child with his family to Mexico, the United States, and eventually Canada. In Montreal, where the Majanos settled in 1981, Paulo attended high school and acquired the first of his fine-art degrees. (He moved to Vancouver in 1992 and later completed an MFA at UBC.) "I grew up in different places and became used to that," he says simply, sitting in the Atelier Gallery, where a small selection of his work is on view. In his art, "that" seems to be less about cultural and geographical displacement than the dreamlike conjoining of disparate realities.
Majano's sweeping sensibilities are reflected in the range of media he chooses: for the past few years, his practice has alternated between painting and photography, and he has ventured into video. "I'm interested in the representational aspect of each process," he says.
They're also mutually influential. Majano's photographs--which include big, tall images of time and light shifting through the sky over Burrard Inlet; disorienting shots of model houses, streets, and cars that wobble between poles of fakery and authenticity; and a series of child's-eye views of Tatlow Park--are very painterly, with evocations that range from high realism to gestural abstraction. And his smaller paintings--of street scenes, still lifes, and still lifes that look like street scenes--are clearly based on snapshot-style photos. "That's a more recent approach for me--to let the aesthetic of the photograph influence the painting," he says. This aesthetic includes the effects of "bad" photography, such as blurring, colour shifts, and shafts and halos of light.
In his most recent solo show, at the Atelier Gallery last April, Majano exhibited both paintings and three short videos collectively titled Capriccio: Small Illusions. They make reference to the local film industry, to our sense of place, and to the way movies cater to our longing for escape and exoticism. Combining digital technology with the traditional film special-effects technique of matte painting, Majano has melded handmade, photographic, and video images to arrive at an artwork that resembles a moving painting with sound effects.
Capriccio serves up a quintessentially West Coast scene of joggers, bicyclists, and dog walkers at English Bay on a wet day, then juxtaposes a painting of the Duomo in Florence with a videotape of nighttime traffic in front of the Blockbuster video outlet at Broadway and Blenheim, and ends with a limbo-esque loop, in which a representation of a Yaletown condominium tower shifts from an image on a TV screen to an incongruous element in the Mexican colonial town of San Miguel de Allende, and back again. Not only does Majano explore the various ways in which, he says, "people fit into the landscape and circulate through the city", but he also evokes a condition of postmodern globalized culture. What should be a surreal impossibility becomes not merely likely but inevitable.
c Robin Laurence
Statement - Recent Work
Paulo Majano, February 2005
Ours is a world of images, where reality and its reflection increasingly share the same place in our imagination. I produce images and media works to reflect upon the ubiquitous flow of images that is so much a part of contemporary experience and to explore the processes that allow this imagery to exist virtually on the same plane as lived experiences and actual memories.
My video works, photographs, and paintings are inspired by the production techniques of popular media, such as film and print, and by the aesthetics of personal forms of image creation like the snapshot photograph. I am particularly interested in the incidental aspects of these forms, often focusing on the unseen elements of the process of image creation that are normally edited out before the final image joins the economy of representation. I also look at the unintended distortions that an image suffers before it is ready for public consumption. The side effects resulting from the mechanics of photography, film making and print media can, like the Freudian slip, reveal glimpses into the subconscious of a culture perpetually caught in its own gaze.
Special effects montage techniques for film, photographic snapshots, travel journals, and advertising media, have been starting points for recent projects. For example, the process of creating visual illusion in movies inspired the imagery and format of a recent exhibition. Viewers experienced a video of what appeared to be familiar city scenes, but were in fact manipulated views created by compositing filmed footage with painted backgrounds. Recreations of the photographs, location sketches, and matte paintings used in the creation of the finished illusion were presented along with the video, negating the immersive nature of this medium by surrounding the viewer with evidence of the laborious process lying behind the seemingly effortless realism of the moving pictures.
Capriccio
What separates cities?
In a world where the line between the real and the virtual is increasingly blurred, distances are bridged as much by the journey physically taking a traveler to a new destination as by the power of representation that conjures up an image in the mind. In Newton’s mechanical universe, distance could only be conquered through the physical journey, the real displacement undertaken to inhabit another place. In the Quantum universe, however, where uncertainty is a guiding principle and quasi-instant exchange is the norm, distances evaporate before the seduction of immersive imagery, which is experienced virtually in the mind. In such a universe, we have no need for the actual journey because every place is already here.
