dislocation: 2.	the act of disrupting an established order so it fails to continue. - dictionary.com

This pretty much sums up my definition of dislocation. Because we're trying to separate dislocation from disconnection and disembodiment, I think dislocation is specifically disrupting an established place. Something that messes with spatial relations is dislocation. Dislocation might be tied in with time; visually, it would be hard to tell if something in a picture was not supposed to be there in the first place. It would have to be a before and after series.

Example: A series of vacation photos of one person in different locations.


Disconnection

Disconnection is the complete lack of conceptual association between two things; two completely different ideas. Disconnection may also be tied in with what we expect and what we actually see. The separation between reality and our perceived reality.

Example: Lewis Caroll's Alice in Wonderland.

Disembodiment

Disembodiment is the lack of concrete form for abstract concepts. A shapeless idea. Disembodiment is probably the one out of the three terms that relies most on outside references. To be disembodied is to be simultaneously dislocated and disconnected.

Example: An inkstain on a desk.

Martina Lopez stated that her artwork springs from events and happenings in her life, like a visual diary. The re-contextualized figures gain new meaning by means of the fantastical landscape. There's a feeling of sadness in her work conveyed through the use of muted colors. The figures in "Bearing in mind" seem to be filled with a painful past. I think this may be due to the cathartic nature of her work.

Ken Gonzales-Day states that the purpose of Bone-Grass Boy was to critique the avant-garde's hypocritical approach of using everyday objects ,which embodied the very thing they were trying to undermine. Ken digitally manipulates the images, creating the look of a pre-modern painting. The incongruency of the she-male lends a humorous air to what I think are supposed to be tasteful and elegant pictures. The images of atrocities contrast deeply with the she-male pics, creating a really disturbing effect.

This is the first in my series of vectored erasure images. My basic concept was that authority transformed people into a force or a presence; the individual becomes an impression.

This was a photo of a policeman in riot gear standing in the middle of a crowd. The people around him paid him as much attention as they did to the sidewalk or the street; he was a fixture.

I believe this is because he carried institutional authority. The policeman was a physical manifestation of an institution. He was not human.

I made the silhouette of the cop black because black meshed with the large areas of black in the other people, reflecting his unobtrusive nature. I though this blend gave him an anonymous vibe, whereas a white silhouette would have drawn too much attention to him.


This is a photo of Nixon in his Oval Office. I chose this photo because of the strong authoritative connotations of the Oval Office. I liked Nixon's body language and how the composition drew my eye towards Nixon.

I silhouetted Nixon in black because it contrasted nicely with the grainy figures surrounding him. The crisp lines of Nixon's figure reinforced his strong presence. I also wanted to establish black as a motif for institutional authority.




This is a photo of a protester confronting riot police in Dublin. To me it appears that the protester has control of the situation, for the moment, and the cops are reacting to him.

In this photo, I wanted to flip around the concept of institutional authority and show some good old-fashioned alpha male authority.

I silhouetted the protester and his weapon in white to clearly differentiate his presence from the previous examples of institutional authority. I think the white space gives the viewer more room to interpret the protester's motivation.






This is the first in my clone-stamp/patch erasure series. My basic theme was to display the things that we leave behind with our names on them and how that reflects on identity.

It's a photo of someone's bookshelf. Most of the books are written by famous men: Hume, Einstein, and Thoreau.

I erased all the words off the covers of the books except for the authors. I was going for the idea that these books were essentially reflections of the people who wrote them. Their entire lives were bound into books and stacked side-by-side.



This is a photo of a headstone of a deceased policeman. I was trying to convey that a rock with a name is what most people leave behind physically. The connotations of a head-stone was a big reason I chose this picture. I erased the fraternal order of police emblem and the inscriptions below in order to draw the focus to the name. I wanted to erase the identity of the policeman, letting the viewer invent a past for the head-stone.


This is a cropped and clone-stamped xerox of someone's criminal record. I was partly influenced by that saying "everybody in life does three things: die, pay taxes, and have painful dooks." This image is a statement of the bureaucracy that we have to endure most of our lives.

I erased all the personal information except the name in keeping with my theme, but also because telephone numbers and addresses change relatively often compared to our names; our personal contact info isn't associated with identity as much as our names are. I blurred the name a little bit to contrast with the straight edges of the criminal record form. I was trying to suggest that our lives and identities are a little bit more organic than the legal forms we define them with.

Presence/Absence

Cohen's view on the presence of absence was a new concept for me. His play on the participation/observation modes through the removal of a figure in the "analogtime" series was particularly interesting. It's strange to question how much of ourselves we actually project into the blank space of his art. To me, Cohen's art makes me think about what I put into that white space, and how it affects the art. It also makes me curious as to what his work means to different people, since they're basically inventing their own image or design to fill the void. With the simple absence of an expected figure, Cohen manages to raise questions on how we observe art, and to what degree do we participate in it.