This is the final post from the Islington Mill Art Academy collaborative text, concluding with a response from Jared Szpakowski:
Rachel Goodyear, 23 August 2013 15:47 –
Looking through Jared’s blog – http://threeteabagsinanenvelope.tumblr.com – I begin to think of the collection of polaroids taken by filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky (collected into a book, ‘Instant Light’) which evoke poetic beauty and heaving melancholy through the quietest contemplations. In a time when life’s pace moves quickly and we can be assured our memories are digitally stored, it is easily forgotten to take the time to muse over the details in our surroundings, especially within the mundane. Jared’s daily contemplations are a reminder that these ordinary details can spark a poetic curiosity. By keeping his daily offerings ambiguous, I find Jared’s blog stirs this curiosity, often through the simplest and poignant means. I too enjoyed the random click selection and felt as though I was wandering through a room of many conversations – overhearing fragments and making up the rest. It also makes me consider images that we can all immediately relate to whether you come to this blog as a stranger or otherwise. I am struck by the recurrence of hospital corridors and chairs. Again, Jared gives little away, and repeatedly considers the possibilities within a familiar motif that touches everyone’s life at some point from birth to death. A filmic photograph of a corridor reflected in a mirror evokes memory and premonition. We discussed in the crit that a lot of art is autobiographical but with a vast scale of how much or little personal background the artist gives away. For me, Jared’s blog seems like a peek into someone’s private world, but it also a tease….an invitation into a personal moment ‘I must conquer my fears, I must conquer my fears’ cut off with an abrupt ‘and so on’.
Sara Nesteruk, 23 August 2013 23:06 –
The blog struck me as private, but also aware of its privacy. It is well designed, clear, beautiful, visually open.
I began to think of the archives of artists such as Stanley Kubrick and Andy Warhol. The collections of material but also the care given to the documentation process itself. Warhol’s archives all stored in identical cardboard boxes look like a piece of his artwork, although seem to have been largely private until his death. Work in progress and also a finished article at the same time.
Jared Szpakowski, 24 August 2013 00:37 –
This is, to my knowledge, the first time my page has been critically examined and having people’s experiences of it articulated for me to consider has been extremely interesting. Surprisingly for me I think a lot of the comments echo my own encounter and emotional relationship with two particular Polish photographers blogs I used to follow during the formulation of my first blog. Their pages regularly documented places that would be considered mundane but to me were overwhelmingly beautiful due to their almost subconscious Soviet undertones. I only have a very primitive understanding of the Polish language so I was essentially a stranger looking in but very soon I felt I was fluent in my understanding of their motives for documenting these places. I try hard to maintain a balance between distance and intimacy but enjoy it when the extremes of the two sit side by side in an almost bipolar opposite and am somewhat reassured that this hasn’t been too bewildering or off putting, unless of course I’m wrong and my P45 awaits me at our next meeting.
http://starzec.blogspot.co.uk/
http://www.lukaszbiederman.com/
Islington Mill Art Academy website: http://islingtonmillartacademy.blogspot.co.uk/
