Adeline Rhall

"Barricader" is 12x16". It's a photo of an impromptu installation that I rushed to set up in an empty classroom on the third floor of MICA's Main Building in the period of time between my Work-Study job and my art history class last Friday. You can swipe for detail shots, the unedited image, and some words on my creative process.
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#stilllifephoto #installationartist #readymadeart #digitalphotographer #fineartphotograph

I think this piece probably came from one of the more challenging assignments I had in my drawing class last semester. My professor, @eshaw_art, had his TA stack up a few chairs on a platform. I don't mean that his TA stacked them up neatly or vertically—they were all arranged somewhat precariously and at odd and unpredictable angles, such that they'd be challenging to draw from any perspective you could pick. We were then made to draw them not by starting with a contour or even a quicker sketch, but by building the silhouette of the chairs entirely from negative space. I never had any formal drawing instruction prior to this class; calling the assignment challenging was an understatement, but it got me thinking about form in ways I'm not sure I did before. I had a couple hours between obligations and a couple photography classes to create work for, saw this empty classroom, and saw the neatly organized chairs not just as furniture but as elements of a potential composition I could stage. There was a sense of form under the surface of this tidy classroom, and I guess I wanted to make it visible to the camera.

The final composition here used every chair and stool in the classroom, between 15 and 20 in total. I added a few and just realized I could keep adding more if I kept the 6 desks at the bottom as a focal point and positioned the easels around it to vary the piece's rhythm. There was something physically challenging about this, moving all this furniture and the easels around quickly in a room on a hot summer day with no air conditioning while I tried to make sure nothing toppled over. Putting that aside, I think the idea of turning furniture into a tangled and abstract mess without physically modifying the furniture itself is interesti