Design Media Arts Graduate Eli Joteva

Tuesday, May 9, 2017

Picture with Elí after we had
just discussed the motivation
behind her work.

For my second event blog, I visited our very own, Elí Joteva's own solo show. She first began explaining how life on earth is not forever. "Everything will eventually disappear" and noticing that, Elí

had this desire to "preserve art through photography". Just like how pictures can capture past events and our memories, it could also capture and preserve the artwork in its prime form. As she said this, I immediately thought back to the idea of how as mass production of an art occurred, the artwork itself loses its creativity and individuality.

Picture of one of the globes
from the past when things
were still fine.

All of the pieces of arts were related to global warming and the environment and follows the idea of trying to preserve what disappears. Elí separated her show to have three parts: the past, the present, and the future. The art which showed the "past" was a projection of three different globes before each of these "worlds" began to crumble. The projections were a virtual memory of the globes and what life was like in the past. In the present however, Elí formed actual globe models made out of mainly ice, flowers, and other products from the environment. The globes began to melt and Elí used this to represent global warming. To portray the future, Elí had asked her friend to sleep next to water and froze the water after. At the same time, she scanned the brainwaves of her friend while he was asleep, translated the waves into corresponding color frequencies, and projected those onto a picture.

Picture of a model of a globe,
melting of the globe represents
global warming of the Earth.

From my talk with Elí, I again had the notion that creativity as well as originality is something one needs to have to produce art. Just by looking at the sculptures, I thought her method of projecting the globes in three different times was very intricate. Many artists have incorporated medical technologies into producing art as our technology is becoming more advanced. Elí used recent technology and combined it with her creativity as well as natural resources to produce her own art. I would definitely recommend attending this event in the future. It was very informative, and illustrated another way in combining technology as well as art together. As the final requires us to write a paper which relates the ideas we have talked about, I think attending this art show really helped in illustrating the relationship between art and technology which can help me to write the essay.

Picture of what Elí perceives
as the future.