The post-modern condition, representing a turn away from modernism’s emphasis on reduction and synthesis and moving toward hybridism and juxtaposition, finds expression in the fabric of the city, where incongruity is commonplace and the aesthetic of the collage is a familiar one. A new notion of authenticity is at play here, one where architecture mines the past and the exotic for their aesthetic potential and film, mass media, and personal imagery refocus our grasp on the lived experience and physical surroundings, ultimately reshaping our sense of place.
The Project
The work Capriccio is a transformation of familiar views of the city in order to render the imaginary visible. The same methods that are used to create illusion in popular film serve as the starting point for this video and painting installation. Borrowing from the filmmaker’s craft by using matte paintings, the work adapts a technique normally used in movie special effects to bring together actual filmed footage with painted scenery, rendering familiar views of Vancouver transformed. In this ten-minute video, the matte painting technique is used to juxtapose video footage of three Vancouver locations with painted scenes from the English Bay area of Vancouver, Florence, Italy and San Miguel, Mexico.
The matte paintings used to produce this illusion are presented along with the video to contrast the seemingly effortless realism of the moving pictures against the laborious process necessary to create them. The paintings work as a counterpoint to the video, negating the dreamlike state of this immersive medium and bringing the viewer’s attention back to the physical.
The title of the work comes from the Italian word used for a form of painting popularized in the 18th century in which contemporary scenes and characters were combined with ancient buildings or exotic locales in highly detailed renderings. Practitioners of this form included the painters Canaletto and Bellotto, whose capriccios stand in contrast to the detailed depictions of urban life for which they are better known. As present-day versions of the capriccio, movies embody the same desire to make the imaginary seem palpable and real, unencumbered by the logic of time and distance.
Paintings from the
Camera Obscura
In 1833, on the shores of Lake of Como in Italy, after attempting to sketch from nature with “the smallest possible amount of success”, Henry Fox Talbot contemplated “…how charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images [from the Camera Obscura] to imprint themselves durably, and remain fixed upon the paper!” A few years later in February 1839, Talbot was the second person, after Louis Daguerre, to present a working method for producing photographic images to the public.
Nearly 200 years following the initial successful experiments where silver nitrates produced faint permanent images on paper, the fascination with the photograph’s capacity to possess its subject seemingly instantaneously, endures as a powerfully seductive vision of reality.
These paintings are an investigation of the illusion of photographic representation. Referencing historical photography and contemporary picture making, these images reinterpret examples of traditional and popular photographic genres. In these works, visual effects such as shifts in focus, colour distortions, and effects of exposure time become traces that reveal the mechanical and optical basis of the familiar photographic aesthetic, in order to explore the subjectivity of the photographic vision.
Rendered in paint, these effects reveal the elusiveness of a definitive, authoritative representation and the ephemeral nature of the material world, destined to be fully experienced only through repeated observation. I suggest the reductive nature of the photographic medium, as every photograph is inherently incomplete, each image inviting the creation of the next.
Paulo Majano, 2006
You are Here
The moment I arrived in Vancouver in 1992 I was struck by the people's relationship to the landscape, the way the city is inexorably linked to its physical place. The West Coast, the imaginary place associated with nature, a laid back attitude, and (at that time) boundless prosperity, was in reality a far richer place for its subtle contradictions, at once mundane and unique, in effect: a city.
These photographs record aspects of the city which have fascinated me from the beginning, as seen now from a point of familiarity. The three series in the exhibition document the landscape from the point of view of the city dweller.
"Burrard Inlet" is an ongoing series of photographs documenting the narrow stretch of water at the entry point to the city of Vancouver. Looking northwest from English Bay, these images document the urban activity on Burrard Inlet, looking out to the Strait of Georgia. Photographed regularly since August 2000 at different times of day, the images depict the constant change of the landscape, and the ubiquitous tankers, cruise ships, planes, and recreational boats, as urban activity negotiates a place for itself within it.
The series "Landscape" presents a view of the sky and a close up view of the ground simultaneously. A mirror reflects the sky, and structures overhead, collapsing foreground/background, top/bottom, into one plane. This is landscape in the city, truncated, negating a panoramic vista.
