Four Seasons Project : Concordia Greenhouse

I'm currently doing an internship in an urban greenhouse on the 13th floor of Concordia's Hall building. This project aims to explore the possibilities of urban agriculture in a greenhouse year-round. This includes overcoming the challenges of limited space and sunlight in the winter, while taking advantage of the year-round access to sun and warmth that the greenhouse provides. Currently, the project is both a source of organic, local food sold at places such as le Frigo Vert, Burritoville, and Café X, and an educational resource and demonstration site for different urban agricultural techniques (including microgreen production and container gardening). Our four seasons growing is dual tracked, with sprouts and greens growing simultaneously.

It's been a while....

I fell off the social media train shortly after then end of the spring semester. My summer was spent getting my hands dirty working as a landscaper, planting a garden, biking and hiking my ass off in Edmonton, Alberta.  Well it's time to get back on the blog train as I'm starting realise what a valuable tool it is to reflect on thoughts, ideas and activities in my life. I took a whole lot of photos this summer, so I propose a little recap.

Ukio-e and it's Reflections On the Contemporary Skin Canvas

Ukiyo-e   is a genre of Japanese woodblock prints (or woodcuts) and paintings produced between the 17th and the 20th centuries, featuring motifs of landscapes, tales from history, the theatre, and pleasure quarters. It is the main artistic genre of woodblock printing in Japan.
Usually the word ukiyo is literally translated as "floating world" in English, referring to a conception of an evanescent world, impermanent, fleeting beauty and a realm of entertainments (kabuki, courtesans, geisha) divorced from the responsibilities of the mundane, everyday world; "pictures of the floating world", i.e. ukiyo-e, are considered a genre unto themselves.
The contemporary novelist Asai Ryōi, in his Ukiyo monogatari  provides some insight into the concept of the floating world:

... Living only for the moment, turning our full attention to the pleasures of the moon, the snow, the cherry blossoms and the maple leaves; singing songs, drinking wine, diverting ourselves in just floating, floating; ... refusing to be disheartened, like a gourd floating along with the river current: this is what we call the floating world...^[1]

The art form rose to great popularity in the metropolitan culture of Edo (Tokyo) during the second half of the 17th century, originating with the single-color works of Hishikawa Moronobu in the 1670s.

Irezumi is a Japanese word that refers to the insertion of ink under the skin to leave a permanent, usually decorative mark; a form of tattooing.

SHIGE  (Shigenori Iwasaki)
March 1970 Born in Hiroshima
After being a mechanic of Harley‐Davidson in Yokohama, taught himself how to tattoo since 1995 and pursues original Japanese Style with traditional Japanese style underneath.

Shige - Yello Blaze Tattoo

Poetics of Cloth continued...

I've been slowly working on this project over the semester for a digital print media class. It's a series of animated stills created from four digital prints that were then deconstructed and reconstructed using scanned samples of African textiles and photographs.  I'm still working on an ending....

Artistic Family Tree : Ana Mendieta

Born in Havana, Cuba, 1948, Ana Mendieta was exiled from her native country in 1961, just before the outbreak of the Cuban Revolution. Much of Mendieta's work expresses the pain and rupture of cultural displacement, and resonates with visceral metaphors of death, rebirth, and spiritual transformation. A seminal figure in feminist art practice of the 1970s, Mendieta devised an emblematic, at times mythical female iconography.

In 1972 Mendieta began making ritualistic performances and haunting earth works, in which she immersed or inscribed her own body within nature. Blood, fire, water, and other natural elements are essential to her highly personal, often mystical vocabulary. Burial and regeneration are recurrent themes. Mendieta's ephemeral "earth-body sculptures" and provocative performances were documented through film, video and photography. Whether painting her body with blood, or burning, carving and inscribing female symbols into the landscape, as in her Silueta series, Mendieta's work is infused with enormous power and poetry.

Mendieta writes: "I have been carrying on a dialogue between the landscape and the female body (based on my own silhouette)... I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast from the womb (nature). Through my earth/body sculptures I become one with the earth... I become an extension of nature and nature becomes an extension of my body..."

Over a fourteen-year period Mendieta made more than seventy films and videotapes that document her powerful body-based performances and landscape sculptures.
Ana Mendieta died in 1985 from an apparent fall out of her 34th floor apartment in New York City.

http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/ana_mendieta/

Artistic Family Tree: Kiki Smith

Best known for her depictions of the human form, Kiki Smith has explored a range of subjects from natural science to mythology.  Often intimate, universal, earthly, frank, non heroic terms expressing its dual aspects of vulnerability and strength. The human body- both in anatomical fragments and in full figure- is at the heart of Smith's work. " I think I chose it as a subject because it is the one form that we all share" she says. It's something that everybody has their own authentic experience with."

Her earliest works investigated its forms and functions, which she articulated through individual parts, suggesting flesh with delicate handmade papers and fashioning internal organs and systems from fragile materials such as glass, papier maché, terra cotta, and plaster.  In the early 90's she gained widespread attention for  her life size figures in wax and bronze depicting female naked bodies in disturbing and visceral poses.

Smith's work had long has long addressed the ambiguous and difficult relationship between female artists and feminist issues.  In pieces that merge human and animal, she creates new mythologies, finding in the morality that has pervaded so much of her process the possibility of rebirth.  In her art, Smith has staged a persistent inquiry that has resulted in works of uncommon power and beauty, inviting us the re-examine ourselves, our history and our place in the world.
http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2003/kikismith/

Portfolio Project

I decided to go back to the basics and draw out this project, it was nice to go back to paper and pencil. Drawing can be extremely therapeutic for me. I added colour with photoshop, this was a first, I've never used paintbrush for anything. It was fantastic for blending, I'm in love with the final result.

