I'm here, I swear!

Hello blogosphere,
I'm here, I promise! I have been a little lax on updating.
I've been working hard, finishing up pieces and getting photos done. I had two photo shoots over the weekend, and they went GREAT! Liz Roberts is a beautiful model, and the men from Army of Infants were rocking the house. I have a few adjustments to make to the garments before the performance, but the motions are working out well.
I'm also working on final drawings. It's been hard being confident in drawing and creating in a new way, but I think it's going well.

Teaching methods has been interesting, learning about teaching philosophies and how to write them. So much goes into one, I don't know how i'm going to keep it short!

Here are some people I am looking at:

Metal sculpture

Tragedy and art

Huichol Beadwork
Where has this been all my life?

Gregory Euclide

Ronit Bigal

Carol Boram Hays

Imme Van Der Haak
Great work with the body.

The week that was

Hello fellow artists and artist sympathizers.
This week I was surprisingly productive. I say surprisingly because I was sick yet again and missed two fill days of being in the studio. But, despite that, i finished one of my pieces. I have yet to really document it, but here is a very silly photo to give you an idea:

On the right is Lolita, my trusty sewing dummy. 

I also managed to do a tracing, which I have been a little lax on and which seem like they're fading into the background. I think I will get back to them in more detail in the future, but right now I am focused on other things. 

I am working hard to get these modular rosettes done. They will form some attachments to a shirt. 

It is kind of interesting getting feedback on this project. I mean, it is always interesting getting feedback, but I am thinking about this project in a way that is not necessarily being projected. All in all, I don't think that this is a bad thing. To me, these things I am making are jewelry. They attach to the clothing, but the individual objects are forming in my mind as jewelry. I realize that because they have the direct attachment to the clothing and not to the body, this creates a disconnect from traditional jewelry and somewhat sends them into the realm of fashion. 

 At home I am working on creating hollow forms out of beads. This is very challenging and a nice break from my studio work here at school. Right now in my life I have two very different studios. It will be interesting to see how they merge after I leave CCAD.

In teaching methods this week we went over some of the issues we are having in our classes. I am still not quite sure what to do with my problem, but it is nice to get some feedback on it. We also went over syllabi that we had written either for classes we hope to teach next semester, or classes we created. It was hard to create a syllabus! I didn't take into account the lazy attention span of students. I will need to edit mine down to bullet points or something to make it more easy to take in. I think it is hard to really understand the students sometimes. I am not that far in age from most of them, and yet it seems like much farther. I have much more in common and find it easier to connect with the older people in the class. This is something that I need to figure out, as I'm sure it only gets worse with time!

Here are some artists I was looking at this week:
preview of Nick Cage Sound Suits
Volker Koch
Bruno Catalano
asger carlsen
Maskull lassere
Kabakov
Lissy Elle
Hrabina Von Tup Tup
I mostly looked at the photo set here called "The Warrior". This is adornment!

It's New York City Baby!

Went to NYC with some marvelous ladies last weekend. We visited some amazing artist studios! We visited Tom Burckhardt and Kathy Butterly first. They had a very beautiful studio/living combination. I was really drawn to Kathy's work. She spoke very eloquently (as did Tom), and I connected with her statements about working in a small scale. She explained that as she works on a particular detail, she gets lost in it and it becomes the whole universe. I really understand that impulse and losing oneself in the particular details of the work. Tom's work was very layered and I enjoyed the transparent quality of the painting. The fact that he casts each base for every painting is really involved. 

The second studio we visited was Simon Evans and his wife. They were both very interesting and inviting people. The work we saw there was evolving and becoming a coherent body of work. I enjoyed the suggestion that the paper they left on the floor of their studio becomes patinaed in a way by walking on it and living around it.

The second day I was unfortunately ill. I missed seeing Jan Huling's work, which I have posted on my blog before. I was very excited about this, and sad I missed it. 

Since being home i've been trying to get back into my work. Meeting today with Trenton Doyle Hancock really enabled me to do that. We spoke about the concept of having each piece be a character, and of enacting them. I am becoming more used to the idea of performance. Also more open to the fact that much of my work may be about gender. These are topics and ways of working I have not been comfortable with. They put me in a place where I am excited and a little bit nervous at the same time, which I think is where I know it is a good place to go. 

In Teaching methods we dissected syllabi and spoke about our rubrics. It was interesting to see what everyone would change in their class, and the different teaching styles that everyone's instructor has. The rubrics were difficult to make but in the end are very useful. 

