BWAC's "Lineage" Opening

Thanks to all who came out to the Lineage opening this afternoon! It was a lot of fun. For those who didn't make it today, the show will be up until October 31st but only on Saturdays and Sundays. Here are some images from the show.

me in front of my work

Scott and I in front of his work

Scott and I in front of my work

me in front of my work

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.

Literary Hodgepodge

This book was for the Coptic binding assignment. I think that this type of binding is my favorite, it is very neat and the stitches look great on the spine. I like choosing colors for my thread, I always think about which color would go best with the color palette of my book, for Literary Hodgepodge I chose a sort of gunmetal grey color to compliment the black and white of the cover, and as its a neutral, it wouldn't interfere too much with the multicolored pages.

I also had fun with my fonts. I know there are people who are font people, who can look at a random flyer or advertisement and say "oh, they used a rounded helvetica," I'm not one of them. The only thing I've really learned in art school about various fonts is that Comic Sans is the worst font ever. Personally I don't really have too much against it, besides it being a bit juvenile and overused. Anyway, for the various fonts in the books I used different downloaded fonts from free font websites. I think it works, I wanted unique fonts that didn't stand out too much. I also used my own handwriting and actual pages scanned from books.

The idea of the book was to make pages for some of my favorite books or types of literature, I only ended up with nine double spreads, (five one page sections) I printed these pages on my home printer on bristol paper. Which was very aggravating as I had to get the page orientation exactly right (because of the double-sided printing) but in the long run sooooo much cheaper than going to the print lab. I think the quality of the images is probably just as good.

I used many different methods in designing the pages, I scanned various pages in books and sketches I had already done as well as photographs I had taken. I also googled images from the internet of Winnie the Pooh and Boris Karloff etc. and designed quite a few entirely in photoshop, I would then print them out and in some cases I would collage on top with paint or pen, wintergreen oil transfers, images printed or drawn on tracing paper. The cover was also done entirely in photoshop, based off of an assignment in freshman year which I re-did and improved upon.

The sections are Spread 1: Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven, Spread 2: Pablo Neruda 1, Spread 3: Pablo Neruda 2, Spread 4: Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Coney Island of the Mind 1, Spread 5: Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Coney Island of the Mind 2, Spread 6: William Carlos Williams' The Great Figure 5, Spread 7: J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, Spread 8: Various children's books, Spread 9: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

The last page is a single page dedicated to Where the Wild Things Are and The Little Prince.

As for the images in conjunction with the text, I tried to choose images that really represented what the text was about, like for the Coney Island of the Mind spreads, I chose images from Coney Island that I took during the summer that I felt really went well with the content of the poems. I chose the poems simple because they were my favorite Ferlinghetti poems and I believe it was just pure luck that I had images that I really liked that went perfectly with them. I draw a lot of things in my sketchbooks in response to works I've read, like the Neruda pages, I find his poems so visually stimulating that I want to depict them. And in the cases of The Raven and The Great Figure 5, I wanted to copy works by masters responding to the same text (Manet and Demuth. And as for the children's books and The Hobbit, I used images found in the books themselves, the original illustrations that we all know. I just had fun trying out different processes and exploring my own connection to the literary works that I love. I think all in all it is one of my most successful books that I've made, there would have been a few things I would change if I could (like adding a nicer table of contents, a title page and a colophon) but I am very proud of this particular book.

The Labors of Hercules

These images are from my series “The Labors of Hercules” which was also a part of my Senior Thesis. This series basically took similar ideas from the “Family/preservation of Heritage series” (tradition, cultural values, etc.) and made them more focused on cultural identity as opposed to personal identity. The pieces depict the individual labors in a very simple way, the slaying of the creatures or the action of the labor is not shown directly but I wanted the observer to understand as much of the myth as possible without the paintings being overly explicit or literal. The order of the images is actually backwards because the Lion is supposed to be first and Cerberus is last.

Cerberus- Spray paint and acrylic on panel.
The Cretan Bull- Gesso and pencil on wood.
The Stymphalian Birds- Oil, tin foil and shellac on wood.
The Golden Hind- Spray paint, pencil, acrylic and shellac on wood.
The Nemean Lion- Oil and shellac on wood.

On a different note, I'm trying to figure out why my default language/type on this blog is Hindi...
व्त्फ़? = WTF?

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.

First post

I've just graduated college at MICA and I've finally got my BFA...now what? Well, first thing's first-- Get a site to display work. So check that off on my list! Now I've just got to find a job, get a business card, and a driver's license. So here's an image that I'm thinking of using for the postcard, tell me what you think. I'll try to update and add more pics over this week. Ciao for now! ~C