Jane Philipps

Last week before class I became frustrated with the technicalities of Photoshop, but I was able to get back into it and produce 4 new photo-collages. I decided against using themes for each one because it became too tedious, so I just took the images that I had and worked with them. I like the way most of my collages turned out (minus the pixelation factor, which became a problem when I wanted to enlarge them), but I'm not quite sure how to move past them. I did a lot of writing during class to flesh out some new ideas that came to mind. For example, a few people told me that my images looked like they could be in travel brochures (and they were nearly postcard sized) so I thought about how I could relate my images to new, different concepts. For this week I am still using my images though. I'm making credit card sized books where I have dissected each image showing the progression from the smallest squares to the largest. To give them a more handmade quality, I am printing my images on rice paper--which is semi-transparent so you can see through to the next page--and binding the pages together with thread. I'm still not completely convinced by using images that are not my own, so I may try to take some of my own photographs to use and continue making these images. I would like to experiment with other media, but I still think photography is the best way to comunicate the relationships I'm creating.

Adell

I decided to go very very specific with my concept so that I can end up with actual unified pieces that work together.
They will be extremely close studies of still lifes, with an emphasis on geometric texture, with little to no perspective and an uncertain, playful relationship to the paper and to three-dimensional space. (All on the same size with the same paper)

Cassie is late!

I'm sorry I haven't posted until now - I meant to come to the studio last night, but I got caught up in artwork (...seriously!) and forgot. I went in a slightly different direction this week - I had planned to do two things: 1)learn to knit, and 2)film interviews with people describing their sensory reactions to the grass blankets, but neither of those happened. Instead, I took around 50 films and tons more photographs of the Arno and the waterfall near Ponte Vespucci. I took my little white character down there, too, to document him in the water. I actually fell in while doing this, and people on the bridge above laughed at me. However, what I gathered while I was doing this work and while I sorted through the videos last night was that there is something about the way the water moves on the surface that makes it seem like there is a deeper force pushing and pulling and swirling it from underneath. That made me think about being submerged, immersed - trying to think of all the synonyms for "underneath" or "covered" and seeing which ones fit best. I do hope to make some sort of installation for midterm next week.
I'm including my photo link here, since it doesn't seem to have been working for the last couple of weeks - I still need to ask someone for help with this :-)
www.flickr.com/photos/cassiehamrick

Alessandra Perez-Rubio

This week I have been looking into line and patterns in nature around me. I saw alot of really interesting images on the chianti tour which is what i put up on my flicker account. I have somehow misplaced all the pictures I I took of what i had done for last week, but I will put them up soon. I am currently working to expand on my collage piece that fits on the wall that juts out, to the part inside the door, and line the inside of the doorway. It has a really interesting effect with what katie is doing inside that room area. I am experimenting more with using simple patterns and images to balance the entire piece, and even out the focus.

abbey teller

During crit last week, I realized that I didn't have a concrete definition for a "blank portrait." After making another mindmap, I came up with social, political, and religious definitions. The social definition of the blank portrait is tokenism. The token characters do not represent a personality, rather they are a representative of their race. It is not who they are, but what they are. The political definition was actually the most clear to me. Visually, the best link is photographs of Arlington National Cemetery and of caskets wrapped in American flags. The dead soldiers have transcended what they were (people with individual characteristics) and became symbols. The symbols have been used in many ways, both as models of patiotism and starting points fot protest, especially during Vietnam, when it was still permissable to photograph all of the caskets coming off of the planes. The religious definition started with Islamic iconogrpahy and the inability to draw Mohammed's face. This further extands to the Judeo/Christian concept of G-d and the creation of man. According to the Bible, man was created in G-d's image. Therefore, the closest you can get to an image of G-d is the almost-image of man. This is impossible to portray.
After defining the blank portrait verbally, I tried defining it visually by creating a series of portraits of one of my friends and erasing out her eyes, hair, neck, shirt, and background (going back to a very basic concept of the blank portrait and masks, where it is lack of true emotion and personality coming through), and adding in portraits of soldiers who died in Iraq with their faces erased, pictures of people from various minorities with their eyes erased, and one picture of my friend entirly erased (in attempt to come close to portraying the religious definition. Hopefully, I will be able to generate enough portraits by next week to fill a small room.

water! water!

