Confusion

I am super confused about the structure of your blog. The months are not correct, the dates are off... my brain is too simple to figure it all out on my own. Would you come to class tomorrow to help me figure it all out? April the 28th. Thanks

Thursday 4-30-09

Completion (graduation)

A common mistake people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
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Douglas Adams (1952-?) British musician and author.

Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.
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W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) British novelist and playwright.

Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest, without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without effort. Then he feels his nullity, loneliness, inadequacy, dependence, helplessness, emptiness.
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Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) French mathematician, physicist and philosopher.

To accuse others for one's own misfortunes is a sign of want of education. To accuse oneself shows that one's education has begun. To accuse neither oneself nor others shows that one's education is complete.
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Epictetus (50-120) Greek philosopher.

Syrtash, Andrea. How to survive the real world: life after college graduation. Atlanta: Hundreds of Heads Books, 2006.

Honestly, this wasn't incredibly informative. Maybe it'd be helpful for the stereotypical movie college sorority girl or frat boy who never lived with anyone that wasn't going to college and always had their parents to pay for whatever they wanted, but for me this was a bunch of sappy dribble. People condensing their life advice to a short paragraph will always sound that way. Most of the advice was about stretching your parent's dime as far as possible before you have to be on your own. But that's not really fair, especially if your parents just threw tens of thousands of dollars at you to go to college. "I went to Aruba and soaked up all the carefree moments I could" Well that's just great advice to anyone who can go to Aruba, but I would say most of the country doesn't have that privilege. I think my living experiences during college have prepared me for life in the real world, because between my freshman and senior year almost none of my friends were college kids. They all had full time jobs and had been paying their own way since 18 or earlier. I've lived with all types of people from those that started smoking crack and stole all the rent money to the plain old assholes who throw temper tantrums above your room as revenge against your polite request to not talk loudly outside your bedroom door at two in the morning. I've also lived with people who wanted nothing more than to just sit in their rooms after a ten hour work day. I know what I'm going to do when I graduate - I'm going to get a job because that is the only thing I can do. I will live on the good graces of my friends as long as I can until I can support myself in my own apartment. I will hope that I have time to go camping or to the beach, but I don't count on these things happening over anything but a weekend. I'm certain that I cannot afford to backpack around Europe because as cheap as that might be the plane ticket is damned expensive. I will do my best to promote my photography and my skills as an artist and hope that within the next decade I will be working more in the arts than in retail. I'd like to go back to school someday, but until I know for what I'm not worried about it. I may want to go for photojournalism, I may want to go for illustration, I may want to go for graphic design. I may even want to go for psychology or mass communications. Until they combine these things into the perfect manifestation of Megan's personality major, I will probably just work on them in my spare time (hopefully getting discount art supplies from my job at Plaza - fingers crossed!) As long as being an adult means I don't have to give up speaking my mind, I think I'll be ok.

Monday Post 4-27-09

Frank Uyttenhove

Frank Uyttenhove is a Belgium photographer working mostly for advertising. He does much photo manipulation creating very impressive pictures with great and funny ideas. I think I've found my new favorite photographer. Not only are his images amazing in quality of execution, but they are whimsical, sinister, and overall quite amusing. I could not find an interview with him, in fact I could barely find facts about his life at all, but I think you'll agree with me that based on the pictures he's worth blogging about.

Website:
http://www.frankuyttenhove.com/
Information:
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/5/6a8/709
Representation:
http://www.t-mitchell.com/

Contest Entry

Anderson Gallery

Contest Entry

Thursday Post 4-23-09

Sinister


"When a sinister person means to be your enemy, they always start by trying to become your friend.
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William Blake (1757-1827) British poet and painter.

Bewes, Timothy. Cynicism and Postmodernity. Brooklyn: Verso, 1997.

Melancholic and introspective, ironical and apolitical, the urban cynic is a myth of our time. In a provocative study, Timothy Bewes charts the development of contemporary society's culture of cynicism. This is a book for all those fascinated by the state of politics, critical thinking, and the plight of the individual in the 21st century.

"Modern cynicism is a condition of disillusion, which can appear as a temperament of aestheticism, or even nihilism. Cynicism betrays an elevated and sublimated scale of values, therefore, for which the abstractions of truth and integrity are of far greater importance than the political virtues of action and imagination...The cynic is the typical 'postmodern' character, a figure both alienated from society and from his or her own subjectivity. 'Cynicism' is a concept mobilized by politicians, critics, and commentators as a synonym for postmodernism; this is a cultural relationship in which both terms function primarily as instruments of political rhetoric."

Though sinister is not exactly derived from cynicism, I believe the two are related as the dictionary defines sinister as: threatening or portending evil, harm, or trouble; bad, evil, base, or wicked; unfortunate; disastrous; and ironically enough of or on the left side; left: and defines cynicism as: An attitude of scornful or jaded negativity, especially a general distrust of the integrity or professed motives of others. The cynic may start out cynical but may easily become sinister. There is definitely something sinister about my work, and the blase in which I present these often terrifying situations implies a "an attitude of scornful or jaded negativity".

Monday Post 4-20-09

Elizabeth McGrath

Los Angeles-born artist Elizabeth McGrath has always had an eye for the strange beauty in the grotesqueries of life; this appreciation is nowhere more evident than in her work. Inspired by the relationship between the natural world and the detritus of consumer culture, she brings forth a new cavalcade of creatures from the darker corners of the streets, the city, the imagination. It is this melancholy interaction between man-made status symbols and suffering specimens of nature that make up her intricate body of work. Today she lives in Downtown LA with her hairless dogs Blue and King Tut, and her Husband Morgan Slade. They play together in the band Miss Derringer.

