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.

neglect

Sorry blogosphere. I have neglected you. But here I am, typing characters on this screen.
I have a critique this week, and here are my thoughts:
I am just working along right now. I am done thinking about my work too much. I have done that all semester, and now is crunch time. I feel I can intelligently justify my work, so i'm just chugging along!

Here are some people I am looking at as i'm chugging along:

Kuma Kuna
Wearable Sculpture

Lorenzo Quinn
Figurative sculpture

As I chug along I am thinking seriously about next semester. I have no idea about what i'm going to do. Woo! But i'm sure it'll fall into place. Or i'll force it. Somehow i'll know. I know I want to use more beadwork. I know I want it to be wearable. I know I want it to involve how the body moves. And there you go. Beyond that, I know nothing.

onward.

Here goes.
I've been reworking since my first crit of the semester. I feel like it was late to get the group crit, and now i'm scrambling to rethink and rework. I've had some individual critiques over the semester, but nothing that made me really rethink everything.
I've taken apart the balls dress and am working on a redo. Hopefully I will have some photos in my Wednesday presentation. Where I hopefully won't get ripped apart. Hyenas, don't be too harsh.
On that note, please come to my presentation Wednesday at 11:00 in DSB!

Right now i'm stressing about this paper for Theory. I realize we don't have to write very much for this program, but I feel like these papers always come at the worst times. Can't we write one right away, then one three weeks before midterm when we don't feel like we're expiring from lack of sleep and stress about our work getting done? In any case, the final touches are just being added and it's a huge weight off.

I'm not ready to go back to Battelle building and live in artificial lights tomorrow. Although I was planning a side trip to Hills Market, if it's not too cold. And if it is, well Battelle, you are my home for 14 hours tomorrow.

Here are some people I have been looking at:
Max Colby
This guy makes his own paper and them embroideries into it. Love it.
Heike Mutter, Ulrich Genth
Public art! A walkable roller coaster, how cool.
Information on yarn bombing
Igor Morski
Surreal
Dran
Hailed as the French Banksy, I like Dran's work better.
Ernesto Neto
How did I not know about this guy before!?!?!? Sculpter.
Julien-Aldolphe Duvocelle
Bae Joonsung
Love it.
Gaudi Cathedral
Lynda Benglis
Gender politics
Weird (and wonderful) fashion.
Contemporary Craft by Bruce Metcalf
If you are at all interested or involved in the craft world this is a MUST READ.
Kathy Ludwig
Mona Luison
Alternate materials. Don't love it, but it's interesting.
Adrian Villar Rojas
Eric Standley
Crazy intricate paper art! Love it.

It's Critique Time! Oh yea.

So I have been so focused on my studio work everything else has sort of fallen behind. My lovely boyfriend and housemate is gone for two weeks, and i've been living at CCAD even more than I usually do. As a result, my mind is way too focused and I need Spring Break! So excited to go home to my parents, and my work is small so of course I can work on it there too! haha. No break for the busy.

In any case, I am working with the piece I have done, taking more photos and experimenting on what is working or not working. Also working on making my multiples of the beaded piece, and combining bubbles from bubble wrap in modular ways. I am experimenting with how to neutralize objects that may have pop culture references. For this I am using colour and combining them in different ways.
As a base I have been using clothing. I am interested in seeing what people think about these very wearable and sometimes oddly comfortable restriction that I am adding to the clothing base.

I am also having a crit with Nari Ward tomorrow before class, so it will be a SUPER CRITIQUE day. I will make sure to put on my big girl pants. And remember my mantra... I am rubber you are glue, whatever you say bounces off of me and sticks to you!
I'm just kidding. I am looking forward to this, actually, I am trying to get al the opinions I can.

Here are some artists and articles I have been looking at since last time.

Nari Ward video 
The host in this bugs me but he's good at speaking and I feel like we have a lot in common.
Emily
Dead things!
video
Strange video but wonderful video
It's adornment!
Hair as adornment
excess

fashion photography

An early week treat

Here are some photos of my studio, and of a piece i've finished recently. Some little treats for the start of your week.

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