Analysis Of My Blue Lake
Kai Lin
ARTD 250
Extra credit
My Blue Lake
When looking at Kiki Smith’s My Blue Lake, it maybe difficult, at first to understand what you are looking at. In fact, it might even be difficult to tell what the piece of art is. The picture has the detail and smoothness of a photograph, but the abstractness and lack of defining boundaries characteristic of a landscape painting. There appears to be features of a person as well as features of a room, but the person has no body and the room seems to narrow into a corridor. The only recognizable part of the picture is a female face in the center, staring ambivalently out at you over a smeared blob that is presumably her body. The face is stretched out, which the ears too far apart for it to look natural …show more content…
Looking at the body as a whole, it would seem like a morbidly obese woman, lacking a chin, was sitting down in a room too small for her and the two bulges intruding from the two sides at the bottom being here bent knees and the striped smear in the middle of the portrait …show more content…
It is a photogravure lithograph of the artist herself, made from a 360-degree photo of her body. The person-like form in the picture, is in effect her body splayed out as if someone had skinned her and then spread her skin flat out. Smith says she got the inspiration for this piece of art from looking at maps. Maps were the spread out version of a globe, a flat representation of a round, three-dimensional object. She wanted to make an image of herself turned into a map. But in order to do this in the year 1995 when this image was made, she had to find one of only three periphery cameras in existence at the time. Thus she worked with Universal Limited Arts Edition to gain access to the one in the Royal Academy at the British Museum in London. The production of this map version of her body entailed a week of sitting on a rotating table and having the periphery camera take snapshots of her. The periphery camera was originally intended to be used for landscape photos during geological surveying and was a prototype for the panoramic view that is now available on many digital cameras. Smith used this panoramic view to capture her face and upper torso splayed out horizontally. Thus what the picture actual depicts is her face, and her two shoulders with her breasts and stomach in between. The distortion of having “unwrapped” the neck makes it appear as if she lacks one and the face is large and stretched because the
ARTD 250
Extra credit
My Blue Lake
When looking at Kiki Smith’s My Blue Lake, it maybe difficult, at first to understand what you are looking at. In fact, it might even be difficult to tell what the piece of art is. The picture has the detail and smoothness of a photograph, but the abstractness and lack of defining boundaries characteristic of a landscape painting. There appears to be features of a person as well as features of a room, but the person has no body and the room seems to narrow into a corridor. The only recognizable part of the picture is a female face in the center, staring ambivalently out at you over a smeared blob that is presumably her body. The face is stretched out, which the ears too far apart for it to look natural …show more content…
Looking at the body as a whole, it would seem like a morbidly obese woman, lacking a chin, was sitting down in a room too small for her and the two bulges intruding from the two sides at the bottom being here bent knees and the striped smear in the middle of the portrait …show more content…
It is a photogravure lithograph of the artist herself, made from a 360-degree photo of her body. The person-like form in the picture, is in effect her body splayed out as if someone had skinned her and then spread her skin flat out. Smith says she got the inspiration for this piece of art from looking at maps. Maps were the spread out version of a globe, a flat representation of a round, three-dimensional object. She wanted to make an image of herself turned into a map. But in order to do this in the year 1995 when this image was made, she had to find one of only three periphery cameras in existence at the time. Thus she worked with Universal Limited Arts Edition to gain access to the one in the Royal Academy at the British Museum in London. The production of this map version of her body entailed a week of sitting on a rotating table and having the periphery camera take snapshots of her. The periphery camera was originally intended to be used for landscape photos during geological surveying and was a prototype for the panoramic view that is now available on many digital cameras. Smith used this panoramic view to capture her face and upper torso splayed out horizontally. Thus what the picture actual depicts is her face, and her two shoulders with her breasts and stomach in between. The distortion of having “unwrapped” the neck makes it appear as if she lacks one and the face is large and stretched because the