https://www.kristawortendyke.com/projects-forte daily 1.0 2023-10-02 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cf15ab49d96710001d1d30e/1559336636648-GUZHJGAUTJ9Y0TE0ASVZ/ThisHeat-01.jpg Projects https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cf15ab49d96710001d1d30e/1559337740308-LDM5TOGP8I26HJRIOIJ0/Intervention_AmericanBBQ.jpg Projects https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cf15ab49d96710001d1d30e/1567991435296-XZLI0DLZIFS4ACXX3JFY/ReMedia_Untitled_007.jpg Projects - (re): media Although most of us have never experienced war, we are surrounded by its imagery. (Re): media is an exploration of the way imagery and information from movies, videogames, newspapers, and the Internet come together to form our perception of war. Having never experienced war first-hand I am forced to put my faith in mediated expressions of the thing itself. By combining the imagery I pillage from all these sources, there is a possibility that what I am creating is more real than the individual images themselves. Explosions are war’s most universal and most spectacular signifiers. We are never falling short of this imagery. I have made use of these magnetizing images to show not only how the lines between fiction and non-fiction blur, but also to show how a mediated experience can become indecipherable from a real experience. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cf15ab49d96710001d1d30e/1561647090188-I70HEGXAX3MB42IAYFBL/Filter_MassObservation_18.jpg Projects - #mass_observation In 1930’s England, approximately 500 untrained volunteers anonymously recorded conversations and behaviors at various public places, including work, the street, public meetings, sporting, and religious events. Today, untrained observers continue to record the world, but now the results are posted to social media, such as Twitter and Instagram. With the rise of distrust in the major media outlets, we have turned to the non-professional, the Twittersphere, iPhone videos, and Instagram feeds for authentic and truthful windows to reality. Krista Wortendyke’s meditation on the 1930’s project, Mass-Observation, questions the aestheticization and mediation of violence in our culture by using images of race riots, cropping them into Instagram-worthy squares, and combining them in a single space or feed. The resulting installation, #Mass_Observation, thus mimics society’s comfort with Instagram while simultaneously calling into question the casualness with which we document and beautify events like these riots and how that in turn influences the way in which we define our own relationships to race. Given the current state of racial politics and clashes in the United States, questioning and attempting to understand the role of mass media and the impact of social media in these conversations is essential, and #Mass_Observation seeks to push audiences to consider their own consumption of mass and social media and the way each medium impacts us. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cf15ab49d96710001d1d30e/1562427350088-FUQRUMXXTUBTN9H4J9NG/Wortendyke_Install_031218_+01.jpg Projects - Killing Season Chicago Beginning on Memorial Day and ending on Labor Day of 2010, I tracked the homicides within the city limits of Chicago. Once the crime scenes were processed and the red tape was taken down, I visited and photographed the site of each murder. There were 172 homicides within that time period of roughly 3 months. The resulting physical piece is a 56-foot long installation of the photographs against a caution-orange background placed in a chronological graph. The form draws attention to the homicides and their frequency in a schematic way. Moving left to right in the piece, there is one column for each day the project spans. Stacked photographs in each column reflect the number of homicides that day as well as document each crime scene. From afar, the arrangement mimics a city skyline and begs the viewer to consider whether this violence is part of the fabric of the urban environment. The sheer number of images coupled with their small size (5.5” x 8.25” and 5.5” x 3.67”) forces the viewer to come in and take a closer look. What they find are quiet, peopleless images of sites that all look vaguely familiar; sidewalks in front of two-flats, garages in back alleys, gangways, playgrounds and street corners. They will also find is the occasional scraps of red or yellow tape, RIPs scrawled on walls, piles of stuffed animals, impeccably arranged empty liquor bottles and a metal cross nailed to a tree. These small clues indicate that these are not just arbitrary locations, but the settings of murders. Killing Season Chicago is a memorial constructed of temporary materials that change with each iteration and are destroyed after each installation’s exhibition. This wall, constructed of foam and held together by wood and tape, will degrade over time, just as the memory/image of each person killed degrades the vitality of the city itself. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cf15ab49d96710001d1d30e/1562010735127-MHJ1477AKV6IMA6U2TUQ/IMG_7025.jpg Projects - Chicago Sun Times Chicago Sun Times is a 38-foot long inkjet print that spills out from the wall across the gallery floor, interrupting the gallery space and asking for visitors’ heightened awareness of their steps while simultaneously drawing their attention to the inundation of statistics too frequently overlooked. Using the spectrum of light from a 24-hour period during heat of the Chicago summer, each band of color marks the exact time of every homicide from Memorial Day to Labor Day during 2010, resulting in patterned hues that are at once alluring and jarring in their totality. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cf15ab49d96710001d1d30e/1559336150484-888I6LG9G0OIZXY4CPTR/_B9A1796.jpg Projects - Bloodspot (Death by Gun) While Chicago makes national news for its gun violence, the victims go relatively unnoticed in the public eye. Their deaths are often matter-of-factly reported and reduced to mere statistics. Bloodspot (Death by Gun) consists of a bloodspot on the pavement, a reminder of a murder in a Chicago alley. Visitors are invited to take one of the 700 news-printed images to mark the number of projected homicides in Chicago during 2016. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cf15ab49d96710001d1d30e/1571082355903-71TPJVZSYQFRWAZ6CWXV/ThisHeat-01.jpg Projects https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cf15ab49d96710001d1d30e/1650505736797-88C8S1G9P8J8W5BY44SM/Transmissions.jpeg Projects https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cf15ab49d96710001d1d30e/1695073744732-X9YXWXHI0I2VQI822VKV/DSCF1634-2.jpg Projects https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cf15ab49d96710001d1d30e/1696268523409-DXLKC2ZWPRKRKCHJAJ0D/Vote_05+copy.jpg Projects https://www.kristawortendyke.com/about daily 0.75 2025-09-30 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cf15ab49d96710001d1d30e/47280bec-57a7-4c3a-9359-dbe0e28b643c/Outcry-2018.jpg About PC: Whitney Bradshaw from Outcry https://www.kristawortendyke.com/contact daily 0.75 2019-10-14