So this is my old post. I was sick, so here it is now I'm freeing up a bit and working with embroidery on wool. Its been fun and relaxing, mostl I'm just going with the flow. ha. pun not intented....some pitfalls I'm watching out for is the camoflauge look, thats usually not so great in artwork, or just not my taste at least...okay my pics dint work last time so this time I'm directing you to the main site and then you have to click on space or place class set on the right hand side. hope alls well maggie

meredith nelson

I have been feeling kind of lost on this project. we've been focusing a lot on shapes and mark-making and stuff in class and i have things i'm interested in but no idea or concept to back them with. as a result, i've been feeling kind of directionless in the work that i'm doing. i've been going back and looking at things through the idea of 'together vs. seperate' (i guess that sounds a little awkard but it's what's been on my mind while working with the materials i collected) and i think things are coming together better now. i'm working smaller and sticking to black and white, messing around with the composition.

Rachel - Week 6

So this week our class has continued to develop our themes. It has been quite interesting to see the variety of projects that the class is making. As for my assignment, I have actually started to tie the branching theme to my fascination with the Whomping Willow trees at the beginning of the semester. I am sticking with 2D media - my plan at the moment is to make pages for a medical encyclopedia chronicling a disease that...well....causes treelike mutation. Yeah......
Anyway, I have posted photos from the latest critique, and at the moment I am just sketching ideas and trying to plan out the composition for my pages.

lee graf

So this past week I went ahead with more experimenting and recorded my data and had all my videos together. I also showed a little prototype of a wheel which I intend to attach to a new controlled environment and film that. Basically I want to refine what experimentation I have already done and to also go into more depth with it. I will possibly use the videos and new still images in conjunction with the velum that I used last week in order to make a kind of progression of the images so that they all mesh together and appear in motion.

Emily Gordon

During class last week, it became obvious that a lot of the things I intended to communicate in my series of drawings did not translate as well as I had hoped. I would like there to be a stronger link or narrative between each piece and I also want to show the different stages of the process of flooding. There was a really clear connection between the image of the boat and the boat in the fountain, but I’m not sure yet if I want to bring the boat into all of the drawings. Someone made a comment that the one with only the boat looks like a zoomed in version of the fountain drawing, so I might investigate that idea some more. Right now I am working on correcting some technical issues I had with perspective and direction of light. I realized that I can keep the same style I have been working with but make my drawings clearer so the viewer can understand what is going on. I’m making a series of smaller sketches to try to fix the problems and figure out if I would like my drawings to have a narrative based around the guys in the boat or if I should just stick with the different stages of flooding.

Katey Albro Week 6

So this week, I am taking the small tunnel that I created last week, and making it much larger, as an installation in the studio. Hopefully, this will help me understand a little bit better how to work with space and the golden mean. I have also been looking at the work of Mario Merz, who has created a lot of work using the golden mean. I want to bring in some sort of organic form into my process now, so I've also started looking at some things in nature, especially fruits and vegetables, hoping to gain some inspiration for the step in this project. Enjoy the pictures!

Ciao,
Katey

Kelly Diehl

The first three pictures are from this week/last week's class. I made six forms to try and get it right. Each one was more polished and considered. I was really happy during the class discussion because the pieces evoked some of the emotional and physical responses I wanted: yearning, desperation, sadness, and resonating in the shoulders and back. My focus this week is the question is it one or two? I'm continuing to work in clay and exploring what happens when I depict each figure separately instead of the collision of the two, and see what happens. I think continuing to make something, anything, is helpful because each form takes on a life of its own. As Jana said, it's a cathartic process in itself, just making. We'll see where this goes.

Kelly Diehl

The first three pictures are from this week/last week's class. I made six forms to try and get it right. Each one was more polished and considered. I was really happy during the class discussion because the pieces evoked some of the emotional and physical responses I wanted: yearning, desperation, sadness, and resonating in the shoulders and back. My focus this week is the question is it one or two? I'm continuing to work in clay and exploring what happens when I depict each figure separately instead of the collision of the two, and see what happens. I think continuing to make something, anything, is helpful because each form takes on a life of its own. As Jana said, it's a cathartic process in itself, just making. We'll see where this goes.

