Art Event: Hannah Piper Burns Talk

 
As her work that was presented was mostly video, here is a link to her vimeo page: http://vimeo.com/hpb

  One thing that immediately interested me about Burns' artist talk was how she started off by showing us the work she had done in her own senior project while she was a student at SMCM. I personally thought that it was really, really cool to see how someone has made the transition from being a student to being a working artist in the real world. It was also pretty cool to see how drastically her work has changed, as it started off as a mix of photography and sculpture and now her work consists of video pieces, or as she calls  them, "mash-ups."
     I thought it was interesting that Burns described her move from photography to video as one influenced by her desire for more narrative. As she put it, a photograph/singular image could not express the full narrative that she wanted to tell with her respective pieces and so a time-based narrative would allow for these narratives to develop more. I think I found this interesting mostly because I find myself to be very uninterested with video and find still images to provide the exact amount of narrative that I want to explore. I liked how Burns explained how she uses the medium of video, through "mash-ups" of song and film that thereby alter the meaning of all the parts, but I, honestly, did not enjoy the final product. I know that in the piece I saw in full (the video about Morgellons) consisted entirely of footage found on the internet, but i thought this made the final video look unfinished and roughly constructed.
     However, that is not to say that I did not enjoy other aspects of her artist talk. I really loved seeing her own SMP work, I could see this inspiring my own work with photography in some way. I also thought her description of youtube as a "unending container" and as a research tool was a really interesting way to see an everyday website as a limitless source. Finally, I thought her comment that art is all negotiation and compromise after the initial idea was very provocative because it made me think about all the art-based ideas I have in a more "logical" or "concrete" sense, if that makes any sense.