My Two Art Visits

       Last week I went to the SMP show that was just put up in the gallery. It was really fun to see the art work coming out of our school. Even though the projects weren't finished they were still really awesome! My favorite  artist was Tara Hutton who made paper dolls with questionable sexual identities. 

     "I believe dolls are toys that ultimately reflect and teach the gendered roles of society. Boys are given action figures to fight with, while girls receive dolls to dress up and nurture. The dolls and their accessories that I have created are meant to challenge these conventional ideas of gendered play. My goal is to create a new type of play with dolls that goes beyond the narrow definitions of gender that Barbie and Ken, American Girl dolls, or even Bratz allow for. By trying to include everyone’s story, hopefully I can create a space where my own experiences with my gender and sexuality fit. The doll’s bodies are politicized, but the way in which we play with them is entertaining, a more gentle subversion than political protest. I want them to be universally accessible by incorporating humor and play."

     This reminded me a lot of my childhood because my mom always used to make me paper dolls and shes also a liberal feminist so she  gave us empowering children books like the Paper Bag Princess.

So I grabbed some of the free paper dolls and I'm giving them to my mom for Christmas :)

I talked to Tara and she said she wanted to leave the dolls out and film people playing with them. I think that would be very interesting and could be pretty funny! Its nice to see an artist straight out working with gender identity problems. 

The other artist visit I did was on Art Day in Anne Arundal. All of the professors had their art work on display including two of my own professors! I really liked Professor Patterson's artwork because it was really visually pleasing and colorful!

It was also fun to see Billy's work because it applied so much to things we were learning in class... I was surprised that I hadn't seen it until then! I also just looked up Billy Friebele to see if he had any of his work online and there is so much stuff! His Inside/Outside piece is so cool!

 

I don't know how I hadn't heard of this... unless this is a different Billy Friebele...

Final Project

Ahhhh! The final project was quite frustrating. My original original idea was to make a really unhappy looking cow out of seitan but seitan is expensive and I'm broke so that was a fail. My next idea was to put my face in clay so I had a mold of my face and then fill it wit chocolate so I could make a chocolate Amy face! So I got clay and it was kind of hard so my room mate suggested I just play with it forever until it softened. Well... it never softened :( I mushed it for about a half hour but it just kept on breaking! So my face mold looked like a blob which wasn't very fun. Last minute I decided to make a stencil, something I had never done before, and then use chocolate to make prints with it. I chose my dad's face because his favorite food is chocolate. Like my other two plans this one kind of failed too. The only vegan chocolate they had (which ended up not being vegan) was filled with nuts and currants so when I put it in the microwave it started burning and smoking. Then after waiting for the smoke to settle I poured the chocolate on my stencil and it pretty much just ended up looking like a chocolate plate because the chocolate leaked under the stencil. My second attempt was a stamp with the stencil which came out kind of scary looking. My third attempt was an outline of the stencil in chocolate but that didn't work at all because after I lifted the stencil up I realized it was never touching the plate because the burnt chunks of nuts and berries were keeping it off. My last attempt was the most successful (though still pretty ugly,) I pretty much just painted chocolate around the stencil with my finger. Oh well... it was fun though! I really enjoyed coming to class and seeing everyone's work :) Te broccoli chocolate rocks diorama reminded me of  Carl Warner's food landscapes:


I like the cauliflower clouds :)


(not a vegetarian friendly land)

                So I decided my piece was going to be a branch covered in a smooth rainbow of leaves, very much inspired by Goldsworthy’s perfect paint-like leaf coverings on natural objects. (Similar to the image below)

