Final Countdown.. or the End of the Beginning

Alex: Look what I found! This is an artist that crotched a pink slip cover for a tank... talk about collaborating! The website where you can look at her work is here: http://www.marianneart.dk/

Dani: I found this artist, C.J Grossman and they make book art and it isn't exactly like yours but I feel like you may be able to get some ideas from her. Her site is: http://www.artjazzbooks.com/

Pam: I know you didn't show anything but I saw the sweet bowl you made and in my travels I came across... Timea Sido a contemporary ceramics artist check it out:http://www.timeasido.co.uk/collection.htm

I myself started looking at ikuko iwamoto's textural investigations and findings. (Quite amazing!) I found recently that I need to learn to be more delicate, not necessarily all the time. Yet I feel like being able to gently compile a piece would be useful for me, so to see such work as found in my link bar area (wink wink) really lights a fire under you.

Another artist I have started paying particular attention to is David Feingold (Bipolar) who is working with a sort of photoshop cut and paste  style (It's really great).

The questions I have concerning Ben and my last piece are as follow:

~Should sound be added?

~Black and white or keep the color?

~ Is it too long, too short?

~ Does it stand alone? Does it work well with the other video(if you've seen it) or with everything else we have been doing.

~Finally what do you think it's about, what did it make you feel (beside wanting to point and laugh).

ALL FEED BACK IS WELCOME!

Also don't forget about Ben, Steph, and My show on Dec 11th 5-7 PM!

She Lives In A Fairy-tale Somewhere Too Far For Us to Find

My work... where to start? I am still working with the idea of good and evil, bad and good, manageable and unmanageable, depression and mania, dream and nightmare, or in other words the constant struggle for a balance. I am now working on similar panels to the ones I created before yet instead of translating those close to me into a positive dream-like scene, I am working on capturing my greatest fears attached to each person  I am close to in an almost nightmarish scenario. I don't mean dark and scary I mean more in the sense of a real-life nightmare. For example the guitar tree was a visual representation of my boyfriend ( He is a musician) and he is also my tree or stability. The fear I attach to him is abandonment or more literally coming home to find my clothes on the lawn so I am translating that into outer panels. So like a web there will be a "string" attaching the nightmare to the dream and then a string attaching a third layer (reality) to the nightmare. Forming a form similar to those silly webs they made us make in English class in high school. When I am in the studio I am in a constant mode of busying my hands: sew, embroider, dye, paint, attach, sew, embroider, dye... It is a rhythm.  I still look at my art as my own therapy and find it best to have a rough sketch in my head while rolling with the punches and solving problems as they come. 

As for what is next... I am unsure I am interested in creating a video piece for my show to add some diversity yet I am not promising anything. I am also interested in revisiting my past or a simpler time, almost a remembrance of my time here at UD as I am going to be done school in about one month and some change. The above picture is from my sophomore year and it is interesting how much I have remained the same as well as changed. I also (in an attempt to lighten the mood and seriousness of this part of the semester, added a video that a friend and I made my sophomore year ENJOY!) My pieces come to me sporadically so I have faith that one weekend after a long week of work I will be driving down route 1 listening to a CD and smoking a cigarette and I will have a thought which will morph and branch into a new obsession or as we call it in the art world a piece. 

Right now I am reading "Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety" by Sigmund Freud. It is interesting but mainly about sex (which doesn't do much for the study I am working on) yet the idea of what causeses what: inhibitions cause anxiety or anxiety causing inhibitions is interesting. I'm not finished yet, but when I am done I will be sure to post my thoughts/opinions/notes. It relates to my work in the sense that I am studying what inhibits people, what anxiety they have and why we feel the need to hold ourselves back from certain aspects within our lives. Once again once I sort my thoughts out better I will add more. 

Recipe: HAHAHAH I don't cook at all!  I made lasagna about 4 days ago in my tiny towers apt kitchen and that was HORRIBLE. It was pretty tasty ( I just realized I worked a 9 hour shift at work today so I walked out to warm up a piece and realized its all gone... damn roommates).  I suggest this for everyone.. because no matter how horrible your day is or how horrible the party you are throwing is going if you bust these puppies out things are sure to turn around. 

Step 1: Drive to the store and pick up these ingredients

*1 box of Pillsbury Funfetti premium cake mix (about a dollar)

*A think of oil 

*and a carton of eggs (your only gonna need 3)

* A can of Betty crocker rainbow chip icing... DO NOT GET PILLSBURY FUNFETTI ICING or your funfetti cake will be ruined!

