Continuation of Phase II Update

Here's some pictures of my piece halfway wood burned and how it is at the moment. I meant to take pictures at stages in between but I completely forgot so this is what I have now. 

Phase III Topic- Final

I was super happy with all of the feedback I got last thursday during our phase II critique. I got some great ideas on how to finish the piece I am currently working on and ideas sparked for the last phase. After looking at Juxtapoz Magazine online- one of the recommendations from class- I found the artist Carsten Witte who I used for my artist statement research as well. He is a photographer from Germany and I am absolutely in love with his newest work. He does these intense black and white photos of women with skulls overlayed on top of their faces. Obviously since it has skulls and bones I am drawn to it! I am completely inspired by his work.

For my photo imagery on fabric final, I have decided to shoot headshots of all of my friends and overlay their faces with skulls. I am either going to print them as cyanotypes or van dyke brown prints, or maybe even combine the two. There is also a possibility that I might try solvent transfers as well.

For Phase lll I want to take a couple of the portraits and wood burn them onto tree stumps- an idea that came up last class. I might overlay some of the faces, I'm not entirely sure yet, but I'll experiment once I have taken the photos. I want to have the faces gradually starting to fade into the skull. I also need to incorporate the birds in some way but I haven't figure that out yet either. I know I still have some planning to do, but I'm really excited to get working on this!

Artist Statement Research

For homework this week, we have to research three artist statements. By doing this, we can compare the statements which will help us when we start to write our own. I wanted to start off this post with the definition of an artist statement just to get a general idea of what is expected of them.

Artist Statement: a short statement of one page or less, written by the artist, that provides background information and influences on the artist’s body of work, overall artistic philosophy, and a brief history of the artist’s development. 
(http://www.crt.state.la.us/arts/grantglossary.aspx)


I looked through a lot of Juxtapoz Magazine online and found a couple new artists that I enjoyed.
The first artist is Iain Macarthur.

 Iain is a surreal artist from Swindon, England. He works mostly with pencil, watercolors and pigment pens. In his work, he focuses on people and creating out of the ordinary portraits. You can find a lot of his work in shirt designs, tattoo designs, posters, album art etc. You can read his entire statement here. I personally love the amount of detail that he puts into each piece. It allows the eye to find something new in the crazy designs, each time you look at it. 


The second artist I found was Timothy Pakron. 

Timothy is a visual artist from Mississippi. He uses different mediums ranging from alternative techniques in the darkroom to medium format color film photography. Timothy is known for painting with the developer in the darkroom so that only parts of his photos are exposed. As far as subject matter goes, Timothy focuses on portraiture. He believes that a portrait has a sense of presence and weight. His goal as an artist is to make the viewer see differently, think differently, and most importantly feel differently. You can read his full statement here and visit his website here. I love the emotion that comes across in his work. The facial expressions and the strokes of the developer really give portaits a whole different feel. It really makes you think about his work and what message he is trying to get across. 




The last artist that I chose is Carsten Witte.

Carsten is a photographer from Germany. He is fascinated by beauty and the beauty that the female body holds. In his statement he says" It's always faces that fascinate me and this mysterious purity of really beautiful people. He photographs the female body focusing on the natural beauty and playing around with shadow and light to create these "icons of beauty". He wants to leave his work up to interpretation of the viewer calling his images "mystery plays" where you never know exactly what is going on. A main idea behind some of his most recent work is the "belief that everything is constantly changing, but photography can preserve the moment. Beauty is almost nothing without the knowledge of how fast it will fade". You can read his entire statement here. And look at his work in Juxtapoz Magazine here. I'm in love with his portraits with the skulls overlapping. The intensity makes the photos absolutely gorgeous. They connect to my work as well, and have inspired my idea for Phase 3.

Phase II Update! 3/25/12

I have finally finished my first piece for Phase II. Here are some images to show my progess! I'm really happy with the way this piece came out. I had some trouble with it, but was able to get past it and I love the outcome.

I have also started another piece for Phase II that I would like to have done, if not almost done by Thursday. This one is based off of an African myth about a Hammerhead bird. When a hammerhead bird learns that someone is about to die, it flies to their home and gives 3 cries of warning. I have taken my own interpretation of this myth and created my next wood burning piece out of it. The grain in the wood I have chosen to do it on is fantastic and I'm really excited to play around with watercolor on it. I've gotten a pretty good start on this and can't wait to finish it. Here's some photos from today:

Artist Event: Tufts University Gallery- Nancy Holt

I went to Tufts University and looked at an exhibit by Nancy Holt titled Sightlines. Tufts University has a really strong connection with the arts that I did not expect or know about.  This gallery exhibit for Nancy Holt had a lot of work and was very interesting to look at.