Zoe Hillenmeyer

So dangling some balls of dough from the ceiling in stockings actually panned out better than I expected. The dough was partially crusty on the outside, and then when others squeezed them, they got all gooey. It played with the idea of hard versus soft, and domesticity. I have included photos of the installation for viewing pleasure. Since the installation, I've been playing with different materials. I went shopping at Cascine this morning, and got fabrics and last night I got a bunch of trash bags. There is much playing and exploring to be done with these materials, and I've been making lots of lists of things I could fill the materials with, and ways that I could sensationalize them. That is what I've figured out, is that I am very into the transformation and sensationalizing of materials, and how to use them to affect an atmosphere. I, once again, do not really know where this will leave me, but I anticipate the experimentation with the materials I just snagged this morning! I am also thinking about working on some drawings that relate to the spaces I make, or playing with the photography of the spaces - so that I am branching out and using the creations in multiple ways. I am a little frustrated by time, but I'm not letting it get to me. It is not that I have too much work, but that I wish we had studio twice a week to be soley focused on that for such a long stretch of time. I love the work that ends up coming out of studio days and the day before it... afterwards, I always feel like I need to "unwind" or something, rather than continue pressing on a subject.

We shall see....

Sam Washburn week 6

This week revolved aound finalizing what the heck I'm doing for the finished project. After discussing my three finished narrative illustrations with everyone, I decided I had missed the mark slightly. I wasn't able to convey the true sense of bursting, and I feel this was due to a lack of buildup. As a result, I have started work on a more definitive narrative that is longer and more finely developed. It should top out somewhere between 20 and 30 miniature panels. So...that is what I plan to do. I am quite looking forward to it. Unfortunately, due to a trip to Berlin, I don't have many images up yet..but I hope to place some more up tommorrow (the 28th).

Allison Shellito

This past week we had a critique where we made comments about each others work without saying anything subjective and without the artist saying anything. It was an interesting approach to the critique and I liked it because it seemed more realistic to me (because the artist isn't there at the gallery to explain his/her work...). I am trying to decide what the next step will be for my work. I have been looking for more spirals, especially ones that I can purchase to use to make work. So far I have purchased a box of spiral pasta and I am looking for spiral lollypops. I am also going to try to make a spiral to use for reference so my work will be more realistic.

I really enjoyed our Chianti trip on Friday. I love the Tuscan countryside! On Saturday some of us went to Ferrara to see a show called "Il Simbolismo" at the Palazzo dei Diamanti. It had work by Klimt, Gauguin, Moreau, and Redon to name a few. It was really wondeful to see some modern art. I really miss that when I am in Florence.

Catherine Hite

ok so i will start with a short review of how my project/ideas have progressed:
so my original form was piazzas and then i switched it to angel wings. from here i wanted to express the idea of force versus delicateness. from here my thoughts are going towards the motion of flight and showing the force of delicate wings and wings in motion.
i have also been practicing making marks that are lighter and built up instead of hard and dark with the first mark.
i have been looking at birds in flight especially today when they all when crazy before it started raining. and i am beginning to think about the presentation of my pieces maybe in the form of birds in flight.
-catherine

Jane Philipps

The photos this week show my full piece from last week and details of it. Though it didn't turn out exactly as I had anticipated, I felt that I had tied my idea together well using the Fibonacci spiral as a base. I got some good suggestions in critique and have thought about how I can continue to expand my idea through my work. For this coming class I am currently working on making smaller photo-collages using the same basic design. I have found many images of spirals and circles in nature to use and I think the photographic aspect will make the comparisons I am trying to make more apparent than rendering did. I may continue to use rendering as I expand my idea further, however. I have also included one image of my first tester photo-collage. After making this one, which is a combination of random images, I am working on choosing common themes for each image, like parts of the body, flowers/plants or color for example. I hope that by doing this my images will become more unified and less random, making their purpose more clear. I would like to make at least 5 before I move on to a new idea, but I will see how Tuesday's work day is and go from there.