The play between the grotesque/offputting/awkward/doomed feel and glamour/beauty/extravagance in her art is what I feel most closely relates to mine. She creates sculptures that at first may appear very precious and beautiful, but upon further examination (or maybe more quickly) there seems to be something off about them. Something a little more sinister than little trinkets to put atop your dresser.

Website:
http://www.elizabethmcgrath.com/sculpture-Arlan.php
Interview:
http://sacredism.com/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=19
Gallery:
http://www.iguapop.net/

Thursday Post 4-16-09

Truth

"It is easier to perceive error than to find truth, for the former lies on the surface and is easily seen, while the latter lies in the depth, where few are willing to search for it"
- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832) German poet, novelist and dramatist.

Horwich, Paul. Truth. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

What is truth? Paul Horwich gives the definitive exposition of a notable philosophical idea, 'minimalism'. This is the controversial idea that the nature of truth is entirely captured in the trivial fact that each proposition specifies its own condition for being true, and that truth is therefore, despite the philosophical struggles to which it has given rise, an entirely mundane and unpuzzling concept.

"'What is truth?' we sometimes ask, but the question tends to be rhetorical, conveying the somewhat defeatist idea that a good answer, if indeed there is such a thing, will be so subtle, so profound, and so hard to find, that to look for one would surely be a waste of time....The common sense notion that truth is a kind of 'correspondence with the facts' has never been worked out to anyone's satisfaction."

What is true and what is untrue are important concepts in my work. The fun part is the idea that there is no such thing as truth, at least in the absolute sense. In truth I am showing you a tree, but no, that's not quite it, I'm showing you the interpretation of a tree as rendered by my camera, the computer, and then the printer. And in truth, that is also not what I'm showing, I am showing dots on a piece of paper that represent a tree, but at the same time a cliff. This constant fight between what is true and what is not true in photography is so tangled with nonsense that it has almost ceased to be - and that's where my work comes into play. Because what am I showing you? I am showing you the result of a process, and so in a way, I am not lying at all.

After Photography

I am glad to see you seeking out artists and ideas that relate so much to your own work. You are using your research in the best way possible. The artist that you wrote about concerning collage is a great example. You should read a book titled "After Photography" written by Fred Ritchin. His ideas about the use of imagery in our Photoshoped visual reality is inspiring at the least! I am glad that you have recognised the balance required between visual believability and illusion in your work. The direction you have taken this semester has been exciting to watch.

Lecture 4-13-09

Derick Holt

I'm not sure that his work was really my style, but I can say he's definitely invested in integrating a concept on every level, such as using food to make prints for a food magazine. What I did get out of it, was the way you can get work where you least expect it. He went to NY looking to get Graphic Design work and couldn't even get people to respond to his emails and such. So then he struggled just to get a restaurant job. He worked in a restaurant for 3 years, all the while bugging them to let him do graphic work fro them. Then the day came he got to design a T-Shirt - Live Free or Diner - I laughed. He essentially became the local restaurant guy and now designs regularly for three different restaurants, runs a website, and is in charge of designing the Diner Journal magazine. He also mentioned that the restaurants want him to design new T-Shirts every few months. This is slightly renewing my hope for the idea that I can use my art even though I won't necessarily be hired by anyone specifically for photography. Viewing his work also further strengthened the idea that the poster for our show was entirely legible and made me really wish that everyone hadn't decided on the simple black and yellow abortion that I threw together in five minutes in an attempt to show what kind of poster we DON'T want to have. Oh well.

Monday Post 4-13-09

Alberto Seveso

Alberto Seveso is a graphic designer and illustrator from Italy who has simply created a fantastic style by mixing colourful vectors with black and white photos known as "sperm shaping". It's very hard to look at his work and not say WOW.
Website:
http://www.burdu976.com/

Representation:
http://www.advocate-art.com/

Interview:
http://abduzeedo.com/alberto-seveso-interview

Thursday Post 4-9-09

Collage

"Collage has seemed to be lacking in sincerity, to represent a corruption of moral principles, an adulteration. One thinks of Picasso's Still life with chair caning of 1911-12, his first collage, and one begins to understand why."
- Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter

Adamowicz, Elza. Surrealist Collage in Text and Image.


"With the invention of photography traditional modes of pictorial expression have been rendered redundant, just as automatic writing, defined as 'la photographie de l'esprit', has disrupted the field. The pictorial possibilities opened up by photography and film anchor the collage aesthetic in radical forms of representation based on the transformation of pre-existing elements.

I found this quote particularly inspiring. Due to photography's ability to render near exact images of our surroundings, other mediums burst out in all directions in order to find new forms of representation. The collage, which may take both photographic and non-photographic materials, is completely based on the ability for images to transform due to their creative juxtaposition to other elements. This relates to my work, as I am collaging drawings with my photos to transform the content of my abstract photos into scenes entirely different than the objects that make up the photos. Wow...that was a bit of a run-on. This transformation is key to my concept of visual trickery. Without collage my images may be visually analogous with what I wish them to appear to be, but the viewer may see something else (which is not necessarily bad, but not what I want) or even worse they might assume they are looking at nothing but colors or patterns - and have make no mental connection to anything in the real world. If this were to happen, my visual trickery concept would completely fall apart - so it is in collage and it's ability to transform that my concept can be realized.