It was really quite fun to do but I failed at using all natural materials. Andy used water and moss as adhesives but I used hot glue… I wish I didn’t. It came out pretty well though; someone walked into my room and thought I painted the rainbow on! The process of collecting the leaves was also fun because I had to climb trees to get to the fresh green leaves that hadn’t fallen yet. I think the people in my dorm who saw me think I’m weird. I was definitely out in nature a lot though for this project, very Goldsworthyish. He also tries to show a natural flow in his pieces which I think I successfully did with the changing colors of the leaves, just like they would change and die naturally.  The critique was really fun because there were such a wide variety of pieces, from colorful popup comic art to black and white impressionist paintings. It was really fun to try and match up the inspirational artist and the project piece. I really liked the pieces that were only subtly inspired by the artist but mostly original like Rachel’s painting of her family. Altogether it was a really fun project J

                The reading and discussion for today was kind of odd. One thing the reading stated was that we couldn’t really see genitals objectively which I personally disagree with. I’ve grown up with a mindset that the body is beautiful so it didn’t really frighten me or make me uncomfortable when we were shown a naked female body in class, unlike most who turned their heads away. However I did agree with the idea that we can’t objectively look at images of death. The feeling of looking at an image of a bullet going through someone’s brain would definitely bring up different emotions than actually seeing it in real life. We are so conditioned to seeing images of death in movies nowadays that it almost makes all images of death seem like some sort of mundane horror fiction. The popcorn movie we watched was also very weird… I still don’t understand how it can just go from a kernel to popcorn without a middle transition stage, which the narrator compares to death…, very fascinating comparison. 

My plan for my project was to gather a bunch of thick tall sticks, tie them together geometrically, and install them in one of the bodies of water on campus. BUT. When gathering sticks I realized that there aren't many perfectly straight sticks from the dead trees around here. So instead I walked around campus and started thinking of a project I could do with leaves. I was thinking of making a rainbow of leaves going up the trunk of a tree but I'm still unsure which project I'll end up doing. I'm going to go outside now and figure it out!

     We've done a lot in class so far, from reading about the origins of time to nude figure drawings, and honestly I've enjoyed it all! I definitely liked the art projects better than the reading and analyzing though because I came into the class expecting to be exploring different forms of art, not different ideas about time and memory. However, I am not disappointed at the lack of art projects in the first half of the semester because I learned a lot, but i'm definitely excited about the new projects coming up!

     My favorite thing so far was the drawing session with the nude model. It was my first time doing that so i was very excited and not uncomfortable at all. It was nice to be in a room where the human body was an inspiration for art instead of something to be ashamed or afraid of. I also loved just looking at the outline of the ladies body and finding cool shapes in the negative space. After we finished all of our figure drawings we had to make a collage out of them with little guidelines. I'm really used to having pretty strict rules for projects in art classes so the freedom of this project was nice. I can definitely tell we are going to have a lot more freedom than we did in my high school studio art class. Everyone's collage came out different and it was fun to hear about everyone's inspiration for their collage. 

     Watching Momento and trying to understand the order of the scenes and what exactly was happening was challenging but awesome. I love that movie! It is a perfect example of how one can manipulate time and order to completely change the feel of a movie for a viewer. It fit in well with everything that we were studying concerning time and memory. I had seen it before and was so confused so I was happy to see it again and was definitely able to put things together better. 

     I am really excited that we are learning about animation because it's something I really love doing and want to know more about. I've done some video animation, mostly claymation, so I decided to do a flip book for this project so I can try something new! I also really like the freedom of this project and I'm excited to see how everyones project came out. 

ARTIST RESEARCH

Zach Pine

Zach Pine is a sculptor who makes all of his work out of organic material. He does a lot of work with balancing rocks, but is also known for his balls of sand which he has mastered and installed in various places. This is how he describes himself as an artist. "Using materials from nature, I create ephemeral abstract sculptures. Some of my work is made solo, but the majority of my art involves others, in the tradition of social sculpture. Healing, seeking balance, valuing interdependence, and accepting uncertainty and impermanence are important themes in my art and in my life."
I'm interested in this guy because I love nature sculptures!
http://www.naturesculpture.com/




