Thesis Show; Alfred University 2012

This work maybe from a long while ago, but it looks like I've got more than a little catching up to do!

Artist Statement:
My work originates from functional cultural objects, and the process of molding a historical form into another.  My research of western and eastern cultures, thrown sketches and drawings conjure notions of tea, coffee, cookies, and sorbets.  These objects of life are transformed and redefine functional expectations.  Striving to enhance the experience of these modern "historical" objects.

Ideas In Progress

It's been quite awhile but I promise I'm working! This is some new work that, with any luck, will help me produce my senior show!  Which is coming up VERY soon, May 5 to be exact and to be honest I don't know if I will be ready, but I'm sure I can pull it off!













          The work is focusing on functional perspectives.  It is about altering your views towards what a handle a saucer and a foot is, on a functional object, and from there the work dictates how you use it or how you interact with it.  All of the objects are based on traditional tea forms from many cultures, then through the creative process are simplified and modernized in form and color palette.   Display is also important to the work, everything is on tables or shelves, set up as if the Mad Hatter (in his right mind) set the table. (*maybe...to be honest I don't know what its gonna be set up as, that is one option. But you'll just have to come to my show to find out!)

Sin Ying Ho

Ceramic sculptural artist Sin-Ying Ho creates work focusing on the issue of the contemporary global culture. What is most important to her is the collaboration of opposing global ideals and cultures, mixing images of new vs. old, economy vs. power, communication vs. language and using these opposing forces with icons as the universal language within our global village.

She uses her work as a projection of herself, to a degree. Native of China but growing up in the western world, she went to Nova Scotia College of Art and Design for her BFA. From there she was able to participate in an off campus study program to Jingdezhen, which is where her current work began. She recently was the subject of a documentary called Meeting Places, which also happens to be the title of the body of work explored in the production. Her most current work is titled Eden which uses Adam and Eve as silhouettes of contemporary global iconic languages; Using such “imagery language” as binary, motherboard patterns, and commercial icons (Starbucks and Nike labels). She then juxtaposes this language with Eden, spectacularly painted in the traditional blue white ware style, but including twists and splashes of color.

Link to site/video preview: http://www.sinyingho.com/video_documentary

Best laid plans...

Or that seems to be what this summer has been.  Lots of postulating, getting ready for, but never seeming to go where I want to be getting.  Though lots of things haven't gone the way that I'd hoped for; I have hopes that this next year (as in school) will bring a new wind, a great direction, which I am afraid to say, I'm in desperate need for.  But as they say, where there's a will, there's a way, and I'm sure I will find mine (even if it doesn't feel like that is even possible in the moment). Even amongst the brambles of the summer I still have found lessons learned, growing pains to be had, I little slice of humble pie and maybe even a silver lining.
               For those of you listening-
                          Thank you and goodnight~

Tea Cups, Jar and Tea Sets

Tea Pots

This is a select collection of the work made in the last few months.  I'm interested in the relationships that objects have to each other, as well as how the colors and forms interact within one vessel. 

New Beginings

Because the last several months have been so chaotic nothing has been posted, so now that the semester is over it's time to get started! First I have some exciting news, I've almost completely moved into my new apartment and it is so beautiful! It is almost furnished now (thanks to Salvo, and the good college students who can't bring large furniture home), all I have left is a bed to sleep on... but soon very soon that will come.  Now as to postings and new work, that will (hopefully) come in the next several days, tomorrow I'm going to start photographing my work so that by at least next week I can be posting images of what I'm doing and where I'm going!~

-pleasant surprise

This morning I look around at 7:50...wouldn't you know I am running a head of schedule, such an uncommon but most welcome thing.  As I sip my coffee I raise my cup and toast to a pleasant surprise for everyone today :)

Anselm Keifer: Take one: Small Spaces

 Small Spaces:

     Last semester I went to the Gagosian gallery in NYC where they where exhibiting "Next Year in Jerusalm" which exhibited a number of pieces by Anselm Kiefer. For me this wasn't any old show; I had been looking at Keifers work since art became a large part of my life. Yet I had never seen any of his works in person, which until this experience I had never realized how important it was to see art in person. Naturally I much anticipated seeing this exhibition. His work after all has been a major influence in how I work, how I experience the making process and also informs much of my own asthetic. It wasn't until nearly the end of the trip that I finally got to see the show. I walked in and the gallery was packed with people, but more so it was unbearably filled with Kiefers work. Art that was on a scale I could had never fathomed before, to me these paintings where the sizes of houses. I meekley entered the gallery (for some reason, fearful that some one would take one look at me and say "what the hell are you doing here! You don't belong here!") and stood infront of the first piece and stared, not even knowing at first what to think, or should I say I simply could not think.