The aesthetic of the facades of office and residential buildings in Vancouver is the subject of the series "Structure-Windows". The rigidity of the architectural grid is counterbalanced by the unpredictable nature of human activity, it is invaded by the traces of the gestures and actions of individuals who bring an element of the personal to the ideal structure of the building.
Paulo Majano
September, 2001
Tatlow Park
Nine Photographs
This is a portrait of Tatlow Park in nine photographs. Taken from the path winding through this urban west coast park, these images record the juncture where natural growth and man-made experience of nature meet. The views observed on a walk through the park resolve themselves into images that hint to the world beyond as the natural patterns and colors evoke abstraction, expressiveness, and monumentality.
PM, September 2002
Tatlow Park - In Sam’s Forest
Nine Photographs
Trees fascinate my son. For the past few months we have often walked through Tatlow Park. He is enthralled by the patterns and colors as they resolve themselves into glimpses of the world; images that conjure up the fantastic can be found here, as well as abstractions, the sinister, and even the monumental. According to psychologists, a child’s first recognition of the visual world comes from the sight of contrasting forms and patterns. If intelligence can be defined at all, it must surely begin with the ability to make sense of patterns to grasp the abstract - musical, mathematical, and visual. For Sam that will come later, for now, he is fascinated by the view from below the trees as we walk the path winding through Tatlow Park.
Paulo Majano, September 2002
Interior/Exterior
Picturesque: “Term covering a set of attitudes toward landscape, both real and painted... neither serene nor awe-inspiring , but full of variety, curious details, and interesting textures.”
Realism: “...the rejection of conventionally beautiful objects, or of idealization, in favor of a more down to earth approach, often with a stress on low life or the activities of the common man.”
Oxford Dictionary of Art
These watercolour and pencil drawings embody the spirit of the collage, what Max Ernst called “the meeting of two separate realities in a plane that is foreign to them both”. These images document interior spaces where the man-made environment and the natural landscape are brought together by that most pictorial of architectural elements: the window. Interior and exterior views come together in the drawing to create a new object,“a plane foreign to them both”, ruled by its own logic and conventions.
These are the interiors as they appeared, ordered and serene, punctuated by the picture revealed in the negative space of the window - a montage of natural growth and rational organization, urban and rustic, reduction and exuberance.
PM
The Valley was presented simultaneously as an exhibition at the Michael Bjornson Gallery in Vancouver BC, in print, and as a web project.
Some have called the valley a place where monsters dwell. Indeed, in the valley the line
between seductive illusion and grotesque imitation is easily blurred. Few forms of depiction
elicit stronger positive and negative reactions than recreations of human appearance. At
different times in history, entities that mimic human beings have captured our collective
imagination in various forms: Frankenstein’s monster, human-like automatons, the cyborg
combining machine and human forms, and more recently virtual characters, have all been the
subjects of fascination, suspicion, as well as repulsion.
In 1970, Dr Masahiro Mori, a Japanese roboticist, sought to provide insight into the psychology
of human reaction to devices that physically mimic human form (robots). He proposed that, if
one were to compare similarity to human form against people’s response to human like
machines, one would find that a the reaction would be more positive as realism increased. But
then, paradoxically, as we approached nearly convincing human form, there would be a
dramatic reversal from a positive into a strongly negative response, a drop from acceptance
into repulsion. This is the valley - the valley of eeriness - or as it has come to be known, the
“Uncanny Valley”.
The concept has proven broad enough to be applicable to other human-like creations and has
been relevant in computer-generated imagery (CGI), and in other domains such as the design
of prosthetics. Dr. Mori’s idea that increased realism does not necessarily lead to increased
acceptance has been invoked those times when the furious pursuit of photo-realism in digital
actors for virtual applications has disastrously failed to gain acceptance - those times when
instead of meeting with a favorable reception these characters have generated unease.
The virtual, in the form of immersive environments, avatars, and virtual actors, represents a
new kind of relationship to representations of our selves. and it’s poised to inhabit a space
quite different from other forms of depiction. The virtual has quickly assumed the role of a
surrogate - a simulation able to inhabit the same space in the imagination as the “real” thing.