Icy Areola

Finally gave in to artistic impulses. After a slew of money saving tactics, including the purchasing of lunch materials from the local Esselunga grocery store, I discovered mortadella. Basically, it is the italian equivalent of balogna. Looking at some photos of the anatomy in Florence's Museo della Speccola, I realized that the dissections of the brain resembled the slices of mortadella. They also screamed "lids and lips! lids and lips!". So, I converted my somewhat vaginal forms into brain matter and thus finally linked it to the blog title of two weeks ago. DELICATE DELI-CUT. For this upcoming week I want to focus on affecting my audience's lips which I feel have a sensory receptor all their own: much more in tuned to texture than finger tips in some aspects. I'm thinking about moving into the breast feeding area. I figure that artists like Merit Oppenheim have already successfully made art based on cups and balm and spoons and other fancies that make contact with the lips. Maybe breasts are the way to go. And I'm thinking about ice. Melting ice. I'm not really sure where all this is going, but as with all my art I just kinda let it become what it wants, so.... we shall see.
~Nicole

Daniel Lubniewski Week 6

Upon the insistance of everyone else in my class, I got rid of all the photos in my exibition, focusing only on the drawings I made. They also suggested that while I have some skill with my chosen media, I should be more consistent in the way that I use it from one picture to the next. The rest of this week has been devoted to improving my exibition based on the advice I recieved in class. I have focused on making the narrative, which is now about acceptance as a way of escaping loneliness, more cohesive. I have also be doing practice with various types of media that I intend to use for the exibition, hoping to get a better feel for them.

Jessica Rogen

After crit this past Tuesday I decided to take a two way plan. First I will restage the photo and second I am hoping to make a short video that shows different scenarios illustrating the period of time until Judith actually gets to Holofernes in a kind of choose your destiny kind of way. Sort of maybe it happend this way kind of thing. I have this written out and mostly story boarded. I had intended to re shoot the picture today but was hit with a multitude of problems. Mostly I am having a hard time finding fabric for sheets this time around. Last time I amazingly found this little store with cheap sheets and just used that. Unfortuantly when I went back to the store they were gone. I think that I will just break down and splurge on more expensive fabric but I haven't done that yet. In good news though, I found a weird headcovering for Amy. It kind of captures that servant covered head look that is in the picture without actually refering to headwrapping (which I find antiquated and not what I'm going for). So this week, no pictures but I will post lots next week to attempt to make up for it.

Joey

Switching gears again...ah, the meandering lines that are our lives, our thoughts, our art carreers...

First there was a concentration on found things and accidental beauty, and then an attempt to harness that beauty in drawings, and now? A return to the things themselves. This week, more scrap collecting (particularly of flattened metal things/ champagne wire top things), some playing with wire, some doodling on the train, allowing the bumps to move my hands...so the exploration continues obviously. This feels to me like a really densely packed closet that you want to clean out and organize and you have to rip it apart and have it strewn all over your floor before you can begin to think about put it all back in there in a way that makes sense. My mind is sort of spinning. This has become a very philosophical process...more about how i work as an artist than about this particular "project" - which its really not even. Its not a project at all actually. It's just me making artwork...or not making artwork. But back to the physical, worldly realm. I've started to think more about wire forms and how wire can either create its own meandering line or can mimic to accentuate where another form contains a meandering lines. Also how a series of meandering lines creates a plane - or that a plain is just a series of similarly meandering lines. The grape vines in the vinyard all in rows, moving over the rolling green topography. I need to explore this more with my own wire bending. Things are becoming more sculptural...also hopefully more site specific, but not yet. I need to figure out how to not get arrested.

Amy Scott

I get to be in a box again!!! This weeks pictures are just a few random images from my project. I learnt a lot from doing this so now I'm going to try to improve it for my next project. I'm doing a lot more planning out of all the little details so this time I wont have any random vans in my pics. I'm also putting more consideration into the materials I'm using. Work is well on its way, and so far, so good.

Windnie Pan

I was struggling a lot last week with the exhibition project. I spent a lot of time on one drawing and ended up rushing through the whole thing at the end. My exhibition simply did not convey what i wanted it to. Fortunately, I recieved a lot of great feedback during the critique in class and am trying to get it right this time. i'm so glad that we will be able to work on this project for the next two weeks. Since Tuesday I have been researching different types of knots and playing around with my ropes. I plan on having one drawing for every type of rope and then a larger one of all of them tied together. I am trying to make each one represent something different so i've been working through ideas with my materials, camera and photoshop. I'm am beginning to narrow down my ideas into some possible compositions.