 Nancy actually went to Tufts and graduated in 1960 with a degree in Bio. She then decided to explore video and photo. Her work explores different parts of landscape, challenging you to focus on the little details of a particular spot. I particularly liked her piece Views Through a Sanddune, 1972 where she teamed up with URI and placed a cylinder through a sand dune making you focus on a small aspect of the landscape in the background. Depending on which way you looked through the cylinder in the sand dune, you saw two small landscapes of the ocean, both different.

You can see how she is combining her science degree and her artistic skills in a lot of her work. All of her work has to do with the surrounding environment of these cylinders that she creates. It is almost as if she is creating “the center of the world”. These cylinders are common in almost all of her work. I think this idea of focusing in on a small aspect of something really large goes along with noticing the little things in life. There is so much that we overlook and take for granted. I think  Nancy Holt wants us to slow down and look at the small things and appreciate what is in front of us. 

March 12th, 2012- Phase II Update

With Spring break and everything I realized that I haven't been on here in a while! I've been working on more wood wood burnings. For Phase II I've decided to use bird myths as my influence and inspiration for my pieces. I found an Irish myth that says when loved ones pass away they come back to sit on their family member's shoulder as a Raven. I've taken my interpretation of the myth and brought it to life in my wood burning, still incorporating the body, watercolor and carving. I plan on having this one done and another piece done for the critique at the end of the month.

Artist Exhibit- 100 Years at BU

The 100 Year Exhibit at BU was a collection of performance work from the 1900's up until today. It was set up in a timleine-like fashion with everything stapled to the wall, so you can take things down and put things back up. The works ranged from photographs, to actual physical pieces of art, to videos displayed on small monitors. The curator Kate talked about how all of the work is basically an archive saved onto a hard drive that  they could take anywhere and print everything out and set the show back up.

There were a lot of pieces that I liked, but there were a lot of pieces that I just didn't get or didn't care for. There were also a lot of pieces that made me uncomfortable and others that I just didn't like looking at. Although performance art is thought of as weird or there to make the viewer uncomfortable, there were many pieces that I liked. I started at the beginning of the timeline around 1911 with Serge Diaghilev's Petrouchka and 1922 Oskar Schlemmer's Triadisches Ballet and The Figural Cabnet.

All three of these pieces were ballets. Performance art back then was mainly theater and ballets. The costume designs and the movement of the body on stage were two "artistic" characteristics of plays and ballets. Whenever I think of performance art I think of more modern videos and I guess, focus on the more odd aspect of modern art today. I completely forgot that ballets and theater performances are definitely in the category of performance art. I think today though, those types of things are not necessarily but in that category because they are able to stand alone in their own categories. 

There were a couple piece where I had to ask myself, is this art? A common question with most modern art today, especially with performance art. A piece that really stuck out to me in terms of "Is this art?" was a piece titled Baby Ikki by Michael Smith. In this piece, Michael Smith is dressed as a baby and crawls around the street of Hartford, CT acting like a baby. Heres a short video that isn't the entire piece, but gives you the gist of what is going on in the video--> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oZfbCm4UeM. I know this is a performance piece, but I don't necessarily understand it. I'd like to hear someone's opinion on why this is considered art. To me, I feel like he is just this man doing some kind of odd street performance that is commonly found in cities. I don't really see the point behind it. 

One piece that I really liked was 2008- Measuring the Universe by Roman Ondak. In this piece Onadk has audience members come up to the wall where he marks their height and the their date of birth. The idea is to have the entire galley covered. There are no breaks between the measurements so the process is completely ongoing. They also measure kids and adults so there are all different heights and marks on the wall. Here is a short video where he talks about this piece and shows the piece "in action"--> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNiwsDnzFiw. 

When it comes to performance art I find that I tend to like performance work that involves the audience to make a physical piece of work. The process of creating a piece of art can be considered artwork all by itself, but to have an actual physical piece of art on top of that is awesome. I think this is why I like the Measuring the Universe piece. It such a simple idea but the process and the outcome make the idea so much bigger. 

Overall, I enjoyed this exhibit. I think that it opened my eyes to a lot of older work that I had never heard about and also newer work that I had never heard about. It also made me think a lot about performance art which is a topic that is not necessarily a common one to come across. I think now with more modern art it is something that we come across a lot more. It is good to get introduced to new ideas and new ways of thinking as far as art making goes, and I think this 100 Years exhibit did just that.