But what does our own perception of entities that mimic us reveal about our notions of “real”
and “image”, and in turn, about our own self-definition? The concept of abjection is useful here
– the theory that there is a space somewhere between subject and object. In Julia Kristeva’s
proposition of the term, something can be foreign yet familiar, perceived as both alive - and not
- at the same time.
The abject refers to an object cast outside the symbolic order, having once been a subject. One example is the reaction of being faced with a corpse, recognizable as human, but now eliciting a sense of unease. The abject defines our own status as (still) living subjects who reject manifestations of our own inevitable mortality. In the uncanny valley we confront something that we expect to be alive but is not, and find ourselves at a loss to reconcile its contradictions
Sigmund Freud referred to the uncanny as that class of frightening coming not from a dread of
the unknown but, in fact, from the feeling that something known and familiar has become
uncomfortably strange. Under what circumstances, though, does the familiar become
frightening? The conditions that create a feeling of uncanniness, according to Freud, relate to
the inability to reconcile being attracted to, yet repulsed by something at the same time.
Uncertainty (in this case whether one is seeing a living being or something that is in fact
inanimate) is at the root of these feelings of dissonance - of uncanniness.
© P Majano 2009
The Project
I propose to show projected videos and large digital images depicting renderings of two 3D computer-generated (CG) figures: a woman and a man. These works will not be shown simply as examples of the realism that can be achieved today, but are intended to create an ambiguous space, and the conditions for the uncanny, by maintaining for the viewers a sense of uncertainty as to the nature of what they are seeing.
I will show a three minute video projection of both figures looped to play continuously. I will use one data projector to project both videos next to each other on a long wall of the gallery (overall size approx. 36”x9’). The first video, still in progress at this time, depicts the CG woman standing with her eyes closed – the only movement and sound coming from her audible breathing (Submission Video 01). In the completed sequence the realism of the figures will begin to break down in the second half of the video - the sound and movement will progressively fall out of sync, the figure will momentarily change color and the facial features will morph through different ethnicities. The second video will be of the CGI man, similarly engaged in a subtle basic human action. I have chosen breathing for the first video since it is an iconic symbol – the breath of life.
The exhibition will also include two large inkjet prints (60”x60” each) - half-length renderings of the nude figures standing in front of a white background (Images 02 & 03). Both images and projections will be shown within the space of the gallery by using dimmed lighting overall and spotlights for the prints. Alternatively, the videos can also be shown on monitors.
In addition to the images for the project, I include with this submission documentation of previous and current work that also revolves around the construction of an ambiguous space. The 2004 multimedia project “Capriccio” delves into the idea of virtual presence by creating convincing urban scenes that are actually views from different cities brought together in one image by compositing filmed footage and painted scenes. Re-creations of the photographs, and matte paintings used in the creation of the finished illusion, were presented along with the video, negating the immersive nature of this medium by surrounding the viewer with evidence of the laborious process behind it (Images 5,6, 7 and video 02).
The images numbered 8 to 12 in the CD document an ongoing photographic project where familiar urban spaces are recreated with simple means using paper, hand made elements, and die cast cars, and photographed with a large format camera. Like a theatrical presentation, these photographs bring the viewer to an illusionistic space, recreating the basic structures of urban life in order to scrutinize it.
The House
Paulo Majano - Photographs
As both a photographer and a painter by training, my artwork is characterized by the use of multiple media to observe and reflect upon contemporary experience. In the past decade separate streams of my work have converged into imagery guided by the aesthetic of juxtaposition. My current projects draw from traditional and digital media to explore themes dealing with the boundary between the real and the imagined.
These scenes, recreated from ordinary private and public settings such as the family room, a street with speeding traffic, or the view from a window at night, are constructed using found elements, cardboard, and simple mechanisms to add motion. Printed without any digital manipulation, the illusion is restricted to the physical limitations of the constructed sets, and to the properties of the media used to record them.
These mediated images reduce typical settings of quotidian life to their basic structures and conventions, creating an illusionistic and equivocal space where the recognizable and habitual can be experienced anew.
PM
Paulo Majano
By robin laurence
Publish Date: 16-Sep-2004
It's possible, Paulo Majano acknowledges, that his peripatetic early years conditioned his adult art. An interest in the dynamics between people and place, our relationship to the natural landscape and the built environment, and our longing to project ourselves from familiar to exotic locations--these themes recur in his art.
