New Layout!

Hey, I see you've noticed the new layout for my blog. I think it looks pretty spiffy if I do say so myself!

Also, check out this review of my work at BWAC's Lineage show on this blog THE ARTPOINT. It also reviews Scott's work.

Here's a poster I designed for my Bond party back in August, it was hand drawn and cleaned up and colored in photoshop. If anyone wants a print of it let me know, I have a few 11x 17ish prints and I'll let them go at the low low price of $7 each. I also have a version without the party info on it.

Quick note about Lineage

Hey all, sorry for the long absence. I totally flaked out and missed the "Red Hooked" show, mostly because it was too expensive to print the photographs and I didn't have time to comparison shop. However, I am definitely doing the "Lineage" show at BWAC along with my friend Scott, whose blog http://scotty106.blogspot.com/ looks eerily similar to mine.

For "Lineage" I'm exhibiting my Preservation of Heritage series, and am now rooting through some of my mother's family photos. Here are some gems I found, ones that I might use in future work.

Tank

"Russell paid us a surprise visit"


Yes, that's a flamethrower.

"Judy watching T.V."

Yes, that's my Pop Pop smoking a cigarette and shaking hands with Darth Vader

BWAC success and Euro Adventure

The BWAC show nailed comes to a close this weekend. I had a lot of and I think it was a huge success. I didn't sell any work but my one piece in the auction was bid on, so I'm happy. I'm really looking forward to to the summer and fall shows, "Red Hooked" and "Lineage" respectively. For "Red Hooked" I think I'm going to print out a couple of didital images I've taken in Red Hook and frame them. And for the "Lineage" I will definitely exhibit my Family series.

Here are a couple of images I'm thinking of printing for "Red Hooked"

I just got back from an awesome Euro adventure but I haven't developed any film yet or sorted through the various digital images I took. I did sketch a bit too and I'll scan some of the sketches in the near future. I went to a ton of museums while I was there, in Brussels I went to the Musées Royaux des Beaux, which includes the Historical Art Museum, The Modern Art Museum and The Magritte Museum. The Magritte Museum was amazing but I really liked the Historical Art Museum which housed an amazing collection from Northern Renaissance painters like Steen, Bosch, Hals, Rubens and many more. The Modern Art Museum was severly disappointing, it was in the basement and was laid out strangely. The colloection wasn't all that impressive except for the works by Ensor.

In Paris I went back to the Musee d'Orsay. A lot of the museum is under construction and some key pieces are not on display. However it made up for it with the insanly awesome exhibit "Crime and Punishment." the exhibit had paintings depicting various crimes (ie. the Death of Marat), an actual guillitine, paintings by prisoners in jail, drawings and plans of the Panopticon jail preposed by Breton. Crime scene photographs, death masks of criminals, penny dreadfuls and posters and newspapers including woodcuts of horrible headlines. It was morbid and awesome, extremely powerful and kind of gross all at once. I definitely reccomment paying the extra euro or two to go see it if you're in Paris.

Amsterdam had the most museums I wanted to go to, The Van Gogh Museum, the Rembrandt House and Museum and the Rijksmuseum. All were amazing I mean the Rijksmuseum had a ton of Rembrandts including the Night Watch, Vermeer, Hals and other Dutch masters. The Van Gogh museum was great, as expected but the Rembranthouse was a lot of fun. It was pretty cool to see his studio and his bed and everything, they also have galleries. They had a great show on early Dutch photography and they had a room with a selection of Rembrant's prints.

Bruges was really beautiful and ridiculously picturesque. I feel like nobody actually lives in Bruges except fairies and unicorns. Bruges had the Groeninge Museum, interesting colloction of local medieval artists and even Belgian modern artists. The Memling Museum in the Hospital of Saint John completely blew me away. The paintinfs and various artefacts from its days as a hospital were fascinating, the Memling museum was amazing, and they had on loan from the Groeninge Museum one of Bosh's famous altarpieces. all of this in a church-like setting, for kids they had medieval coloring books set up on drawing horses with colored pencils. The were scenes from the bible and scenes from the hospital, it was kind of great coloring in Nuns taking care of maimed people. In the upstairs there was this very powerful exhibition by an artist in residence on the "foundlings" since St. Johns was also a foundling hospital.