When you get home follow the instructions on the box... let cake or cupcakes cool. Ice those bad boys and serve them up and let the fun fill your life and forget all your worries! 

(Disclaimer... funfetti may even cure cancer at this point ;)     )

If anyone would like to see what I am working on then feel free to stop by my studio and strike up a conversation! 

Later Gators! 

Crit Feedback

Robin: I really enjoyed how the animals you carved seemed familiar yet estranged. The way all of them are tucked within themselves is great. There is just enough detail to make out what the animal is without providing the viewer with a scaled down replica of the creature. I appreciate the subtlety and attention to detail.

Justin: I loved what you were aiming for, yet felt that the piece had a few too many outside and unnecessary additives. The main large piece with toned down hand prints would work wonders on the viewer forcing them to run through a list of possible scenarios and ideas forcing them to look on and contemplate. I really enjoyed the tangled and distorted bodies in the middle and immediately began to question which direction to take the piece in. I also am very pleased with the scale you are working at. I would be interested in seeing a far larger piece or maybe even seeing how you work with many smaller elements.

Phil: I enjoy the slightly new direction that you have departed on. The piece fits comfortably with the work I've seen of yours in the past, yet starts to lead me in a fairly new narrative direction. For me the piece seemed to be replacing technology with more natural and older materials (woods metals). The tension is still in your work and I love that. Yet there seems to be more the the piece this time besides tension, it seems like you placed a heavier hand on this piece working with more colors, different textures, the placement of three similar things throughout the room. I believe this piece speaks to a struggle and a careful reconstruction or the placing of things back together or "the way they were". Essentially speaking I read control and the idea of who ultimately has the control, the objects, the artist, the materials... Excited for more.

Abbey: Very disturbing... I LOVE IT! The melting/ rotting is wonderfully displayed through WHATEVER THESE ODD MATERIALS are. The bright green may have been too much (in my opinion) the way everything else was rendered it seemed displaced yet we were unable to fully talk about yours and the direction you wished to steer the piece. The rotting carcass is bery believable my only advice for next time is BIGGER!

Lauren: The pieces have a light sense to them and beautiful in appearance. I read the piece as an anti-mosaic as it is. It is aesthetically calming yet because we were unable to discuss your piece I am still not sure where you wanted to take this, or if it was finished. If it is finished I feel as if it may need a little something extra such as a colored surface treatment or more of them as they are. I really want to know what the piece was about so I may ask you the next time I see you or you can respond on here :)

Elise: I'm interested in this torso and how it seems trapped. The colors in the puddle read warm/fire/fall/ even blood (?). Yet the material itself resembles ice. This for me already presents a struggle. I also enjoy the chest cavity that is being weighed down. I personally have anxiety and I feel like this piece speaks to that (for me at least). The idea of having something holding you back, weighing you down, and essentially paralyzing you. With the piece on the floor I feel as if the "anxiety" or unidentified pool of material has knocked down the person and is beginning to ooze all over them . I actually love this piece, it was very easy for me to connect to it. 

Pam: The glazes on these are wonderful. Although I love your cobalt blue theme, I am overjoyed to see that you are diversifying your collection. I would love to see more, and possibly have you move away from utilitarian objects.

Steph: I enjoy the part after Part2, the wait. The stop animation is brilliant and I feel depicts your piece the best especially in the conveyance/ conception of time... When the fake blood came in I couldn't watch (  I don't like blood, it makes me pass out ).

Ben: The migration away from the home due to disruption (sexuality, relationships) is something that I believe many of us (college art majors) can relate to. I enjoy your visually stimulation take on this through the use of layering. It is interesting to look at, entertaining, contemplative, and fits in lovely with the body of work you have previously been working on. It speaks to you and your practice and the direction your work has recently take.... DO WORK SON! ;)

Estaban: I enjoy being able to touch your piece, and the repetition of certain forms and textures. The use of multiples that are not all exactly the same pleases me. Just as humans are not all the same. I love how everything you are making seems to be working towards a common purpose. I am reminded of topography and a sense of protection/ walling oneself in. I see a lot of your older work in this yet much has changed. I still read a bit of a story in this work, yet this piece seems far more thought out and constructed. I feel as if you are making a model for this giant mountain you are going to make and go live on :). I think you should keep on working and I am very excited about witnessing the end result!

Dani/Alex: I already gave you guys feedback in the last blog.

We are all plastic figurines in some sense.

