COME TO STOP DOWN! TOMORROW NIGHT

Tomorrow night, 7-10pm, is the USC Photo Department's annual bash Stop Down! So come to the IFT/Grad building, located at 3001 S. Flower Street (behind Chano's)!!

There will be button makers, a pop-up photo booth, live music, free tacos and lots and lots of art!! Costumes are encouraged so please have fun and dress up!!!!

The info can also be found on Facebook and the Roski website.

See you there!

MFA Grad Lecture: Anne Ellegood

Last week I saw Anne Ellegood, newly appointed senior curator at the Hammer Museum in Westwood.  In her talk, she discusses two projects that she's curated: The Uncertainty of Objects and Ideas: Recent Sculpture and Realisms, the second half of the two-part exhibition, The Cinema Effect: Reality, Illusion, and the Moving Image, both at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C.

The artists involved in the Recent Sculptures exhibition were Andrea Cohen, Bjorn Dahlem, Isa Genzken, Mark Handforth, Rachel Harrison, Evan Holloway, Charles Long, Mindy Shapero, and Franz West.  What I thought was most interesting was that Ellegood got permission to let a few of the artists into the Hirshhorn permanent collection storage and pick out works that influenced or informed their own work.  They were then able to curate mini exhibitions in the smaller galleries around where their work was installed.  I thought that was great because when you're in school you get to hear your professors and visiting artists talk all the time about artists or work they like but when you're alone at a museum you usually don't have a clue how or where anyone came up with their ideas.  And this exhibition gave museum attendee's that chance for further insight.

For the second half of her talk, she read a paper she wrote for the Realisms catalog which discusses video and digital works that investigate how traditional cinema both communicates and critiques by complicating the relationship between fiction and reality.  She screened parts of Candace Breitz two-part video installation piece “Mother + Father” as well as Omer Fast's "Godville."

MFA Grad Lecture: Anoka Faruqee

Finally catching up with my blog posts!

About a month ago now, I went to the Anoka Faruqee grad lecture.  I'm usually not that interested in painting but I thought I would go listen in anyway.  Faruqee's work is very, VERY meticulous and tediously constructed.  The bulk of her painting are made up of what might be millions of asterisks.  She grids them out according to what color she wants to paint and where and then hand paints every single one.  She told a story about one time where she actually damaged her eyes from painting so often.  Every time she looked at one of her own paintings she would get a migraine.  She ended up having to hire assistants to finish her works for her until her eyes went back to normal.  And now she's supposed to do eye exercises everyday to make sure it doesn't happen again.  That just seems nuts to me.

In the beginning of her lecture, she talked about how she grew up in a house heavily decorated with elaborate Indian fabrics and that their patterns heavily influenced her work.  I wish I knew more about the significance of the asterisks though.  I know she explained it but even at the time I wasn't able to catch it.  She talked very little about why she makes the painting she makes and talked mostly about how she made them, which was slightly disappointing.  She talked at length about colors and grids and pours and copies and mixing and charts and stuff but not much else.  Finally at the end of the lecture, the grads and faculty were able to pull a little more out of her but by then it was too late and the lecture was over.

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For more info about Faruqee and examples of her work, check out her website.

Project 2: RODCHENKO/ROBOTS

The artist I was looking to for inspiration was Alexander Rodchenko. More than his photography, I was interested in his propaganda poster work. A lot of my work in my other studio classes has been/is about the future and his work looks very science fictional to me. Going with my interest in science fiction, I decided to chose robots as my theme.

Emphasis/Economy:

Of the four pieces I made, this was the one I had the hardest time with. I'm not super happy with it and I think I could have pushed the design more. Originally, I was going to use the composition for movement but since it was pretty static, I thought emphasis and economy would work better for it. I think I should have added more detail to the face so the eye had a place to rest after being pointed toward looking at the face by all the lines.






Movement:

This piece is my favorite of the four. I liked the angle at which the robot girl was drawn. Though I was hesitant to divide the background of the image diagonally, in the end I was glad that I did. I think the image would have been a little less interesting if the background was all one solid color.








Repetition:

With this piece, I didn't want the repetition to just be a bunch of pattern. I wanted the repetition to be in the content of the design. The image to copied my original thumbnail design from was a bunch of robotic ball-looking objects. I'm glad I made one of the four pieces not have an anthropomorphic figure in it. I think it breaks up the flow of the group a little bit, but in a good way. I think the group would have been less interesting if all four pieces had female looking robot-mannequins in them.





