Advanced Sculpture, 2014

Summaries of Four Art Events

Event Date: Tuesday 28, 2014
Located: Boyden Gallery

Michael Robinson Chawez - "End of an Egyptian Era:  The Fall of Mubarak"

Michael Chawez is a photographer who worked for multiple news papers such as the Washington Post. He traveled to many places perusing his passion to travel and photograph events that interest him. He calls himself not only a photographer but a researcher and a journalist as well. He explained through his talk about how much research goes into doing what he does. Without doing research you could never know where to go or at what time to photograph history being made.

Michael Chawez talk based around his eighteen day experience in Egypt at the time when the Mubarak uprisings started. He expressed how thrilling to be in a place where history was being made. He showed the audience images he took which centered around the Egyptian people and what they were going through when this event was taking place. There were images of grief, chaos and injury expressed in colored images on the wall and black/white images within his slide show. Chawez talked about how different photographs styles; black and white verse colored, speak in different ways. Some images work best in color while others in black and white are more expressive.

Chawez on top of talking about his trip to Egypt he also talked about his other photographic experiences that were notable to him. On top of showing a slide show of his work from The Fall of Mubarak he displayed images from Peru as well. Chawez in Peru he went to an "abandoned" gold mining town to witness the raw, heartbreaking beauty of a place where many are struggling. Another experience he talked about was going to Brazil which based around photographs in the city which focused on the violence, drugs, and hip-hop artists in the area.

I can relate to Michael Chawez in the way he explains that he is always doing research for his photographic projects. I never realized or considered how much time it takes before the art truly begins. I am recently getting into doing research for all my advanced classes before jumping into the art. At first I found it time consuming and pointless but as I continued I founded value in the process. I see myself growing in my artistic knowledge which is showing in my work. Another moment I found interesting is how the artist expressed his thinking behind whether images were more expressive in color or black and white. There was a thinking process and a lot of consideration in how his work was going to be displayed depending on the event, project or where it is going to be displayed.

Event Date: February 20, 2014
Where: Boyden Gallery

Gabriela Bulisorva lecture

On February 20, I attended the Gabriela Bulisorva lecture discussing her photo project about the experiences of prisoners as they were leaving jail.  She focused on how difficult it is for these people to readjust to society after being in prison. She spoke about how some have little family or broken family relationships, and many have no place to go. She wanted to learn about these experiences and capture their process of trying to integrate into society, while also using her art to tell their story. She is not only making artwork for herself, but also for the people she is working with, while also making it for an audience. She had to take in account all of her audience when creating her work. Within her work and lecture she focused on her feelings about the increase in massive incarceration and explained how many don’t know or don't understand how large the issue is.  People who say that they don't care about the “villains” make this problem a human rights issue and a civil rights issue.

Bulisorva’s photography project Time Zone was focused on Lashawna Etheridge-Bey's story, about her experience of growing up in crime, incarceration for a double murder and her experiences coming out of jail. The artist presented this artwork as a video project. She mixed still frames, audio and moving video into her piece. She showed different ways of expression through the way she framed faces and body parts of the figures, while also mixing color and black and white into the video. The artist wanted to focus on the once-incarcerated woman as a "human being", making the video about her recovery and her path to forgiveness. She did this by showing little about crime. At the end of the lecture and presentation, Mrs. Etheridge-Bey spoke about her story, and offered her insight about her experience and recovering after being incarcerated. She and the artist both then advocated for us to learn more about the one million women behind bars, how we can help those who are incarcerated, and to understand their perspective. Gabriela Bulisorva and Etheridge-Bey have developed a strong bond throughout this project and are currently working together on other projects about the same subject matter.When thinking about the artist’s process I can relate it back to my work. Bulisorva has done a lot of documentation and even building a relationship with her subjects to tell their story. To make an artwork that focuses on a message, I could emulate her process. I found it interesting how the artist told the story in a perspective of healing and recovery. She could have easily told the story in another light which would make watching her artwork have a different message. She taught me that depending on the audience, there needs to be attention to detail, especially when working with a sensitive subject.

 
Event Date: April 2, 2014
Where: Cole Cinema

Animation Event Lecture

On April 2, I went to hear a lecture given by Lynn Tomlinson about animation.  Lynn Tomlinson is an animator, documenter, media artist and more. She worked for 25 years as an independent animator. Unlike how she started her career, most of her projects are done with groups of people rather than just by herself. She spoke about her life and her early works. She showed projects that she had done in the past which ranged from contracted projects to ones she had done with children. In her animations, she has worked with multi-media, different styles, different color designs, and different subject matters.

One of artist’s achievements and also the way she got "started" was winning an MTV contest for a logo design which got aired on television. From there the artist worked with clay and short film stop motions that tell a story or message. Another large achievement that Tomlinson talked about was being asked to do a short animation for Sesame Street.  This short animation taught a lesson about the letter "P". The artist has done many animations for many different projects. She explained in her lecture how hard it was to create these by hand, and how changes in technology have changed methods a lot since she started.  She explained that in an animation that she is working on currently, very second in the animation is equal to one hour of work to create it. Not only does she animate a story, but she has a need to put a moral or lesson in almost all of her work.

What I found interesting in the artist's work is her usage of framing and zooming in. All of her work seems to flow very easily into itself when zooming in, even though she is working in a medium that is very time consuming to do so. She also zooms in ways that are interesting in her films, which is a common theme throughout her work. She zooms into windows that turn into eyes and zooms out to be something completely different. Tomlinson is very exploratory in her use of media. She doesn't mind mixing and playing with many materials in her work. She uses people, paper, objects, wire, clay and other materials in almost all of her work. As an artist, I think that in my work I could be exploring more materials as she does. Her choices in materials not only help her build her animation and tell her story, but also add an expressive and unique quality to her work which I could carry into mine.

Event Date: Multiple weeks in March
Where: Drawing Studio

Model Session

I attended the model sessions over several weeks in March, with other fellow artists. In the sessions, we studied the form of a middle aged woman. I drew jester drawings for durations of 30 seconds to 3 minutes in length, the timing of which was controlled by a student in the class. We worked mostly on standing poses for the jester drawings.  For the longer sessions, the model was posed in a sitting position or lying position. For these sessions we worked for minutes at a time. I mostly drew in pen and pencil in my sketch book. I was more interested in shadows and how the overall power of the body rested on the ground rather than the little details. I am interested in organic shapes in the body itself, and a lot of my lines flow with the particularly strong shapes that I saw. In my jester drawings, I was interested in capturing the flow of the body and how parts of the body linked together.

Studying the form of a model is an artistic exercise that has been practiced for a very long time. What I can take from this experience is the ability to understand and create on paper what I see with my eyes. It is as much about training my hand as being able to use my eyes to interpret artistically what I see. If I am able to do this, I can prepare my eyes for projecting objects on paper, being able to envision and then create them physically. The ability to draw a human being is a crucial artistic experience for me to develop as an artist.  To have the patience to work with my errors and mistakes is something I can also take into my art in the medium of sculpture.