Born in El Salvador in 1966, Majano moved as a young child with his family to Mexico, the United States, and eventually Canada. In Montreal, where the Majanos settled in 1981, Paulo attended high school and acquired the first of his fine-art degrees. (He moved to Vancouver in 1992 and later completed an MFA at UBC.) "I grew up in different places and became used to that," he says simply, sitting in the Atelier Gallery, where a small selection of his work is on view. In his art, "that" seems to be less about cultural and geographical displacement than the dreamlike conjoining of disparate realities.
Majano's sweeping sensibilities are reflected in the range of media he chooses: for the past few years, his practice has alternated between painting and photography, and he has ventured into video. "I'm interested in the representational aspect of each process," he says.
They're also mutually influential. Majano's photographs--which include big, tall images of time and light shifting through the sky over Burrard Inlet; disorienting shots of model houses, streets, and cars that wobble between poles of fakery and authenticity; and a series of child's-eye views of Tatlow Park--are very painterly, with evocations that range from high realism to gestural abstraction. And his smaller paintings--of street scenes, still lifes, and still lifes that look like street scenes--are clearly based on snapshot-style photos. "That's a more recent approach for me--to let the aesthetic of the photograph influence the painting," he says. This aesthetic includes the effects of "bad" photography, such as blurring, colour shifts, and shafts and halos of light.
In his most recent solo show, at the Atelier Gallery last April, Majano exhibited both paintings and three short videos collectively titled Capriccio: Small Illusions. They make reference to the local film industry, to our sense of place, and to the way movies cater to our longing for escape and exoticism. Combining digital technology with the traditional film special-effects technique of matte painting, Majano has melded handmade, photographic, and video images to arrive at an artwork that resembles a moving painting with sound effects.
Capriccio serves up a quintessentially West Coast scene of joggers, bicyclists, and dog walkers at English Bay on a wet day, then juxtaposes a painting of the Duomo in Florence with a videotape of nighttime traffic in front of the Blockbuster video outlet at Broadway and Blenheim, and ends with a limbo-esque loop, in which a representation of a Yaletown condominium tower shifts from an image on a TV screen to an incongruous element in the Mexican colonial town of San Miguel de Allende, and back again. Not only does Majano explore the various ways in which, he says, "people fit into the landscape and circulate through the city", but he also evokes a condition of postmodern globalized culture. What should be a surreal impossibility becomes not merely likely but inevitable.
c Robin Laurence
Statement - Recent Work
Paulo Majano, February 2005
Ours is a world of images, where reality and its reflection increasingly share the same place in our imagination. I produce images and media works to reflect upon the ubiquitous flow of images that is so much a part of contemporary experience and to explore the processes that allow this imagery to exist virtually on the same plane as lived experiences and actual memories.
My video works, photographs, and paintings are inspired by the production techniques of popular media, such as film and print, and by the aesthetics of personal forms of image creation like the snapshot photograph. I am particularly interested in the incidental aspects of these forms, often focusing on the unseen elements of the process of image creation that are normally edited out before the final image joins the economy of representation. I also look at the unintended distortions that an image suffers before it is ready for public consumption. The side effects resulting from the mechanics of photography, film making and print media can, like the Freudian slip, reveal glimpses into the subconscious of a culture perpetually caught in its own gaze.
Special effects montage techniques for film, photographic snapshots, travel journals, and advertising media, have been starting points for recent projects. For example, the process of creating visual illusion in movies inspired the imagery and format of a recent exhibition. Viewers experienced a video of what appeared to be familiar city scenes, but were in fact manipulated views created by compositing filmed footage with painted backgrounds. Recreations of the photographs, location sketches, and matte paintings used in the creation of the finished illusion were presented along with the video, negating the immersive nature of this medium by surrounding the viewer with evidence of the laborious process lying behind the seemingly effortless realism of the moving pictures.
Capriccio
What separates cities?