Balance:

This design was originally supposed to be my repetition design but Sherin and I decided that the balance in the image was more interesting than the repetition. Someone mentioned during the critique that the figure recedes back into the design a bit but that was intentional. I thought it would have been less interesting if the figure popped forward. For me, I think it was about doing some unexpected. I thought that people would expect a design that pops but I wanted a design that didn't.

Composition

Project 2 began as a difficult project because I was unsure of a theme to choose. I knew I was completely inspired by Shepard Fairey's work, and I wanted to do something that I felt worked not only with his style, but with his message. I chose Hip-Hop as my theme, because like Fairey's work, it has a feeling of rebellion and misunderstanding. His style and technique also function well with the feeling of flowing and motion that one gets when listening to hip-hop.

I decided I'd focus on different elements of hip-hop for this project.

Repetition

For this piece, I decided to use the graffiti aspect of hip-hop. I chose to do a spray can with paint flowing out of it for the piece, because I felt it had a lot of repetitiveness. I used different styles and patterns that Shepard Fairey uses in his work to stick to his style for the project. This turned out to be one of my favorite of the pieces, not only because it stuck to the composition so well, in my opinion, but alsobecause it was one of the first pieces of drawing I have ever done (the finger was esp

ecially difficult) and I managed to do it successfully. I also enjoyed creating shadow without the use of values in gray, something that was challenging to do, but it opened up a new way of thinking for me.

Balance

I feel that although this is one of the more simple pieces of the 4 that I completed, it not only sticks to the composition well, but it also incorporates Fairey's style. He often times focuses his attention in the center of the frame and has beams moving directed outward from the centerpiece. This piece is supposed to be a microphone, a major piece of hip-hop and rapping, and by making the microphone so large and having it take over most of the piece, I feel like it conveys that image very well. I wish I could have thought of a more interesting way to do the micr

ophone, rather than drawing in the lines with my pen, but at the time, that was the best I could think of.

Movement

For this piece, I decided to use hands/fingers once again because I felt this one should have a human aspect to it, since human motion is so natural. I thought of spelling the words “hip-ho

p” out on the hands because I felt it showed a sort-of punching notion, and it gave the effect that the words were popping off the page. Another way that I created a feeling of movement was to have the words “leaking” off the page, to create a downwards flow of motion.

In my original idea, I had the words “is dead” on the bottom of the page, but I felt it created a stop and didn’t really have the same fluid effect that I was aiming at for the piece, so I didn’t include it.

Emphasis and Economy

For me, this was surprisingly the most difficult piece to work with since I was trying again to stick to Shepard Fairey’s inspiration, and his work is oftentimes very busy, and not so simple. This one shows a record dripping—the same effect I use for the movement piece. It is supposed to show the fluidity of hip-hop. I feel like in my mind I had a greater idea behind this piece than what I was able to convey in this image. It was surprisingly the most difficult of the pieces which goes to show that sometimes just thinking simple is one of the most complicated tasks.

Alice Konitz

Recently, I went to artist, Alice Konitz's, lecture on her artwork. Her work mainly consisted of sculptures, but there were a few paintings and collages from magazines. Her sculptures, for the most part, were geometric and oftentimes heavily influenced by architecture and landscape, topics which she seemed to be very fond of.

Something very interesting about Alice was her love for LA; she admires the architecture and the desert and even the freeways and how her work stems from these things. Growing up in the suburbs and constantly seeing the buildings and freeways of LA, I definitely don't think I appreciate the landscape and engineering as much as Alice does. For me, a freeway is just a freeway, dirty and oftentimes blanketed with cars sitting bumper to bumper; but for Alice, a freeway is an "adventure park", something that she can create a piece of art from. What I like about Alice's work is that it makes the ordinary more exciting and interesting.

I also enjoyed Alice's use of geometric shapes. She oftentimes used hexagons in her work, using them to make large interactive sculptures and imitations of stores and store fronts. She also used hexagons in designing a decal pattern for a store, which I found particularly appealing. I think the balance of the hexagonal sculptures and the hexagons themselves made me attracted to those particular pieces. I think, also, that the practicality of her work, was an alluring aspect for me, perhaps suggesting that her "art" could at times be called "design."

