MFA Lecture Series: A.L. Steiner

Last Wednesday I sat in on A.L. Steiner's MFA lecture.

Steiner works in the mediums of photography and video but started out as a communications major as an undergraduate and worked as a photo editor after graduating. And from the sound of it, she didn't go to graduate school, which is pretty rare for a working artist getting representation from galleries. I thought her process of making photographs was refreshing. She works mostly in 35mm and digital, which I also think it rare for photographers working right now who mostly seem to be using 4X5 and 8X10 cameras to make their work. She takes her cameras with her everywhere and photographs whatever she feels like, slowly building an archive of thousands of images.

One of the works I was most interested is called, "One Million Photos, One Euro Each," where she covered the walls of a gallery, floor to ceiling, with photographs that could be bought for one euro by anyone who came into the gallery. She's done this project in several locations all over the world.

I especially liked her work C.L.U.E., which stands for Color Location Ultimate Experience. It's a collaborative video dance piece where two women wearing different sets of the same colored clothing and dance through various environments. It reminded me a lot of being a child and playing with friends, which is probably one of Steiner's intentions for the piece as she mentioned a lot of her work is about play.

Steiner also works with the music/performance group Chick on Speed and W.A.G.E., an organization that fights for fair wages for artists as they do work for educational institutions and non-profits.

I couldn't find actual footage of C.L.U.E. but I did find this performance with parts of the video playing in the background.

Art vs. Design

I see art and design as both ways of expression. Art has no rules, and can creates problems by letting the world see your visions and to hear your voice with no boundaries. It is free and anything can happen even if it doesn't make sense to anybody else but you, the artist. An artist makes their own rules and guidelines. Design is creativity at its finest because when a problem is addressed, you must utilize art to make a solution for the problem to make something work. a designer works off someone else's guidelines making someone else's life beneficial with the their work. A designer and artists world are completely different universes both starting from different motive, ending with different results.

Died Young, Stayed Pretty: Movie Screening

On Monday, I'm glad I went to the, "Died Young, Stayed Pretty" movie screening. The director was a woman named Eileen Yaghoobian.

The movie followed a number of artists across the country who make event posters for small rock bands around the country. These are not the posters that you see in cheap plexiglass display cases at the mall. These are the kind that you see stapled to telephone poles and bus stops.

All of the poster artists felt like they belonged to something that they believed in. The subculture that Yaghoobian studies was able to reach new growth with the help of a website called gigposters.com. This website allowed once ephemeral posters to be stapled onto the internet forever.

Here's an interesting collection of quotes from the movie. They may not be word for word exactly.

"Gigposters.com creates a community for a bunch of people that don't have one...allows a group of people to share one mindset."

"People that haven't done anything with their lives realize it and do something that makes them think they have accomplished something...like collecting Star Trek toys."

"Culture is something that you shovel out your window so you don't drown from it in the night...that's why you can't be a sponge."

"The happy face...the most ubiquitous piece of graphic design around...it's the American version of the Swastika."

"Drugs and alcohol dull creativity...make things appear better. We lower our standards. We should instead focus on being bored, sober and creative...and actually making things better."

"As long as the world keeps playing the ice cream song, the world can't be that bad of a place."

Stumble Upon

This website is pretty cool if your are bored or need some inspiration. You just make an account and check off different subjects you like and it directs you to websites you are interested in.    www.stumbleupon.com

Dough Aitkin @ Regen Projects

I went to the opening of Doug Aitken's new work Migration at Regen Projects in West Hollywood on Saturday. If you're interested in video or photography work, I would highly recommend it.

MFA Lecture Series: Jennifer West

Last week I attended MFA Lecture with LA-based artist and Roski faculty member Jennifer West.

West's works consists of video works in which the most of the content is made not through exposing film in a camera, but by taking actual film and drawing on it, soaking it, scratching it, kissing it, and anything else to it that you could possibly imagine. After cleaning the film, which often gets covered in lots of disgusting and messy substances (grape jelly, laxatives, urine, Gatorade, dirt, etc.), she takes her film to a lab where it's transferred to a digital format which she then projects, usually along the edges of walls, in gallery spaces exhibiting her work.

While I was a little overwhelmed at time by the sheer number of works she screened for the lecture (in a conversation later about the lecture, a professor of mine said that they were pretty sure that West showed all of her past work), I did find myself deeply interested in what I saw. But even though I think the works are beautiful and mesmerizing, I found myself more interested in her process rather than the actual works themselves. She spends a lot of time coming up with what she wants to mark the films with, materials that often not very visible or noticeable when actually watching the work. Not to mention her process of making her films can be incredibly collaborative, often involving her family, friends and past students in her film marking festivities. If she didn't let us know what she used to make each film before she screened it, I really wouldn't have had anyway of distinguishing one from the other, besides the color and maybe some of the patterns of each piece.

I liked listening to West talk but I wish she would have spent more time talking about fewer pieces. She kind of rushed through most of her works so she would have time to talk about the last piece on her dvd. I hope to one day see her work in a more formal gallery setting, encountering her work the way she intends it to be seen. I feel that if I saw her work in a gallery space without hearing her talking I would have been more interested in the actual videos rather than the process of how the work is made.



Don't forget that A.L. Steiner is visiting tomorrow. If you're into photography, I wouldn't miss it!

Morcheeba

Just stumbled upon this music artist, Morcheeba. The song titled "The Sea" reminds me of some of Zero 7's work, another artist I like that we were listening to in class the other day. "Wonders Never Cease" is pretty good too.