SARAH URIST GREEN: This episode of "The Art Assignment"
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We're in Minneapolis, and we're about to meet up
with Paula McCartney.
She makes photographs and artist books
that explore the ambiguity between the natural
and the unnatural.
and cause us to reexamined what those terms even mean.
Projects like "Bronx Zoo" saw McCartney
photographing real birds and living plants
in constructed landscapes, while "Bird Watching" saw
her photograph fake, craft store-bought birds
in real landscapes.
Her most recent work, "A Field Guide to Snow and Ice,"
is a series of photographs in a book that
explores her idea of winter, which includes images
of actual snow and ice along with images
of stalagmites and piles of gypsum sand
that only mimic icy forms.
With Paula, we're going to talk about how
we look at the so-called natural world
and how we go about constructing it in our minds
and in the images we make.
Hi, I'm Paula McCartney, and this is your "Art Assignment."
I moved from San Francisco to Minneapolis, and at that time
I was really surprised how much winter there was.
I was used to winter for, like, three months out of the year,
but I was not used to winter for six months out of the year
and basically in all capitals in this really very
exotic environment.
Just like the landscapes in the Bronx Zoo felt very exotic,
this amount of snow and ice felt very exotic.
So I knew that I wanted to explore that idea.
So I started the project in what I
call the "safety" of the summer months,
and I made a photogram of a dried, pressed Queen Ann's Lace
flower.
It's this beautiful flower that I remember from my childhood.
And I thought pressed and made into a photogram,
it looked like a snowflake.
The first snow fall of the season in November of that year
I went out into my backyard and I pointed my camera up
into the sky and photographed snow falling down on me.
And combining-- looking at those photographs
next to the photograph of my Queen Ann's Lace snowflake,
the Queen Ann's Lace was a snowflake,
but it also kind of turned into, like, a star burst.
And the photograph of the snow falling
at night looking straight up looked
like snow falling, but then also could be an image of the night
sky, the cosmos.
And I really liked how with that juxtaposition
the two very specific things could be transformed or opened
up, and they could be interpreted
in lots of different ways.
Because I was living in this environment
with so much winter, I was seeing winter all the time.
And what I really wanted to illustrate
was the winter of my imagination again.
Because I think the more abstracted things are
from the larger landscape, the more
they become images from my imagination
as opposed to documenting the world as it is.
So your assignment in creating a constructed landscape,
the first thing you should do is think
about what kind of landscapes you're
interested in, what kind of environment
you're interested in.
Look about the materials that you have around your house.
Are there things that you're excited by like different rocks
or minerals or stones?
Think do you want this to be a winter landscape?
A summer landscape?
You can go outside and get leave and flowers,
you can get some snow if you have snow at this same.
Take the elements, make your landscape,
take lots of photographs.
Photograph it from above and below, really experiment.
Add a few more things into your landscape.
Take some things out of your landscape.
Make lots of pictures.
Look at them.
Think about which picture really transformed those elements
that you combined together to make your construct landscape.
So maybe something very small looks big or something big
looks small or you're transported to a different kind
of environment.
And share your favorite picture with us.
So, like, one way I could approach this, Sarah,
is I could make a miniature landscape
and then use sort of the tricks of the camera
to make it look big.
Yes.
That's exactly right.
And there are so many great precedents
for this Art Assignment.
I'm really excited about it.
I can think of one president at every single movie made
before 1990 which used the tricks of the camera
to turn these miniature paintings into set backdrops.
Yes.
That's very true.
But there are others from the art world as well.
And I'd like to bring up the fact
that I have a ton of friends and colleagues
that I draw upon for ideas for these precedents.
Like, you could think about Henri Rousseau's jungle
paintings where he visited, not the jungle to gain inspiration,
but actually the Paris Zoo and the natural history museum.
JOHN GREEN: I'm also quite fond of Sugimoto's diorama
photographs where he visited the Natural History Museum in New
York and photographed the dioramas, but in such a way
that it looks very realistic.
SARAH URIST GREEN: Or there's Thomas Demand
who makes these really amazing constructions from cut paper
that he than photographs in a manner that's
incredibly convincing.
All of this is supposed to make me
think about the difference between what is real
and what is fake, right?
Right.
Especially when it comes to nature.
And our precedent today actually comes from outside
of the world of art history.
In 1856, Scottish industrialist James Nasmyth
retired from a successful business
of inventing and building machine tools
to pursue his interest in astronomy.
A neighbor of English estate thought
they kept seeing a ghost outside carrying a coffin,
but it was actually Nasmyth in his nightgown moving
around his telescope trying to get the best view of the night
sky.
He soon built his own telescope, a powerful
reflecting one that allowed him to see at great magnification.
He made detailed observations of the moon,
and in 1874 published a book of his findings,
complete with photographs of the lunar surface.
However, no one had successfully taken non-blurry photographs
of the moon's surface yet, so what more these images?
Nasmyths' craters and mountains were actually
plaster models he made from his drawings, which
he then lit from a low angle and photographed from above.
The images are convincingly and remarkably accurate,
but they are at the same time false and fantastical images.
Like Paula's photographs, Nasmyth's
are derived from close observation
and engage the most simple of materials
to create and transport us to another fully-fledged,
albeit impossible, world.
I think the idea with constructed landscapes
is that almost every environment that we're in nowadays
is constructed in some sort of way.
So your lawn is constructed, your garden is constructed,
on arboretum that you go to is constructed.
So all these places that we think of as natural
are really constructed.
So it's always sort of you're deciding
the degree of something, how constructed something is.
So for my constructed landscape, I
decided to start with black paper,
because I like a lot of black backgrounds in my work,
and a photograph that I just taped here to my studio wall.
So this is my foreground and my background,
and the background is a photograph of birds in flight
that I had used in lots of other projects.
So I have a rock that I collected this summer
that I really love the shape of, because I liked
how it looked like a mountain.
And then I got another rock out of my garden--
so I had two rocks-- that was also sort of mountain shaped.
And I also got a giant bowl of sand
that I took just from a sandbox that's reminding me of snow.
So one thing you'll want to consider with your assignment
is the idea of scale.
Think about where you are in relationship
to the objects in your set up, your scene, to see
do you want to make something look smaller than it is?
Do you want to make something look larger than it is?
And really move around your set up so
that you get a lot of different possibilities
to find the best thing or the most exciting thing
or how can you make a rock and some sand look, like,
really monumental and exciting.
Everyone has all these fantastic ideas
in their head, all these stories that we think of all day long,
and this is your way to illustrate that idea.
So see if you can combine things that maybe you
haven't combined before.
See if you can build something that you've never built before.
Experiment to sort of open up a new way
of seeing the landscape.
I think, you know, we're so used to seeing
the landscape I think a lot of times we take it for granted.
But I do want, with this exercise,
and with my work in general, to have
people look at the landscape in a new and different way.
Take lots of pictures, because the beginning pictures you make
are not probably going to be your best ones.
Think of the first ones as practice.
Take pictures from above your scene.
Take pictures from eye-level, when
you think of, like, the worm's eye view or the bird's eye
view.
You don't just look at a scene and know,
I know the perfect perspective.
You have to move around and look.
So do take a lot of pictures.
Like, if you're using your phone,
you can delete them all afterwards
except for your favorite one.
But take, like, 20 pictures.
Take 30 pictures, take a hundred pictures.
Really experiment.
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