Alex Grey...
because he's awesome!
Alex Grey is a really unique artists who makes spiritual and psychedelic 2D and 3D work. Everything he does is giant too so its amazing to see it in person. Every full moon he has a gathering and I went once went to his house for it and he talked about his beliefs and showed his art and then there was a crazy drum circle dance party :) His art is gorgeous!
http://www.alexgrey.com/



Andy Goldsworthy
Another super talented nature sculptor. I love all of his work! He makes temporary and permanent sculptures from things he finds outside. He is kind of similar to Zach Pine.
http://www.morning-earth.org/artistnaturalists/an_goldsworthy.html

     In class on Tuesday we watched Man With A Movie Camera, a silent Russian documentary with no real plot. I thought it was crazy how the editing style was so new in the early 1900's and how the film was criticized for its short frames. It seems like short shots are a lot more mainstream nowadays! We also split up into groups and made a collage of lines shapes that had to either feel anxious or calm. When we had to guess the feelings of the collages the first things I looked at were colors. Cool colors always seem calm and warm colors always seem more exciting. However it seemed like a lot of people were looking at the shapes first, simple and smooth being calm, and busy and jagged being anxious. The rest of class we spent collaging our figure drawings which I really enjoyed because we had a lot of freedom which makes it easier for me to work. That night we read Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, a book I am also reading for my freshman seminar. It worked out well because Chapter 4 was my next assigned reading for my seminar too! The most interesting part was when McCloud talked about how time can be showed in a single frame just from the movement of one's eyes. I also liked how he remade the Muybridge photograph below with his cartoon character. 

     On Thursday we finished up our collages and discussed everyone's piece.  It was interesting to see how different everyone's collages were and whether people had planned an idea for their collage or if things had just flowed.

 Questions:

1. How have shot lengths changed throughout movie making history?

2. Why does our brain associate different colors with different emotions and feelings? 

     I decided to research average shot lengths (ASL) and how shot lengths have changed throughout movie making history. I did this because the ASL in Man With A Movie Camera was way shorter than the average movie in the early 1900's and it was criticized because of this.   I counted the shot lengths in Man With A Movie Camera, like I showed before, and then looked at something most people watch nowadays on TV. It seemed that most shows had a similar ASL as did Man With A Movie Camera, so something tat was once highly criticized is now becoming mainstream. I started off by looking up music videos to see if the has been a decrease in ASL over time. When I looked up "Music Videos" Lady GaGa's Bad Romance was the first thing that came up. Wow it was scary... I hadn't really listened to the song and I don't really watch music videos so it was quite surprising. Anyhow, in this music video the shots are mostly between one and three seconds long.

     Then I looked at the first music videos from the 1980's. Their ASL's seemed to be around 8-13 seconds. An example I used for that was Talking Head's Once In A Lifetime. 

     Average Shot Lengths seem to be getting shorter and shorter. I looked up a database on line that documented ASL's from a bunch of different movies over time but the database was kind of confusing and I'm not sure how accurate it was but it showed that the longer shot lengths were from older movies in the mid 1900's and the shorter shot lengths were more in the present. http://www.cinemetrics.lv/database.php. 

     I also looked at how these short shots have been linked to attention problems such as Attention Deficit Disorder. "In contrast to the way real life unfolds and is experienced by young children, the pace of TV is greatly sped up." says Christakis. His research appears in the April 2004 issue of Pediatrics. Quick scene shifts of video images become "normal," to a baby "when in fact, it’s decidedly not normal or natural." Christakis says. Exposing a baby’s developing brain to videos may overstimulate it, causing permanent changes in developing neural pathways." 

"In the study of more than 2,000 children, Christakis found that for every hour watched at age one and age three, the children had almost a ten percent higher chance of developing attention problems that could be diagnosed as ADHD by age 7. A toddler watching three hours of infant television daily had nearly a 30 percent higher chance of having attention problems in school." 

