F.2.1 Observing the Observed: Portrait Drawing and Algorithmic Data Collection

Sage Sidley, Artist

The act of watching people is something we are all guilty of – myself included, as an artist in the practices of portraiture, photography, and observational drawing. In these disciplines, there is always a subject and an observer. For example, observational drawing has two consequences. Close observation promotes empathy towards the subject; however, it also holds a subsequent power relationship of observer over subject. How can these practices be utilized to better understand User’s data-portraits rendered by accumulated algorithmic data?

Portraiture is an opportunity to connect and understand the subject in a different way, as well as strengthen and honour the relationship between the artist and subject. However, this relationship is altered through permission given by the sitter and respect promised by the artist when creating the relationship and developing a record that can be shared and spread. Capturing the subject and creating a record of their 'image' as perceived by the artist, is a sensitive action. When looking at the record (in this case the drawing), it will never be a true representation of the subject; it will be an accurate representation of this artist-subject relationship. This lens provides the viewer of the drawing with critical questions: who is the subject, who is the artist, and what is the relationship that is being presented? These same questions are valuable to ask when looking at digital social surveillance practices.

Within my research, the watcher-watched relationship has perplexed me, especially in the context of social surveillance and surveillance capitalism that is overtly and constantly executed online. As users continually attempt to self-represent themselves on online spaces, they are becoming both the artist and subject. The question is whether this behaviour is a gain in power or an overwhelming loss of power to the Big 5 (Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft). This paper will analyze digital social-surveillance practices through the lens of portrait drawing. What does our digital portrait represent about our relationship with the digital realm?

F.2.2 Portraits in Iron, Forged in Steel: Materiality and Meaning in LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Cyanotypes

Siobhan Angus, Yale University

My presentation focuses on LaToya Ruby Frazier’s cyanotype portraits, a type of photography that uses iron as a light-sensitive material to create negative and positive prints in Prussian Blue. Frazier’s cyanotype portraits produce a link between materiality and meaning as steel is an alloy of iron. My presentation considers the material and symbolic histories of iron/steel in both photography and the steel mill. Frazier’s series of self-portraits of the artist in motion If Everybody’s Work Is Equally Important? borrow a visual vocabulary from mid-century steel industry advertisements while evoking Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies. In On the Making of Steel Genesis: Sandra Gould Ford, Frazier uses portraiture to document the human and environmental costs of deindustrialization. Frazier’s series centers on the life and work of Sandra Gould Ford who worked at Jones & Laughlin Steel Company in Pittsburgh.

The portraits are contextualized with blueprint copies of documents that Ford archived, including records of workplace accidents alongside company promotional photography. The series documents Black working-class life in the Rust Belt. The inclusion of Genesis in the title positions steelmaking as a metaphor for people forging their lives and identities out of the raw material they are given. Similarly, portraiture can function as a space of self-construction by providing space for the subject to present as they want to be seen. The use of Prussian Blue highlights the mediated nature of portraiture while symbolically referencing blue-collar work. The artifice of the images draws attention to the labor of the photographer by highlighting process. Through an analysis that foregrounds materiality, I argue that Frazier’s use of cyanotypes produces an evocative link between artistic and industrial labor while expanding the boundaries of working-class portraiture.

Installation View, I strongly believe in our right to be frivolous, handwritten conversations on yellow legal pad and other A4 papers, from Mounira Al Sohl: The Mother of David and Goliath, Sfeir-Semlar Gallery, 2019. Photo by Yani Kong.

F.2.3 Archives of No-Place: Portraiture in Mounira Al Solh’s I strongly believe in our right to be frivolous

Yani Kong, Simon Fraser University

The Syrian Civil War broke out in March 2011 and by April, more than 5000 people fled to an unwelcoming Lebanon. The Lebanese government denied the formal relief of humanitarian camps, unsettling local communities and ghettoizing migrants. At this time, Lebanese artist Mounira Al Solh began her continuing portrait series, I strongly believe in our right to be frivolous (2012-ongoing), inviting Syrian emigrants and others from the Middle East into her Beirut studio for coffee and beer, and to have their portraits drawn on her yellow legal pad, transcribing their conversations in the margins. This collection has expanded to more than 500 ink and gouache drawings and embroidered textile portraits, constructing what Al Solh calls a “time document.”

These portraits suspend each subject in the act of waiting, a fragile record of uncertainty. Al Solh’s quick line sketches, notation on sheet paper, mimic this transitory instability, highlighting process – both her creative process and the migration process – as fundamental to the work itself. The effect is two-fold: at the first level, as Al Solh has said, her process of sketching, interviewing and notation allow the artist to draw near to her subjects as well as the political structures and events that contribute to their narratives. Second, following Guattari (1992), these otherwise unheeded individuals are activated as creative subjects through ‘aesthetic enunciation’, emerging as both the speaking subject and a kind of ‘co-creator’ through the practice of storytelling. Creative subjectivity emerges across triadic relations between artist, subject and nascent artwork, expanding this complex to link viewers and art worlds through embodied practices of viewing. Such relational encounters do not simply gesture toward the perceived other but draw close to these bodies in sensitive study, revealing structures of care that cast bodies in-relation in greater intimacy with the world (Braidoti 2011).

Theodor de Bry, Christopher Columbus Arrives in America (also, Columbus landing on Hispaniola, December 6, 1492; greeted by Arawak Natives), 1594, Engraving. Source: United States Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

F.2.4 Averting the Full Force of a World Collison: King Guacanagari’s Regarded/Disregarded Portrait of Christopher Columbus

Roger J. Crum, University of Dayton

History has separated Michelangelo Buonarroti and Christopher Columbus. Yet their first “works” famously or notoriously date to 1492, and their common Renaissance culture intersected indirectly in two portraits of the Genoese explorer. While Michelangelo’s protégé, Sebastiano del Piombo, painted the well-known, posthumous, and extant portrait of Columbus, the explorer himself records the lesser known fact that during his first voyage a certain King Guacanagari promised and had a statue of him made in gold. Notably Columbus never took possession of the statue; now lost (if ever made), it survives only as a reference in the explorer’s journal. Nevertheless, its subject and the “grey zone” spatial and aesthetic circumstances of its intended production, materiality, presentation belong to the less delineated, transcultural histories of sculpture during if not of the Renaissance.

Exploring the likely look and meaning of this reported work, this paper argues for a small but important place for Guacanagari’s unreceived gift in the global histories of Italian Renaissance individuals and their involvement with sculpture in places/spaces of cultural encounter far removed from the Italian peninsula; there, where the statue was promised and where it was ultimately not received, two cultures essentially collided but may not, in the end, have amalgamated and solidified in the finished form of this reported gold statue. Its escape from the Renaissance canon may have been authored by Columbus himself in his seeming disregard for Guacanagari’s generosity or tribute; its reinstatement, requiring new modes of analysis and vocabularies, is now the result of our more contemporary ways of arguing for and considering an expanded, more global and less restrictive Renaissance canon.