I have this obsession with learning to blow glass one day, as well as learning how to incorporate plastics (recycled of course) into my work. So when I stumbled across ways to manipulate plastic grocery bags I was very excited. Yet this is coming from the girl who fell in love with duct tape wallets and purses. A friend of mine got really into recycling and some how learned to make purses out of plastic shopping bags. Basically you collect plastic bags that interest you or are plain and you sandwich them between two or sometimes four sheets of wax paper. After you have arranged the bags the way you like you simply iron them on low heat (like when you trap leaves between wax paper). Be careful not to melt the wax paper or plastic. By overlapping sections of the bags you will eventually end up with a "sheet" of plastic that you can sew together and add fabric to for a lining. You can also iron strips and use the strips to weave a bag (I am not exactly sure on how that works Siarra has yet to show me this method). But the idea of flattening plastic and making it into workable sheets/strips is so simple yet it has never crossed my mind. I already love working with fabric and this franken-plastic material would be perfect to work with due to its ability to flow, and bend. 

A video that uses a similar process to create a laptop bag can be seen here :

http://www.youtube.com/watchv=0oddEWnj7X0&feature=PlayList&p=B8B6653312E5E2A5&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=11

 If that link isn't working (it gave me some trouble) Then go to youtube and type in How to fuse plastic bags into laptop case.

I researched a bit and apparently there are a lot of people out there making purses, bags, jewelry, and even dresses out of grocery bags! I think this is pretty sweet and eco-friendly.

An artist I have been looking at recently is Nathalie Schnider-Lang I thought that since I was about to venture to Berlin in a few months, I should research some artists who practice in Germany. Here work is composed of mainly the figure and nothing is really smoothed out the pieces are not in full really either. They melt into one another or a base and have a foreign and rough texture that obscures the image slightly yet still allows one to read what the piece is. She is one of my links on the right side of the blog and the website directs you to her work (figurative Plastik).

Another artist that I have been looking at is Georgia Kopf-Reddmann, a German artist working with photography. Her work is simple and elegant and what I really find interesting isn't necessarily the photos themselves but the colors she captures and the ability to capture a mood. There are warm, cool, abrasive, and comforting images and I find myself completely relaxed as I scroll through photo after photo often going back to look at photos I have already seen.

Artist feedback (I will post the rest of everyones we didn't get to soon) Yet for now:

Dani: I loved your piece and I can tell that it was well thought out and delicately constructed. I think the relationship of a book to skin was a perfect comparison. I feel that often an underlying point or moral of a story does not surface until there is a hole created for it to ooze up and make contact with the reader, just as the underlying blood waits for its opportunity to rise to the surface with a prick or a cut. In a way I feel like skin is a book, it has remembrance in the form of burns, moles, scars, wrinkles. Similarly a story or book uses text to document the past or what has occurred. The piece was disturbing but in an intriguing and genuinely engaging way. I felt the need to touch it and digest all it had to say just as one would a book. <3

Alex: I don't know if this is appropriate or not, but 1) I am very proud of you, and 2) I can really see an underlying theme, idea, connection in your work. The idea of sheltering and home is apparent and also the idea of not knowing, just as the viewer was unsure of what lay within or around these strange "creatures", buildings, fungi, etc. I think this is fitting in your work, it seems like you enjoy addressing your need for control and your acceptance of your inability to control all things at all times. I also appreciated the duality in this piece... taking hard clay and giving it a soft, and wispy appearance. Also I enjoyed that you created an environment for what is essentially an environment itself. I have so much more to talk to you about concerning your future piece too... I think a lot of your ideas do run through all your work, you just don't realize it. Like doing pointless things to set your own mind at ease ( I am not being mean I love this). I don't want to give away what you are about to do so I will make sure I talk to you in person about this soon.

In general I was glad to get back into the swing of things with crit. I only have 2 more after all :( I want to savor them all.

Realize, realize what you are.

The studio: Right now I am working on the watercolor portion of my piece. To be more specific a dress that a girl is wearing in my piece. It is made out of tiny watercolor drawings of cat heads (don't act surprised). I am using the same imagery that I wanted but pulled away from making the cat heads out of clay, I thought the material was wrong and would appear distasteful and awkward. I am pleased with the idea of using flat sewn on paper heads to create a more visually alluring and flowing dress. My plan from here is to adhere the heads to the fabric and start embroidering and dying. I am very excited about combining all of my loves; dying fabric, beads, buttons, sewing, clay, watercolor.. and so forth in one piece playing with depth, planes, harmony (now I'm just rambling). 

Dreams: Oddly enough I happen to keep a catolog of almost all the dreams I am able to vividly remember upon waking. Also I have night terrors from time to time so most of the dreams I remember are more like nightmares. 