In a world where the line between the real and the virtual is increasingly blurred, distances are bridged as much by the journey physically taking a traveler to a new destination as by the power of representation that conjures up an image in the mind. In Newton’s mechanical universe, distance could only be conquered through the physical journey, the real displacement undertaken to inhabit another place. In the Quantum universe, however, where uncertainty is a guiding principle and quasi-instant exchange is the norm, distances evaporate before the seduction of immersive imagery, which is experienced virtually in the mind. In such a universe, we have no need for the actual journey because every place is already here.
The post-modern condition, representing a turn away from modernism’s emphasis on reduction and synthesis and moving toward hybridism and juxtaposition, finds expression in the fabric of the city, where incongruity is commonplace and the aesthetic of the collage is a familiar one. A new notion of authenticity is at play here, one where architecture mines the past and the exotic for their aesthetic potential and film, mass media, and personal imagery refocus our grasp on the lived experience and physical surroundings, ultimately reshaping our sense of place.
The Project
The work Capriccio is a transformation of familiar views of the city in order to render the imaginary visible. The same methods that are used to create illusion in popular film serve as the starting point for this video and painting installation. Borrowing from the filmmaker’s craft by using matte paintings, the work adapts a technique normally used in movie special effects to bring together actual filmed footage with painted scenery, rendering familiar views of Vancouver transformed. In this ten-minute video, the matte painting technique is used to juxtapose video footage of three Vancouver locations with painted scenes from the English Bay area of Vancouver, Florence, Italy and San Miguel, Mexico.
The matte paintings used to produce this illusion are presented along with the video to contrast the seemingly effortless realism of the moving pictures against the laborious process necessary to create them. The paintings work as a counterpoint to the video, negating the dreamlike state of this immersive medium and bringing the viewer’s attention back to the physical.
The title of the work comes from the Italian word used for a form of painting popularized in the 18th century in which contemporary scenes and characters were combined with ancient buildings or exotic locales in highly detailed renderings. Practitioners of this form included the painters Canaletto and Bellotto, whose capriccios stand in contrast to the detailed depictions of urban life for which they are better known. As present-day versions of the capriccio, movies embody the same desire to make the imaginary seem palpable and real, unencumbered by the logic of time and distance.
Paintings from the
Camera Obscura
In 1833, on the shores of Lake of Como in Italy, after attempting to sketch from nature with “the smallest possible amount of success”, Henry Fox Talbot contemplated “…how charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images [from the Camera Obscura] to imprint themselves durably, and remain fixed upon the paper!” A few years later in February 1839, Talbot was the second person, after Louis Daguerre, to present a working method for producing photographic images to the public.
Nearly 200 years following the initial successful experiments where silver nitrates produced faint permanent images on paper, the fascination with the photograph’s capacity to possess its subject seemingly instantaneously, endures as a powerfully seductive vision of reality.
These paintings are an investigation of the illusion of photographic representation. Referencing historical photography and contemporary picture making, these images reinterpret examples of traditional and popular photographic genres. In these works, visual effects such as shifts in focus, colour distortions, and effects of exposure time become traces that reveal the mechanical and optical basis of the familiar photographic aesthetic, in order to explore the subjectivity of the photographic vision.
Rendered in paint, these effects reveal the elusiveness of a definitive, authoritative representation and the ephemeral nature of the material world, destined to be fully experienced only through repeated observation. I suggest the reductive nature of the photographic medium, as every photograph is inherently incomplete, each image inviting the creation of the next.
Paulo Majano, 2006
You are Here
The moment I arrived in Vancouver in 1992 I was struck by the people's relationship to the landscape, the way the city is inexorably linked to its physical place. The West Coast, the imaginary place associated with nature, a laid back attitude, and (at that time) boundless prosperity, was in reality a far richer place for its subtle contradictions, at once mundane and unique, in effect: a city.
These photographs record aspects of the city which have fascinated me from the beginning, as seen now from a point of familiarity. The three series in the exhibition document the landscape from the point of view of the city dweller.
"Burrard Inlet" is an ongoing series of photographs documenting the narrow stretch of water at the entry point to the city of Vancouver. Looking northwest from English Bay, these images document the urban activity on Burrard Inlet, looking out to the Strait of Georgia. Photographed regularly since August 2000 at different times of day, the images depict the constant change of the landscape, and the ubiquitous tankers, cruise ships, planes, and recreational boats, as urban activity negotiates a place for itself within it.