Here are some artists and things I have been looking at:

Kaminer Design

Jewelry

Beth Cavener Stichter

Ceramic sculpture

Masha Reva

Fashion

Chow Ka Wa Key

Fashion photography

Jean Marc Laroche

Skeletons 

Pirate songs

Arts of Revolution

Video about art made of artifacts of war

Eric Standley

Cut paper sculpture

Matthew Picton

Paper sculpture

Psychogeography

Bence Bakonyi

Photography

Crazy nature

The Richat Structure

Iemza, French Graffiti artist

Russ and Reyn

Cool photography

More crazy nature

Kyle Thompson

More cool photography

Merci dieu, c'est Vendredi!

So this week was full of freaking out and being really stressed out. But, now that my house is clean and there are no more ants in my studio, I am feeling much better.

I started to trace Mourning Object #1 his week. This piece speaks to my comfort with mourning, with my grief about death. I am comfortable with where I am right now in this process, and felt I could start tracing this piece. I am using colour in this tracing, a different colour every day, just choosing whatever seems right. Here is a video:

I am also continuing to trace the other piece, because I feel like this ritual is also important. Here are some videos of that: 

So on another tangent, i've been watching Malcolm in the Middle. I know, I know, it doesn't have much to do with this, but really it does. That show is so well written! There is an episode where the father takes a sabatical to paint, because it's something he's always dreamed of. So the whole episode is about how he's trying to get to that ultimate painting. In the end, his family comes to the garage where he's been painting, and they are in awe because it's amazing. He goes up to it, so proud, and OF COURSE, the paint layers are so thick that they fall on top of him. It's soooooo gooooooood! 

Have been thinking about my work, and about what it is saying. Writing a lot on that. It's not coherent writing right now so I will post it another time. 

In Teaching methods this week we talked about rubrics. I really believe rubrics are a great teaching tool. I feel like they inform the students exactly what is needed from them to get a certain grade. If they are aiming for an A, they know exactly what they have to do. Also, as a teacher, I can just point at the rubric and that's it. It was an interesting discussion. We also looked at some great photos of France and Italy. They made me so homesick! I am ready to go back to France for an extended period of time. I really do miss it. 

Here is who i've been looking at this week:

Trenton Doyle Hancock video, Art 21

Watch this! 

Trenton Doyle Hancock

amazing. 

Alexandra Valenti

Fashion

Elina Brotherus

Model as self

Li Hongbo

Clever Sculpture

Dean Gorissen

AMAZING comic illustrations

Margery Amdur

Sculptures with alternate materials

Antony Gormley

I've been reading a lot of interviews with this guy, he've very interesting

Jon Estwards

Photos

Yuewei Vivien Zhang

Internet time!

This week I've been sick so not doing much. Working on reading a research, as well as getting some work done on tests and also on different pieces. I've been gathering materials from here and there to get started.
Here is a video from my studio:

And some photos where I thought I was recording but only took pictures:

I've set up the other garment-like mourning object on a piece of paper to start tracing it. Next week. 

In teaching methods we talked about different learning types. I thought the text on Jung was particularly interesting, however I feel like testing people for these different personality types just puts them in a box. It seems kind of contradictory in some ways; if you know you're that type and put stock in it, wouldn't you let that dictate your actions? I kind of think Jung is pretentious. I guess that comes with the territory though. 

This week I have been looking at:

Fabio Viale

Modern Marble sculpting

Anti-Anxiety objects
on Aura Tout Vu
Haute Couture
Alicia Framis
Photography
Valentino Spring 13
Why did men stop wearing high heels?
Ethan Murrow
Drawings
Nuala O'Donovan
Sculptural ceramics
Sasha Vinci
Sculpture
Sculptural sandcastles
Faye Mullen
Video/body work
Artist commune
Tara Donovan
Modular sculptural work
Ana Teresa Barboza
Ross Bleckner
Claims he got a popularity boost from being mentioned in the pilot for Sex in the City. I wouldn't doubt it.
Dali's Alice drawings
Eric Nehr
Crazy photographs. Crazy social situations. Crazy people doing crazy things because of superstitions.

Teaching methods

Today in Teach Methods we talked about a lot of interesting classroom theory. We started by going over information from our last class, the most interesting of which I though was formatting your classroom to encourage engagement and risk taking. Allowing students to take a risk and possibly fail is an interesting concept, and one that seems like it could be hard to implement. I am excited to try though! Also, to write a syllabus.
We went on to study Blooms Taxonomy, Learning types and a Critical format template. Blooms Taxonomy I thought was kind of obvious, as was the learning types document. They seem like things that are face value parts of teaching. The critical format template was helpful. Critiques are hard to know how to run, and sometimes can get out of hand. If they are not run well, then the students don't get anything out of them. This document was a very good guideline document for future critiques, and I hope to use it to run critiques in my Teaching Assistants position.
I am interested in reading for next week, and running a discussion about the topics.