Kristin Seymour
Artist Event: Heather Layton
This was by far my favorite artist talk of the Spring semester. No only was Layton’s speaking capabilities far stronger than most artists who have given talks here, but her work was compelling and new for me. Although at first her work may label her as a political art activist, when looked at deeper it is less about politics and more just about people and society. Lisa in the question section of the talk, asked Layton “Why art?”. I feel that Layton answered Lisa’s question in a great way. She said because it was what she knew how to do. She elaborated by saying that art has a way to start conversations that most people have written off or stopped talking about. That art is a way to see existing situations with new eyes.
I do not work with social and political topics as Layton does, but I relate to how she talked about art as a vehicle for awareness. I create my work to show people the information or subject matter that they already know, just in a new light. My work is about nature and not about people as Layton’s work is. She focuses on comparisons between societies for many of her works. For one of her works she GPS mapped the coordinates of Drone attacks in Pakistan and placed them on the United States map. Another more on the groundwork similar to this was in New York State. She noticed a large gap between the city and the suburbs. The class and race of people were different and the discrepancy in the number of homicides between the two classes of people was excessive. She found the coordinates out for all the homicides in the city. She then relocated those coordinated onto a map of the suburbs. She placed flowers in each of the locations with the name of the victim. The response she got from this project was spectacular. Some residents were furious because they saw their neighborhood as safe and secluded from the violence even though it was right down the street or across the train tracks. Some residents were shocked and actually paid attention to the message and wanted to learn more. In the end Layton was successful in her project because she got people talking and in turn awareness was raised.
The other work she talked about in her talk that interested me was her Notes to a Future Generation. For this collaborative project she asked people to write a letter to a future generation. The letters were then put into burlap pouches that were hanging from string on the wall. The layout mimicked a clothes line. The bags were to be turned inside out once the letter was in them. On the interior of the bag there was brightly colored fabric. Layton said this was to symbolize that the future is bright. The letters were instructed to only be opened in 2100 by a future artist not born yet. I liked how she did not create a strict prompt but rather said just write a letter. I liked the aesthetic view of the project itself. The clothesline style hanging of the pouches showed the sheer number of these pouches well. I enjoyed how there was a transition from brown burlap to bright fabric within the bag.
Layton’s goal is to make people think about their relationships to others, their relationships to other cultures, other societies and other views. She travels to controversial lands and then comes back and shares her experiences with us. She elaborated hom how when in Pakistan people were nice and kind just like in America and that what the media portrays about the Pakistani culture is not true. Governements have even threated her to not talk at colleges. She is a controversial artist doing things many people would not risk doing. She is raising awareness of taboos within society.
Kristin Seymour
Art Event: Lynn Tomlinson
Tomlinson was here to visit for one week and stayed in the Artist house. While at the house she created a work that hit me pretty hard. She started her talk with showing us a work she had created that morning. Her work depicted the last house of one of the disappearing Maryland islands. She said that a friend had shared the photo with her and she was inspired. The image of that house was very familiar to me. Even though her depiction of the house was very abstract, I knew what I saw right away. The professional photographer Jay Fleming had photographed that house many times. Jay is one of the only professional photographers who has gone multiple times to visit the disappearing islands of the Chesapeake Bay. He photographed that exact house the day before it collapsed into the Bay. As soon as I saw her artwork based off a photograph, it mad me wonder if it was Jay’s photo.
Tomlinson is an animator by trade but throughout her talk I saw the correlation and prevalence of collaborative artworks that work less with animation and more with puppets. It seemed like almost all the works were made in collaboration with other artists, students, composers and community members. Immortal Jellyfish was an interactive multimedia puppet show that she put on with her students. She controlled the live video and animating while her students’ were puppeteers jellyfish puppets in a hand made aquatic setting. Tomlinson also explained during her talk about an app she is working on with computer scientists. She is creating a crab puppet that you can manipulate through an app. The digital crab will move to your commands and be recorded with the intention of creating a miniature play. Tomlinson is collaborating with other artists and computer scientists for this app.
Focusing back on her original animations she explained that we might have seen some of her work before. Her animations have been featured on PBS and Sesame Street. Public television was her niche in the 90’s because they were looking for short animations geared toward kids that conveyed a positive message. These clips were around 30 second long and would air between show segments. She explained that she was given full artistic reins in the creation and even in the morals shown. She chose to make her animations out of a wax painting technique. She would use a small variety of colored wax. She would then place it in a back-lit machine that heated up the wax and allowed it to soften and mold to her hand movements. Frog Harmony was one of these animations featured, and actually the one animation of Tomlinson’s I vaguely remember form my childhood. This piece was created using greens, yellows and browns. The moral of this short film was that when you work together, there is harmony. Another popular short film of Tomlinson’s is A Smart Crow. This was also created with a limited color palette of wax. The tones within these works come from the thickness of the wax, not a change in wax pigment. These works are backlit, this gives them a different feel than other wax animations. She said in the talk that she enjoys animating by hand and moving the wax around for each frame of the animation.
The connections I made with Tomlinson is her ability to rethink a pre-existing idea in a slightly different way. She is using common animation techniques as well as common materials to create her works. What is new and innovative is the implementation of back lighting for her animations and live videotaping for her performance piece. I can relate to this because I feel like I am making work visually similar to the pop art, screen prints of Andy Warhol. I am using similar abstraction ideas and just reformatting them in my own process of photography and illustrator. What I found particularly interesting, and not relatable about Tomlinson is her ability to collaborate on almost every project. In almost all of the works she shared with us, there were other people who played a role in the creation. To me this is a contradiction to her hands on art practice of animation. She does not want computers to do any of the work; she wants her mind and her hands to create each frame. So, to me I feel that this is a contradiction to her collaboration habits.
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