The sheer magnitude of the work towering infront of me was beyond any art I had yet to experience. I had no idea that the work I had been looking at all this time in books, was so much more than what I could see on those minescule pages. It was here, standing in this room filled with people I didn't know, and filled with work I had never "seen" before, work I didn't know could exist, that I began to cry. I cried because I had been living under the presumption that I knew Anselm Kiefers work better than any one, that I had seen it all and yet infront of me was this thing I had never imagined, I had never seen this. Not only did I feel ignorant and powerless, but I also realized that this was art. To me this was the kindling to the fire that drives what I define myself by, yet I knew nothing about this art. I continued throught the gallery examinging every mark, every fire carved in to the hill scapes, one painting/sculpture after the other I would stand and pull in every inch, stund at its power, conflicted with enigmatic jealousy. This is the art I wanted to make but had no idea how to. Tears would fall with each piece and all I wanted was to consume every ounce of unabated intensity. I started getting frustrated with this gallery space filled with people who couldn't see what I saw; Frustrated by the fact that I couldn't move to a place where I could engross the work with my whole mind, the space was far to small to withstand this sort of power. I couldn't move, I couldn't see, I couldn't think and so as the dissatisfaction built in me I finally left when I could not bare it any longer.

 I roamed the streets of New York City in a haze. I had atleast two hours left before I had to leave this wonderful city, I had hundreds of gallery's I could have gone to, but I couldn't stand to go into one more gallery, too look at another piece of "art", that would have been an intolerable dissapointment. So I sat and waited for the bus that would take me back to this small town I called home most of the year, and for the first time since I had lived in this place I did not want to go back.

       Since then the show has gone in and out of my mind, poping up as reminder of what art can accomplish. Looking back and thinking about the space that frustrated me so much, I realize that the intolerance towards the people there should be directed more to the fact that the space no matter how large in comparison to the other gallerys I went to, was too small to exhibit all of the work that it did. I felt crowded because it was. There was no place to step back; To walk from a far and let the works unveil themselves as the viewer is enticed closer and closer until its no longer an image, but becomes a structure of overwhelming marks and surfaces just as intricate as the structures of DNA that make up everything that lives. That being said, I also have realized once again the importance of experience. For example to others the work may have been powerful but not so much as it was for me. This was, after all, my first pilgrimage to New York City. This was my first time going to a gallery that was more than the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, which is an amazing gallery... for Rochester. These where gallerys that people talk about the world round and held works from artists that I have, just like Kiefers work, only seen in books. Works that I saw, such as... Jasper John's Flag, or Mark Rothko's No. 5/No. 22, or Louise Nevelson's Sky Cathedral and Lucien Freud's Naked Man, Back View, no matter how much influence these artists have had on me none could compare to the effect that Anselm Keifer has.

       Experiences are key in the way that any given person views art. For example, when I changed high schools after my parents divorce, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, I had no goals and there was nothing that made me consider what the future could be for me. This was when I met Bill Stephens, the art teacher who worked at the school I just transfered too. The very teacher that when I had an indepentendent study with for painting, told me where the brushes and paints were and that was the only instruction I got (even though I had never painted before that). While I was working, Bill saw what I was doing with the medium and handed me a book on Anselm Keifer's work. With Bill as my guide and Keifer as inspiration I found something that ment more to me than anything else before, it was Art. This is why no one else in that gallery was wandering from painting to painting with tears in their eyes, they hadn't had the same experience with the art that I had. Once again Keifer has impacted me from a far, and maybe one day I will meet the man who has instilled such inspirating in me, but until then I will have to settle on two life changing experiences.


*Images provided by the Gagosian Gallery, MoMa and MET websites.

