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)