All in all the museums in Belguim, Amsterdam and Paris were a ton of fun, I prpbably spent 70 euros in postcards and another 40 in Museum entrance fees but it was well worth it!

The Preservation

Hellooo, sorry about the long lapse between posts but this time I actually have been fairly busy. Recently I've been working at the video store around the corner, doing this freelance animation thing which I'm super glad is over because I've never done animation before and I felt incredibly out of my depth, and I started working for Aurora Robson again (the artist I interned for last summer.) So yeah, I've been a busy bee.

This post will be highlighting my final for my book class, it's titled "The Preservation" and I really tried to combine elements from the Family Series of my Thesis with what I learned in book class. It's a Coptic bound book and I used a variety of methods and materials to get it to look and feel right. In this book I was really interested in texture both physically and aesthetically, some of the pages have collaged or layered elements to them next to flat printed images. I wasn't as concerned with the placement of images on the page, I wanted it to seem somewhat random.

The printed images often look 3D, as I xeroxed leaves, flowers, photographs and other objects directly onto the page. I also played a lot with my printer, printing on top of already printed things, feeding different types of paper and making photograms with the xerox machine in it, sometimes altering the size and scale of what I was xeroxing. Another element that tied it very strongly to my Thesis is that I actually took digital photographs of quite a few of my little Family collages, these photographs were often purposely blurry, and extremely close up, to only see part of the collage, I used these images as pages in the book.

The book deals with memory, family and personal history. It also simultaneously explores the history of photography and image making. One part I particularly like is that I took and old family photo, scanned it, played around in photoshop and inverted the black and white, I then printed it out on regular computer paper and oiled it to make it transparent. I took that "negative" and made a Cyanotype with it. I then took a digital picture of that Cyanotype and printed it out on a piece of paper to use as a page in this book. It's the process that I'm very interested in, of course I want the end product to look interesting but in the process I've used one of the oldest forms of image making in conjunction with some of the newest forms of image making. I also find it interesting that Bookmaking itself, along with Printmaking, have such a rich and old history, that many do not even think about day to day.

I do realize that in using actual flowers and putting the oiled images in the book, it will eventually look, smell and feel different over time, things will get browned and washed out but in I actually really like it. It's called The Preservation because I feel like I'm preserving the past, preserving history and like photography itself preserving moments in time. I had a ton of fun assembling this book and I feel that it is really what I was trying to get at with my Thesis, a sort of conclusion that sums everything up succinctly.

Some Older Work (First of the Family Series)

These pieces were done during the Spring of my sophomore year at MICA. This idea of the Family / Preservation of Heritage Series was germinated in my Collage & Assemblage class for the assignment of "Ageing and Distressing" in which we had to take new materials and make them look old or worn.

Work

More Work

Here is some more work my Senior Thesis, (from September '08 through right before I graduated.) These pieces are from a body of work titled "The Preservation of Heritage," I'll give you the abbreviated artist's statement:

These pieces reflect my interest in Family and Heritage themes. I have been using old family photos and photographs that I’ve taken myself that I feel represent some aspect of my family life or my experiences growing up and using them in small pieces usually on wood, canvas or panel. I use my family’s snapshots because I find interest in forgotten people and events; this holds an element of mystery for me. I feel like I am reclaiming part of my heritage by re-appropriating these images in my art. I use a myriad of materials, spray paint, oil paint sand, shellac, matte medium, acrylic and whatever else I can find.

I really enjoyed working on this series and will probably continue using more stuff found in the basement. I've also been meaning to root through some of my mother's old photographs since most of photographs I've used so far have been from my dad's side.

I'm going to try to get some decent images of some of the photo work I've done this year as well as images of the books I've made. Hopefully they'll be up for your viewing pleasure before long.