The series "Landscape" presents a view of the sky and a close up view of the ground simultaneously. A mirror reflects the sky, and structures overhead, collapsing foreground/background, top/bottom, into one plane. This is landscape in the city, truncated, negating a panoramic vista.
The aesthetic of the facades of office and residential buildings in Vancouver is the subject of the series "Structure-Windows". The rigidity of the architectural grid is counterbalanced by the unpredictable nature of human activity, it is invaded by the traces of the gestures and actions of individuals who bring an element of the personal to the ideal structure of the building.
Paulo Majano
September, 2001
Tatlow Park
Nine Photographs
This is a portrait of Tatlow Park in nine photographs. Taken from the path winding through this urban west coast park, these images record the juncture where natural growth and man-made experience of nature meet. The views observed on a walk through the park resolve themselves into images that hint to the world beyond as the natural patterns and colors evoke abstraction, expressiveness, and monumentality.
PM, September 2002
Tatlow Park - In Sam’s Forest
Nine Photographs
Trees fascinate my son. For the past few months we have often walked through Tatlow Park. He is enthralled by the patterns and colors as they resolve themselves into glimpses of the world; images that conjure up the fantastic can be found here, as well as abstractions, the sinister, and even the monumental. According to psychologists, a child’s first recognition of the visual world comes from the sight of contrasting forms and patterns. If intelligence can be defined at all, it must surely begin with the ability to make sense of patterns to grasp the abstract - musical, mathematical, and visual. For Sam that will come later, for now, he is fascinated by the view from below the trees as we walk the path winding through Tatlow Park.
Paulo Majano, September 2002
Interior/Exterior
Picturesque: “Term covering a set of attitudes toward landscape, both real and painted... neither serene nor awe-inspiring , but full of variety, curious details, and interesting textures.”
Realism: “...the rejection of conventionally beautiful objects, or of idealization, in favor of a more down to earth approach, often with a stress on low life or the activities of the common man.”
Oxford Dictionary of Art
These watercolour and pencil drawings embody the spirit of the collage, what Max Ernst called “the meeting of two separate realities in a plane that is foreign to them both”. These images document interior spaces where the man-made environment and the natural landscape are brought together by that most pictorial of architectural elements: the window. Interior and exterior views come together in the drawing to create a new object,“a plane foreign to them both”, ruled by its own logic and conventions.
These are the interiors as they appeared, ordered and serene, punctuated by the picture revealed in the negative space of the window - a montage of natural growth and rational organization, urban and rustic, reduction and exuberance.
PM
The Valley was presented simultaneously as an exhibition at the Michael Bjornson Gallery in Vancouver BC, in print, and as a web project.
Some have called the valley a place where monsters dwell. Indeed, in the valley the line
between seductive illusion and grotesque imitation is easily blurred. Few forms of depiction
elicit stronger positive and negative reactions than recreations of human appearance. At
different times in history, entities that mimic human beings have captured our collective
imagination in various forms: Frankenstein’s monster, human-like automatons, the cyborg
combining machine and human forms, and more recently virtual characters, have all been the
subjects of fascination, suspicion, as well as repulsion.
In 1970, Dr Masahiro Mori, a Japanese roboticist, sought to provide insight into the psychology
of human reaction to devices that physically mimic human form (robots). He proposed that, if
one were to compare similarity to human form against people’s response to human like
machines, one would find that a the reaction would be more positive as realism increased. But
then, paradoxically, as we approached nearly convincing human form, there would be a
dramatic reversal from a positive into a strongly negative response, a drop from acceptance
into repulsion. This is the valley - the valley of eeriness - or as it has come to be known, the
“Uncanny Valley”.
The concept has proven broad enough to be applicable to other human-like creations and has
been relevant in computer-generated imagery (CGI), and in other domains such as the design
of prosthetics. Dr. Mori’s idea that increased realism does not necessarily lead to increased
acceptance has been invoked those times when the furious pursuit of photo-realism in digital
actors for virtual applications has disastrously failed to gain acceptance - those times when
instead of meeting with a favorable reception these characters have generated unease.