All in all, I did enjoy Alice's work. Though some of it, like her movie, was hard for me to understand; I think that what she accomplishes is both thought-provoking and physically appealing.

The theme for my project was makeup and the effects of the products in daily life. My first piece (top left) used the element of movement. What my intentions were with this piece was to make it look like the nail polish was dripping out of the bottle as it fell on to the surface. I could have done a much better job by choosing a different angle for the objects and made it more proportional.
For the second piece (top right) I used the element of repetition. I was trying to throw in a different perspective by being abstract with the lips and the lipstick, showing different types of lips and lipstick. I strongly believe that if I had enlarged the lips, the piece would have been stronger overall.
For the third piece (bottom left) I used the element of emphasis in economy. I zoomed into a nail polish bottle with nail polish spilling out of the bottle. This piece was kept very simple and minimal for emphasis in economy.
For the fourth piece (bottom right), I used the element of balance. It shows a lipstick in the middle, and chopped up parts of the lipstick on the sides to give it balance. For this piece, it would have been more successful if the center lipstick was not so much in the middle, and the idea was played around a little more perhaps with smaller chopped up parts of the lipstick or even different variations of sizes and thicknesses.

EC- Culver City Gallery Opening

A few weeks ago I attended the Culver City Gallery openings, and was very inspired by the great art I saw.

My new favorite artist of the day, Nate Frizzell was not showing there, but was in the next month, and had cards with his art on them. I researched his art, and was captivated by his illustration based paintings. I was surprised how young he

was, and how quickly his art had matured. His pieces delt with the human condition and the difficulty we have with being honest with ourselves and others. By using children, he shows false innocence.

Another exhibition I really enjoyed was Edwin Ushiro's "Softly Encompassing the Womb". They were mixed media pieces which appeared as almost anime paintings, but were actually illustrations. They were illustrations of fascinating Hawaian legends, a tribute to Ushiro's Hawain culture. I was very surprised about how much I loved his art, because I usually don't prefer anime or anythig cartoon like. But I was really impressed and moved by

the stories and how he chose to illustrate them. I also loved Ushiro's soft, oceany and Islandy color palatte for the paintings. But the muted colors still worked for the scarier legends.

I also saw Claire Oswalt's "Peril in Perfection." She works with graphite on wooden movable puppet-like human cut outs. They were of struggles between people. While I liked it on a technical level, there was nowhere where it explained the meaning behind the

pieces. I looked it up online, and it said that they were supposed to represent the push and pull between control and freedom. The fixed movement is supposed to represent the control of the artist. The men fighting address the topic of male aggression and fighting. Her art was very good, but it spoke to me the least.

James Everett Stanly's "Let it Burn" was one of my favorites. He creates portrait-based watercolor paintings of the after effects of fire and natural destruction. The paintings are of the

subjects dealing with the after effects of destruction and loss. Stanly was inspired by the California fires and conflicts in the Middle East, both manmade and natural disasters. As a watercolor artist, it was really exciting to see accomplished artists using it, because I usually don't see watercolors portraits in fine art galleries. He combined my two favorite media- photojournalism and painting- and the results were phenomenol.

It was very inspiring and exciting to see artists reaching their goals of having their own show. Placing the art in the context of its creator made the art even more interesting. I hope to get a chance to go back to Culver City soon.

Extra Credit - Garboushian Art Gallery Grand Opening

On Saturday, October 10th, I went to the grand opening of the Garboushian art gallery in Beverly Hills. As the father of my best friend, Herair Garboushian has been collecting antique and contemporary art as a hobby ever since I knew him. Every time I would go to their house, I felt like I was in an art museum because there were sculptures, pottery, and small to large pieces of art work displayed on every wall in every room. He has been working on opening this gallery for a very long time and when it was finally opened, we were so excited for him. There were many different artist's painting and sculpture displayed at the opening that caught my eye. Some of them were Nee Chu, Keith Martin, Michelle Knoblauch (one shown in this picture), and my favorite was a painting by Don Suggs. They all seemed to have very abstract pieces but unique to match their styles. Don Suggs painting was very inspirational because although it was quite abstract he used his brush to make smooth transitions from one area to the next, resulting in formations of a human figure. On top of this, he seemed to add another layer of more geometric shapes to make these figure more precise. I also admired his choice of colors in this art piece. Overall, I enjoyed going to this art gallery and look forward to many more collections Mr. Garboushian will bring to the house and his gallery.