Sculpture Studio Spring 2010

Summaries of Four Art Events

Denis Kitchen

Denis Kitchen created Kitchen Sink Press, a comic company that eventually rivaled Marvel comics. Kitchen Sink Press was a part of “Underground Comix,” which was a genre of comics that addressed issues that society wasn’t quite accepting of. Underground Comix started off as an anti-war movement, and began to address issues such as civil rights, feminism, gay culture, and hippies.

While these comics might have seemed to be held to a high regard, they were not, rather, they were taboo. Denis Kitchen said that back then, mothers threw away all comics that they found in their children’s possession. The “Comics Code Authority” was developed as a board that censored all comics. Comics started off as very graphic, showing rotting corpses or bullets going through heads. There was a link between comics and juvenile delinquency, and the Comics Code Authority was created to censor those aspects about the commix that would contribute to the delinquency.

Underground Comix became “underground” because the Comics Code Authority didn’t censor them. What is most outrageous to me was one comic from the feminist movement that depicted a giant vagina, and inside was the building from a city. What’s crazier is that that comic was in response to a comic that depicted a giant penis breaking through the city floor. At the beginning of his lecture, Denis Kitchen said, “I hear you’re a liberal arts school. We’ll find out how liberal you really are.” Kitchen went for the shock effect in both his lecture and in his lifelong work.

Martin Brief

Martin Brief was my favorite artist talk, mostly because of his demeanor and humble sense of humor. Before Martin Brief, I had never heard of an artist so dedicated to such a visibly tedious work. He talked about six of his series: The Newspaper Series, Amazon God, The Dictionary Series, The Artforum Series, Truisms (After JH), and Success.

Each of the series was extremely tedious. For the Newspaper Series, Martin Brief took newspaper pages from different years and filled in all of the lowercase ‘o’ letters, which created an extremely interesting pattern showing the layout of the page.

One of my favorite pieces was Amazon God, in which Martin Brief searched “God” on Amazon and documented every search he found. He had a vertical column of the work “God” and surrounding it were titles of books that he found. The word “God” stayed consistent while the words that surrounded it were either on the left, right, or both.

Brief was very humble and related to us as students when he said, “I don’t always know what I’m doing.” I loved that he was confident enough to say this, and that not knowing quite what he’s doing led to a lot of inspiration for his work.

Pam Cardwell

Before Pam Cardwell’s talk, I was lucky enough to have met her in person in my painting class when we went to her studio at the artist house. I saw her dozens of sketches of pinecones and twigs and was struck by both her interest in nature and thus her focus for preparation sketches. She really tries to get a feel for what she’s drawing in multiple ways through her multiple sketches.

From her artist talk, I learned that she gets a lot of her inspiration from her five years spent in Turkey where she taught. She talked a lot about the fabrics and the colors there and how they serve as inspiration for her. Not only do things she picks up in nature and from places she’s been inspire her, but she is inspired by other artists. She doesn’t ever want to copy another person’s work or anything that she sees directly in nature, but rather uses it as inspiration.

Student Art Show

This was my first time submitting work to the student show, and I had two pieces in it—my self-portrait and my first sculpture. I didn’t go to the student art show last year and I was struck by how nice the exhibit looked, as well as the multitude of mediums seen.

There were plenty of books displayed from the book arts class that I was very interested in for the interactivity and that they were all hand crafted, but I was unable to tell with some of them. Michael was giving out his “I can’t breathe when you sleep” business cards to some of the judges and adults who I had not seen before, and I enjoyed watching their reactions.

Jamie won an award for his drawings, and there were many other awards given out. My self-portrait along with nine other pieces was selected to display in PNC bank over the summer. It was fun to see our work recognized so formally and to see other people’s work that I was not familiar with.