     The decrease in ASL could also be an explanation to why there are a lot more attention problems in children then there have ever been. 

http://www.whitedot.org/issue/iss_story.asp?slug=ADHD%20Toddlers

   


    On Tuesday we had a lady come in and nude model for our figure drawings, it was awesome! We've been doing a lot of reading and analyzing so it was really nice to start some art projects. It took me a while to get in a drawing mind state, so my first couple of figures were slow and out of proportion, but after a while I got used to the smudgey charcoal and lines started to flow a bit easier. I would have liked a little more time with each position, even just a minute or so, but it was still so much fun! I'll definitely take advantage of the figure drawing opportunities that the school offers outside of class :) I sculpted a lot last year but I've never taken any drawing courses so working with charcoal was a new experience.
    Tuesday night we read an excerpt from Ways of Seeing by John Berger, which, as the title clearly states, was about the way humans see things. The most interesting thing in the chapter we read was about how photography has affected the way we see art and the visual world."The camera isolated momentary appearances and in so doing destroyed the idea that images were timeless." Before photography what you saw relative to your position and space was a unique experience and art was the only was to reproduce this experience for other eyes to see. Photography made it possible that anyone could see the personal experience of anyone else and perfectly capture a time and place.
     On Thursday we had a pretty chill class. We started off watching a powerpoint about Futurists, who seemed to focus their art on movement, time and space. It was a nice change from the more aesthetically pleasing art we had been looking at. The lines Futurist artist used to represent different senses brought us to a conversation about synesthesia, a topic we are also studying in my psych class! After that we listened to music and tried to translate the sound into images which we drew on the computer. We used some fancy electronic drawing pad that I really want to own now :) Our lesson reminded me of my art teacher from highschool who had synesthesia. She said she could visualise music, and he had a peice that reminded me of the Futurist artwork. http://stefanienagorka.com/drawings/drawing1.html
      For my research I've decided to look more into synesthesia.

SYNESTHESIA

 

 is a neurologically-based condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.

     Over 60 types of synesthesia have been reported by people and could possibly be as prevalent as 1 in 23 people. The most common type of synesthesia is known as color-graphemic synesthesia, where letters and/or numbers are perceived as colored. Someone with color-graphemic might see numbers like this:

      My first memory looks something like Chairry from Pee-Wee's Playhouse. Pretty much what I remember is laying on my parents blue carpet, looking at their old ripped up chair, closing my eyes, and imagining the chair with a face like the one above and it moved closer and closer to me until it was almost touching me and then I opened my eyes. It really freaked me out! I don't really know when it was but I have such a clear memory of it. I also remember I was stuck laying on my belly and I was scared but I couldn't go anywhere so I assume it was before I could crawl. My dad also used to watch Pee-Wee's playhouse with me when I was just a baby so maybe it was a night mare... or daymare from that. After that my memories start at around two or three in preschool, mostly nosebleeds and sandboxes.

       In class on Tuesday we played a super fun game of Win Lose or Draw and discussed G.J. Winthrow’s What is Time?  That night we read excerpt 2 from What is Time? which I thought was a lot more interesting than the first. I thought the part about the flatworms was crazy. “An even more astonishing claim, first mad a few years ago in the United States, was that if the original trained worms are chopped up and fed to the untrained ones the latter absorb the learned behavior along with their food.” Woah! So my first question comes from this reading, the author then goes on to say “In none of these experiments is there yet any firm evidence that memory has really been transferred from one animal to another and it’s not just some substance that speeds up the learning process.” But he didn’t say they re-trained the worms to re-learn the behavior, he said the behavior was absorbed with the food right? So if worms have this new behavior all of a sudden that isn’t natural and wasn’t re-taught, then what other explanation is there other then they really did transfer the memory to the second set of worms?

      After class on Thursday my mom called me to tell me about an article she had read. She told me she felt bad because she always used to tell me to find one comfortable quiet place and make it my study room. However the article she had just read suggested studying in multiple places is the way to go because it's easier to recall something when you have multiple associations with it. That was interesting, but what was even more interesting was that we had just discussed the same thing in class about twenty minutes before she called! Weird...