My Dream: Over the summer I worked as a desk clerk at Best Western Galaxy Inn.  The dream starts out with me at 

work but the hotel isn't a hotel, it's a pharmacy. The manager and owner are training a new person to replace me and for some reason both he and I are working. Although I know what I am doing the trainee begins yelling at me and tells me that what I am doing is wrong and I realize that I really have begun to forget things. As I enter the back office (which is now where we keep all of the medicine) I keep running into spider webs, they are EVERYWHERE. In the back I run into my sister (who also worked at Best Western and apparently works at this hotel/pharmacy) and she ignores me and surprisingly isn't offering to help me, even though she has worked there longer. I become very overwhelmed and quit. Somehow I have a bike at work and begin riding it to Cathy's (the dayshift manager) house to apologize for leaving her short handed at work. On my journey I come across a pool and it is filled with obnoxious kids in there later teens. My boyfriend shows up and reminds me that I know the family and that they just recently lost their sister who I knew (well enough to have attended the funeral). The parents come out and I begin to remember and feel bad about finding the kids obnoxious. Then I wake up. 

Visual Memory: This

 is very embarassing but... when I was in 8th or 9th grade I was friends with a girl who lived around a lot of woods. She and I would always go hiking, camping, and basically just find any way to get in trouble. One day she, her brother, and I decided to build a fort.. so we went into the woods that ran along the side of her house and found a clearing, we found a long stick and put an old bike seat on the end. Then we took the old tarp that covered her pool and made a tent like structure using the stick as the center and strings tied to trees as a way of keeping it tight. We then used old chicken wire (her parents owned a concrete business) and made walls all the way around. About a hundred feet away was a field and the crop of choice that summer was corn, so we cut down a ton of corn stalks and wove them in and out of the chicken wire to create "walls'. The area that we pitched our tent over had two levels where tree roots had allowed for erosion so we made steps out of plywood and some nails. Las

tly we hung their old hammock from the porch from tree to tree within our structure. It took us all day, but when we were done we were proud and fully entertained. For a couple months the structure stayed up and for years I would drive by and be able to see the remains. That image is forever etched into my mind. Standing at the edge of the woods staring at our fort (Fort Fluff) as the sun was setting in disbelief that I had taken part in such an amazing undertaking.

These are photos of where I worked over the summer... so basically what I saw 5 days a week from 4-midnight!

The front!

The LOBBY! Check out the sweet mirror I got to use to see who was coming up the hallway (And yes there were some creepers)

It's All Left Up to Me

  


Over the summer I was working at a BestWestern for about 8 hours a day (night shift to be exact) longing to be back in school and creating. I missed working with my hands so much that I resorted to making bracelets and crocheting on slow nights. Although work put my art on a bit of a hold, it did allow me to meet some amazing people. A 67 year old man who was filled with great tales and advice. Young military guys who held stories of Iraq, Germany, and even a ScubaBear! If anything the few "guests" who I really got to know really gave me a lot to think about and showed me why I try to communicate and why I chose to concentrate on my art. This semester I am looking to finish up past work, make some amazing new pieces and finally put all of the pieces of the puzzle, that I envisioned about 2 years ago, together. My plan for our first piece is to create a "painting" with water color, ink, fabric, clay, and anything else I feel fit to sew together. A collage of sorts if onemay, my favorite. I love using my hands, as do many of us, and using multiple materials to create one piece. As far as what I have been looking at; I have really been into sewing for months now and have looked at some random less known artists/ peoples fabric art. The image to the left is of some Pittsburgh art and I just thought it was lovely. It is like life-sized cross-stitch. The image at the top is of an image I found surfing google at work over the summer. It was on a young girls blog and I really enjoyed the elements in it. Fabric, drawing, sewing, it reminded me of the way I like to work I may also just be into somewhat tacky art (no offense to above artists) an art that incorporates crafts within the home with a little something more. In conclusion I just feel like spending my last semester staying passionate. I started out trying to expressing my emotions from a bipolar standpoint.  Or looking for a way to show others who I am internally, a way to communicate. In a way I still want to do that yet the events of the summer and the last 4 years have shown me a different way of thinking.  I feel like I need to create a world that I understand, I need to do this for myself, and thats it.

Oh I almost forgot some artists that I have been looking at are Mike Kelley (He works with stuffed animals need I say more?) and Kristen Morgin. Google them or you can click on my link to Mike Kelley's website. He did a few VERY odd pieces with Paul McCarthy ( another interestingly lovable artist) I have yet to post a link for Paul because I can't find a site that offers links, images, and so forth. There are other sites that host articles about him such as Wikipedia and so forth. You can also youtube pieces of his videos last time I checked.