He has also lived in New York where he worked for photographer and film maker David LaChapelle and collaborated on several projects with Cuban American artist Anthony Goicolea.
Richard Orjis looks into Nature/culture, at different stages creating his own "cult". He also digs into surface vs. substance. With these themes creative control and manipulation is a very important part of the process of making his works.
A flow chart Richard showed us: explains how everthing kind of fits together and works into each other...
Nature – culture – spells- rituals - sacred objects - social groupings- art - religion- science,
-western art history – pop culture – film, music, fashion, television, magazine…
On the work oh His that was "cult-like"...
Orjis states he tries to work 'intuitively'…
This below work looks into fatherhood, linking it with art history.
Looking into art history, like the famous "Madonna and child"… mother and child. Maternal.
It is also inspired by heavy metal album covers. This work he has also manipulated on photshop. The candles weren't actually in the photo. Manipulation is a big part of Richard Orjis' work as I will go into later.
"All his work is designed to illustrated non-existent, shadowy social groups, engaged in ambiguous activity. They appear to be a group of Europeans who have gone feral in a tropical jungle. Covered wholly or partially in mud, they stare dully out at the camera through elaborate necklaces and garlands of brightly coloured, sensuous flowers. Phallic and vulval forms dominate the arrangements (pitcher plants and orchids). The figures are passive and unthreatening, but also generate frissons of evil and madness and exert a horrid fascination." - Quote on Richard Orjis from Wikipedia.
The work of Richard Orjis' graduation work was "My Empire of Dust".
Using mud and water, he did series of works on paper depicting semi-clad figures. Some scenes were set in woodland, and the heads of some figures seemed to have morphed into 'grotesque' wood galls while others wore helmets. In this work He looks into beauty vs grotesque and also just using nature as a medium, which is a recurring theme throughout Orjis' works.
Another cool work was where Orjis got 60 people to be involved in the work at an art gallery in Christchurch. Involving rubbing themselves in coal and getting their photo's taken all looking in the same directions…... He would then go on to manipulate the photos on photoshop and add a red mask - which he says "seperates them from reality"... "Coal, it’s a fuel, but it could be diamonds…"
Another statement I heard him make was something like "The coal of Christchurch..bringing up stuff from under the surface..."
This exhibition also involved a car fulled with flowers from local botanical gardens,creating this idea of either a hertz (symbolizing life and death), or a traveling greenhouse..
All of his ideas seem to be linked between nature and "cults"/religions...
On Nature and Beauty (Surface vs. substance)
A lot of his works are based around religion of some type… “I realy like that Idea that I am connected with everything around me"...
Orjis says he doesn’t believe in modernism… "we are always connected to something else"… Moses, bible, burning tree, tree huggers, decorating trees at Christmas time..
These works reminded me of a modern day version of Arcimboldo's vegetable faces work. Arccimboldo was an artist from Milan (1527). His portraits of human heads are made up of vegetables, fruit sea creatures and tree roots/ based on fascination.
It also kind of reminded me of what Steve Rood said in last weeks lecture, about people becoming sick of drawing and painting, and turning to photogrpahy...
Like a modern version of Arccimboldo's work, but made with photogrpahy. This also shows the way Orjis has made the most of creative control and manipulation. As the process he used to make the work for his masters was quite simple, just starting with the photograph of his subject (portrait) then he would go on to edit it and add in the parts of nature on photoshop.
I like this part of his work, different because so unnatural, but looks natural because done in a photography medium, unlike painting because painting can just be "fantasy like", but photography makes his work seem more 'real' because thats what photogrpahy does.
These works contained alot of flowers. Orjis stated that the orchid represents sexuality.
He used gorse, as in New Zealand it has a thing about identity...
Gorse a weed we want to get rid off, but Orjis then brought it into the context where we look at the beauty of the flower…
Posing the question, What is NZ’s identity? Over and over again we search for this in politics.
Had always enjoyed art for the way it is, cant be only surface, has to be more, surface beauty, attracts bee, but the substance behind it, is that flower wants to reproduce, the most beautiful flower will get pollinated more… has to have surface beauty for people to want to speand more time with it etc… cool idea…
On Creative control and manipulation...
The Spineless Nancy Pelosi By Salvador Dali...
Orjis mentioned Salvdor Dali- an aritst that put's opposite things together. He did this in some of his works - using french sticks then poking candles in them...
This is part of the public work Orjis did at te Tuhi. He said He was sick of the negative stuff and wanted to do something "affirming"... What's funny is that he got the text from a cult called Heaven's gate. ( A very strange cult)... haha, I like this work though, and the way he has used manipulation to make it simple, but effective and able to speak to you in a few seconds while driving past.
The Main conceptsof Richard Orjis' work were:
nature vs culture:
The natural and the artificial:
The beautiful and the grotesque:
Community and individualism:
Richard Orjis on art: "… all art is a lie that tells us the truth…"
By studying Richard Orjis' work we learn to look at nature in a way that can help us "look at the visual world"...We realize that objects are communicating with us all the time…This inspires me to look at what I do with the way I interpret how people are, things they wear, what they say etc, idea of communication..
Thanks Rebecca,
ReplyDeleteThere's lots of great ideas and images in here. But it's mostly written in the form of notes rather than a conversation as such. Perhaps a good idea to "process" the ideas a little more before you start writing, or be selective, choose a couple of ideas to expand upon, and save the rest of them for a rainy day.
TX
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