     In addition to our discussion of What is Time? we watched Momento, a movie about a man suffering from short term memory loss. I had seen it a few years ago and was totally confused, so it was definitely nice to watch it a second time. It most definitely related to everything we've been doing with the concept of time and memory and fit in with the strange warped time videos that we had already seen in class. We haven't finished it yet so I'm excited to get to class on Tuesday!

      I've decided to research memory in general because apart from our reading I know nothing about it. Hopefully I'll be learning a bit more in Psych 101! According to exploratorium.edu, there are three main subdivisions of memory; working memory, long-term memory, and skill memory. Working memory occurs in the prefrontal cortex. This memory coordinates long-term memories with sights, sounds, and feelings, so you can respond to events as they happen. Long-term memory stores permanent information ranging from a knowledge of yourself to your understanding of the world. It is processed in the hippocampus. The last subdivision of memory is skill memory which is processed in the cerebellum, and then stored in the basal ganglia. 

(Cerebellum) 

It is responsible for coordination and sequencing of movements. 

I also learned that hippocampus is the Greek word for seahorse :) It is the spiraled part of the brain. 

http://www.exploratorium.edu/memory/index.html

Here's some cool links:

Memory Artist (there's also a section about time and memory) 

Sheep Brain Dissection

Earliest Memories Guestbook

http://www.exploratorium.edu/memory/index.html <-- pretty much the whole site is interesting. 

I have to say, at 9:20 in the morning, it's nice to have a class that starts off with a music video. The first two classes we began our day watching and analyzing two music videos directed by Michel Gondry. Both dealt with time in odd ways, one in a cyclical way and the other questioning past and future. I thought the Kylie Minogue video “Come Into My World" was easy to understand and not too interesting, but when it came to "Sugar Water" by Cibo Matto I was a lot more confused and had a lot more fun analyzing it and putting together the time puzzle with the rest of the class. Time was a very important element in the video because frames were playing backwards and forwards yet somehow the director managed to line up everything perfectly. Michel Gondry definitely likes to mess with our perception of time. Since we watched the first video I’ve been thinking of the movie Run Lola Run*, a movie in which time plays the most important role. It is a twenty minute situation that is played three times, each time changed with a minor event. After watching it I felt like every single movement I made was going to change the rest of my life drastically. When I analyze time a lot I sometimes feel the same way and my brain hurts.  

In the first reading we were assigned, Jerry Saltz asked “Can art change the world?” but I don’t think that can be answered with a yes or a no. I thought about the New York Times I see every morning and how there’s always a large photograph on the front page that catches my attention. If photography is included in the question of whether or not art can change the world I think we would all agree that it has done plenty. It’s a more relatable insight to what is happening in the ever changing world around us. 100 Photos That Changed the World. I think if any of these (photos in the previous link) were painted or drawn they would maybe have slightly less of an impact but they would all be pretty powerful.

The second reading, What is Time?, by JG Whitrow, was surprising to be assigned for an art class. It was pretty much the history of time, something I have not read or heard much about, and something, like Whitrow said, most people can not explain. “Although there are many important ideas that most of us agree we do not understand, only time has this peculiar quality which makes us feel intuitively that we understand it perfectly so long as we are not asked to explain what we meant by it.” In this reading Whitrow does what most of us are incapable of and answers the question.

I would love to learn more about how our perception of time changes throughout our life as we grow. “Logtime is the cognitive hypothesis that our age is our basis for estimating time intervals, resulting in a perceived shrinking of our years as we grow older. A simple mathematical analysis shows that our time perception should be logarithmic, giving us a subjective scale of life very different from that of the calendar. Our perception of aging seems to follow the same (Weber-Fechner) law as our perception of physical stimuli.” (http://www.kafalas.com/Logtime.html)


I am a bit confused about the meaning of cyclical time... I feel like everything we do and the way we keep track of time is in cycles. Weeks, months, years and then we repeat. Is that not what is meant by cyclical time? 

*I see you’ve mentioned it in the syllabus!