Untitled War Film #1
Untitled War Film # 2
Untitled War Film #3
Untitled War Film #4
Untitled War Film #5
Untitled War Films
For "Untitled War Films," I used five snap-shots from my military career as a salute to Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills as follows:
1. Sherman poses in the guises of various generic female film characters in a visual language reminiscent of 1950's and 1960's B-movies. I posed in various stereotypical military scenes from 1970's and 1980's war movies.
2. Sherman herself acted as protagonist and model: Whether she was the one to release the camera's shutter or not, she is considered the author of the photographs. My photos were taken by Army buddies but I consciously set up the scenes.
3. Sherman comments that "...in film stills there's a lot of overacting because they're trying to sell the movie." Likewise, I was hamming it up for my snap-shots.
Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills is a suite of 70 black-and-white photographs made over the course of three years in which the artist posed in guises of various generic film characters.
Art critics see parallels between Sherman's untitled film stills and the concurrent "pictures" exhibition, curated in 1977 by the art critic Douglas Crimp at Artist Space in NYC.
Specifically, "the adoption of preexisting visual material and a concern with mechanisms of cultural representation."
Artist from the pictures exhibition were:
Cindy Sherman, perhaps the most famous member of the group, was not included in that show, but her work was included in a revised and expanded version of Crimp’s essay that ran in the Journal October in 1979.