The Artful Teapot

I have my own memories in tea- stories my mother would tell me about my Gigi holding afternoon tea with all the glory in place settings and biscuits, the blood thirsty games of Scrabble that would inevitably follow.  There is a picture roaming around the house of my Gigi and a three year old me sitting in a sun room dressed up in the Sunday best savoring in afternoon tea. Even more recently (and perhaps less fastidiously) I find my self drinking tea after every meal and just before bed in the very least. It is amazing to think just how often tea partakes in our lives.  And I use "our" as a term encompassing everyone, and when I say everyone I mean to say every human being on this planet is some how connected to tea.  How! How has this come about, it's not something you would commonly think about, that is the history of how tea became tea.  Perhaps we take it for granted that tea has always been around, as if cave men would stop their day for a cup of earl grey and a hint of cream; but earnestly I have been drinking gallons of tea with out ever stopping to think where the beverage I was consuming came from.  So this past week I began reading the Artful Teapot which talked of the brief history that is tea.  The adventure starting in China, and how it was used as a monetary form as valid as a ten dollar bill, and when the Europeans got a knack for it they tired of only importing and started trading opium filled pipes for tea filled teapots.  And just think, that without the essential brick of tea changing to loose leaf tea there would be no teapot at all.  Not to mention that when the Europeans got a hold of tea and heard of the Japanese tea ceremony, that derived from a tea drinking ritual in china, after noon tea and all of the tea trays, cake plates, creamers,tea tables, sugar tongs, strainers, infusers, tea dresses..., all of these things invented in order to accommodate one substance. The substance that I drink from now, and for some reason I can feel that history with every sip, and its getting stronger with every sip, every line read and write. 

The teapot represents all these things, from etiquette, social conversations, rituals, addictions, all from years of experience and history.  Thinking about the stories and pictures my family has all based around tea.  The collections of tea, tea pots, cups and saucers that roam my home, which rarely end up being used but it's our collection of history.  A collection of memories and conversations that all happen around these illustrious objects that are not only based in function but in moments as well. How does an object elicit such history, how can it possibly entice memories and conversations? How can I make these objects seduce us back to the last art of the afternoon tea, high tea, tea ceremonies etc... Perhaps by harbouring an event of the creation, by making the object inveigle its history. An object that seems to reincarnate itself in every new making.  Letting its self be rediscovered again and again by individuals around the world. But what is the teapot to me? How can I make a form that is a mix between sensibility, ostentatious romanticism, something of valor, silly enough to be serious; Yet always about conversation and taking the time to talk to the people who inhabit your life.  How can I make something that makes you want to find the time for yourself to just ponder everything.  These are the things I'm interested in forming into that oh so familiar shape of the breathing bellowing mother of ceremonies. 

Maira Kalman- An Uncertain Principle

Maria Kalman is a self discribed daydreamer, growing up in a house where facts where not allowed.  Which is part of what makes her such a wonderful artist.  She is truly open to any kind of form, while maintaining a definate voice of her own.  She blogs for the New Yorker and has done several covers for the magazine.  Her current blog is called "And the Pursuit of Happiness" (Link to blog: http://kalman.blogs.nytimes.com/ )  which is a more politically focused blog that started during the last presidential election.  But in 2007 Kalman was working on a blog called The Principles of Uncertainty, (Link to blog: http://kalman.blogs.nytimes.com/category/the-principles-of-uncertainty/page/12/ ) which was later published into a book. 

 

 The book itself is a whimsical recording of her life in a year.  She starts in the month of May talking about the Dodo bird, Spinoza, Pavlov's dog, and her mothers wonderful interpritation of the United States.  She continues the year the same way, recalling things that happend to her; such as her visits home to Tel Aviv with her sister, the death of her husband, and her love of extravagent hats. Anything that is possible to experience in a humans life she records in an almost non-sensical way that is liberating. Even though her account on life is whimsical it is also more true than anything that you can read in a history book, because she focuses so much on the human aspect of what it is that she is talking about. The works that illustrate the book fit her writting well.  The drawings and paintings that fill the book are textural, imperfect, delightful but at the same time serious.  But above all the book is inately human.  Who better to writte a book on existance than a self declared daydreaming free spirit. Kalman is some one who has managed to maintain a realistic yet positive view on the world that we all live in. Yet behind all the presumed sillyness, the book is truly thought provoking, bringing to the surface questions that we should be asking ourselves more often. Just as in life the book is an experience. 



"Well, Susan, this is a fine mess you are in."

In 2007 Kalman also lectured for TED talks (an annual convention) about simplicity in life and her blog The Principles of Uncertainty amoung other works she has done (the lecture can be seen in the video screen below or directly from the TED talks website).  Beyond The Principles of Uncertainty she has also written childrens books and before that she illustrated The Elements of Style a classical grammer book written by William Strunk and E. B. White, which she also talks about in her lecture. In The Elements of Style  Kalman was able to turn something so normal into something extrodinary. She took examples from the book and illustrated them in a way that no matter how rediculose the statment or the image, it made sense on that same human level she used in The Principles of Uncertainty.