The virtual, in the form of immersive environments, avatars, and virtual actors, represents a
new kind of relationship to representations of our selves. and it’s poised to inhabit a space
quite different from other forms of depiction. The virtual has quickly assumed the role of a
surrogate - a simulation able to inhabit the same space in the imagination as the “real” thing.
But what does our own perception of entities that mimic us reveal about our notions of “real”
and “image”, and in turn, about our own self-definition? The concept of abjection is useful here
– the theory that there is a space somewhere between subject and object. In Julia Kristeva’s
proposition of the term, something can be foreign yet familiar, perceived as both alive - and not
- at the same time.
The abject refers to an object cast outside the symbolic order, having once been a subject. One example is the reaction of being faced with a corpse, recognizable as human, but now eliciting a sense of unease. The abject defines our own status as (still) living subjects who reject manifestations of our own inevitable mortality. In the uncanny valley we confront something that we expect to be alive but is not, and find ourselves at a loss to reconcile its contradictions
Sigmund Freud referred to the uncanny as that class of frightening coming not from a dread of
the unknown but, in fact, from the feeling that something known and familiar has become
uncomfortably strange. Under what circumstances, though, does the familiar become
frightening? The conditions that create a feeling of uncanniness, according to Freud, relate to
the inability to reconcile being attracted to, yet repulsed by something at the same time.
Uncertainty (in this case whether one is seeing a living being or something that is in fact
inanimate) is at the root of these feelings of dissonance - of uncanniness.
© P Majano 2009
The Project
I propose to show projected videos and large digital images depicting renderings of two 3D computer-generated (CG) figures: a woman and a man. These works will not be shown simply as examples of the realism that can be achieved today, but are intended to create an ambiguous space, and the conditions for the uncanny, by maintaining for the viewers a sense of uncertainty as to the nature of what they are seeing.
I will show a three minute video projection of both figures looped to play continuously. I will use one data projector to project both videos next to each other on a long wall of the gallery (overall size approx. 36”x9’). The first video, still in progress at this time, depicts the CG woman standing with her eyes closed – the only movement and sound coming from her audible breathing (Submission Video 01). In the completed sequence the realism of the figures will begin to break down in the second half of the video - the sound and movement will progressively fall out of sync, the figure will momentarily change color and the facial features will morph through different ethnicities. The second video will be of the CGI man, similarly engaged in a subtle basic human action. I have chosen breathing for the first video since it is an iconic symbol – the breath of life.
The exhibition will also include two large inkjet prints (60”x60” each) - half-length renderings of the nude figures standing in front of a white background (Images 02 & 03). Both images and projections will be shown within the space of the gallery by using dimmed lighting overall and spotlights for the prints. Alternatively, the videos can also be shown on monitors.
In addition to the images for the project, I include with this submission documentation of previous and current work that also revolves around the construction of an ambiguous space. The 2004 multimedia project “Capriccio” delves into the idea of virtual presence by creating convincing urban scenes that are actually views from different cities brought together in one image by compositing filmed footage and painted scenes. Re-creations of the photographs, and matte paintings used in the creation of the finished illusion, were presented along with the video, negating the immersive nature of this medium by surrounding the viewer with evidence of the laborious process behind it (Images 5,6, 7 and video 02).
The images numbered 8 to 12 in the CD document an ongoing photographic project where familiar urban spaces are recreated with simple means using paper, hand made elements, and die cast cars, and photographed with a large format camera. Like a theatrical presentation, these photographs bring the viewer to an illusionistic space, recreating the basic structures of urban life in order to scrutinize it.
The House
Paulo Majano - Photographs
As both a photographer and a painter by training, my artwork is characterized by the use of multiple media to observe and reflect upon contemporary experience. In the past decade separate streams of my work have converged into imagery guided by the aesthetic of juxtaposition. My current projects draw from traditional and digital media to explore themes dealing with the boundary between the real and the imagined.
These scenes, recreated from ordinary private and public settings such as the family room, a street with speeding traffic, or the view from a window at night, are constructed using found elements, cardboard, and simple mechanisms to add motion. Printed without any digital manipulation, the illusion is restricted to the physical limitations of the constructed sets, and to the properties of the media used to record them.
These mediated images reduce typical settings of quotidian life to their basic structures and conventions, creating an illusionistic and equivocal space where the recognizable and habitual can be experienced anew.
PM