"His first thought on getting
out of bed—if he had any
thought at all–was to
get back in again."

 She not only colaborated with the writters of the book, but also introduced a contemporary musican to writte an opera that went with The Elements of Style; Which was hosted at the reading room in a library in New York Citiy.  NPR hosted a discussion on her colaboration in 2005, including excerpts from the opera (Link to: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4985137 ). 

Paul Mathieu: A close minded "potter"

         Paul Mathieu spoke at the NCECA critical in Santa Fe, which my professor, Linda Sikora went to; and brought back Paul Mathieu's talk, The Radical Autonomy of Ceramics. (which can be downloaded from this link;  http://nceca.net/static/documents/radical%20autonomy%20FINAL%20short.doc ) I made the mistake of reading this article just before going to bed and found my self needing to blog about it at 3 in the morning because I found it so upsetting.
        How can a four page article rile me up from my tired eyes, and force me on to my poor under-used blog?  Well besides the fact that this "close minded potter" has decided to redundantly express his frumpy, backwards, and all to specific thoughts of the grandeur of "ceramics" as an entirely separate form of art; he hit home on an ideal of "art" the frustrates me to no end.  The idea that "ceramics" is "ceramics," that painting is painting, and sculpture is sculpture, and photography is photography, etc... When this idea of "art" is something so far from (what I see) as the truth. 
        In the article I find he is trying too hard to demote "ceramics" and at the same time put it on a pedestal as if it is some grand form of "art" that no other "art" can touch because it takes such a base of knowledge to be able to create it. When the truth is that "ceramics" is just as difficult as any other art form and even though you need a certain skill set to understand the material, it remains true for any other product of "art".  I think the ideals that he is spreading, this super specific and almost racist way of thinking is far too close minded for what "art" has turned into.  Why should "art" methods and forms become separate from one an other? Why can't potters/ceramicists be sculptures? Why can't painters pot? Why can't printers perform? Why can't performers sculpt? What is to say that these things can't happen? Why can't "art" become just Art.  Something that encompasses all types of work; whether they be separate or combined materials? I feel that this ideal is at the heart of what Art is! We may not be able to define precisely what Art is in a physically present way; because it is always changing and forming itself in to new things, so that no one can precisely pin point what it is.  That is the magic of Art, which is something that I am so drawn to. 
      It is unfortunate that Paul Mathieu is so (seemingly) set into this tyranny against Art. Perhaps his voice is meant to rile up these kinds of thoughts, just maybe he doesn't actually think that every form of art should be separate and unyielding to one an other; I can only hope.  Especially when there are artists out there like Maira Kalman, Phillipe Pasqua, Anslem Keifer, Paul McCarthy, Frank Gehrey and many more from the past, the present and more preciously the future. 

The Art of being in School

Week one of being back at Alfred University. I've started realizing already that maybe taking three studios is going to be... difficult.  Despite the dreary outlook I'm looking forward to stressful days, scheduled weeks, sleepless nights and early mornings.  Why would any one look forward to that kind of life? Well who can resist exploring yourself in physical forms?  I've already decided on trying something completely new in painting, I'm going to be as silly as possible, moustaches and disproportionate faces and bodies perhaps complimented by grotesque nightmarish images of corpses and monsters? Who knows what I will make besides the work itself.  Then there is the simple hope and dream that at the end of the semester I will be a competent potter, a crafts(wo)man, a learned hippy...who is right now a clay covered mess, with little direction and only has a learners permit for pottery.

Have you seen my xiphoid process?

Imagine drawing this at 8 in the morning on the first day of your...Abstraction class? That's right, first day of my Observation to Abstraction class we had to draw a to-scale drawing of the back from neck to hip. I'm surprised to say that it was actually easy (for that time of the morning).  What was really funny was the fact the my professor (Kevin Wixted) came over, said my clavicle was too long. I disagreed, so he measured and...it was perfect.  From this drawing we of course had to make abstractions from the drawing (It being an "observation" to "abstraction" class after all) which was fun, and led to some interesting things.  I will post those drawing eventually, but as you can probably see this image is bad enough, the others are worse.  So as soon as I have a better lighting set up, new pictures will replace this one.