Artistic Family Tree - David Hammons

Over the next few weeks i'll be posting a list of inspirational artists, in response to a current project for Art and Ecology.  We have been asked to devise a family tree, delegating artist in sequential order of influence.  There are so many artists to think about and consider. In my own practice if feel the the intent of my art is always changing, however somethings remain significant even if not originally recognized as such.  Things like identity have strongly influenced my work, maybe more so in the last few years as I am finally beginning to believe in who I am and my place in this crazy world.

David Hammons (born 1943) is a sculptor, installation and performance African American artist from Springfield IL in the 1960's.

 Bliz-aard Ball Sale (1983), a performance piece in which Hammons situates himself alongside street vendors in downtown Manhattan in order to sell snowballs which are priced according to size. This act serves both as a parody on commodity exchange and a commentary on the capitalistic nature of art fostered by art galleries. Furthermore, it puts a satirical premium on ‘whiteness’, ridiculing the superficial luxury of racial classification as well as critiquing the hard social realities of street vending experienced by those who have been discriminated against in terms of race or class.

 Hammons was one of many pioneering African- American artists commited to civil rights and the Black Power movement.  For the past 40 years Hammonds has explored race, creativity and politics without gallery representation. In recent years Hammons’ art has evolved into increasingly incorporeal undertakings, but in many ways the artist himself has continued to figure – to be a figure – in his work. As his fame has grown, he has earned a reputation for his evasive manoeuvres, for defying art world protocols. Yet the more Hammons side-steps the public sphere, the more present he seems, the more his own identity comes to be at issue. When a New York Times reviewer makes a point of referring to ‘the artist himself, whom I’ve never met, and chances are, never will’, it’s clear we are in the realm of something like personal mystique. But for Hammons persona is more than epiphenomenal: his work seems to a large extent to be about how he functions in the world. And it includes the conversation around it, the dialogue – public and private – that surrounds the artist’s activities.

Throwback: Sketch Journal- In my mind games

Some of these date back a while. I used have so much more time to draw freely. That will be a goal of mine this summer.

Fall 2012 Collaborative Print

In the fall I was granted the opportunity to work with another artist, Sara Tremblay, on a collaborative print project. Sara is a photographer, who also draws and works with video. We compiled a series of intaglio prints reminiscent of the cyclical  phases of the moon. There are eight key stages of the moon however Sara experimented with about 36 different steel plates. All the plates were hand cut and the edges buffed. The markings were created out of general wear, rust, hammering, smashing the plates on various surfaces, and rubbing the plates on the floor.  We experimented with a multitude of colors, silver, gold, black, varying shades of blue and used a collage technique "Chine-collé" to emphasise the phases. In the end Sara was attracted to the embossing, and cut the plates into 8 phases, that worked like a collection of puzzle pieces. The phase was then inked and connected with its other side, so the prints are fully embossed but only half inked.

Poetics of Cloth

Here is a sample of my series of animated stills, when completed I'm hoping to incorporate some music from the ever inspiring Flying Lotus.

Artist: Kwaku Adoma Ananse

Akosua Adoma Owusu creates films and videos that blend popular culture, music and mythology from both West African and American sources, examining the crossover and exchange of cultural representation in the contemporary African diaspora. Her videos range from documentaries to pastiche to experimental abstraction.
 Drawing on this narrative, Owusu explores the parallels and differences of merging cultures, using the double-sided trickster character of Kwaku Ananse, halfspider and half-man, as a guiding metaphor.

In Anancy, as in her other films, Owusu blends lush, colorful imagery with diverse musical accompaniment. She has investigated cross-cultural pollination in other ways, for instance through examinations of beauty practices and their relationship to racial politics. Her cinematic vision encompasses the increasing ubiquity and lingering unease of transnational identity.

http://akosuaadoma.com/home.html

Resisting Invisibility: Black Faculty in Art and Art History in Canada

"There is an ongoing invisibility and even erasure of talented black intellectuals, artists, writers and scholars in the Canadian academy. But we also need to acknowledge and challenge the dominant lens through which this invisibility tends to be examined. Contrary to popular belief, not all issues, objects, events and materials of relevance to race, racism, colonialism, slavery and the Black Diaspora can be situated within or examined from the perspective of social science disciplines such as politics, sociology, psychology or law. Art and visual culture more broadly were and continue to be central to western programs of slavery, colonialism and ongoing conditions of racial oppression and marginalization.  Monarchs, colonial administrators and European citizens had to be convinced of the rightness of the colonial project and the morality and economic viability of empire building."
-Charmaine Nelson

Charmiane is the only black female art historian in Canada, teaching Black Diasporic Art at McGill University. I find this alarming and infuriating, that there is a lack of accessibility to Black History and Black Art History studies in Canadian universities. Why is this so?
The neglect of Afro-American art, history and distortion of the facts concerning Negroes in most history books, is the  deprivation of a heritage, that plays a valuable role in Canadian and American Culture. A knowledge of history is crucial if we want an understanding of the past in relationship to current discourse. Historical ignorance breeds contemporary ignorance!


Here is a link to Charmiane speaking about the presence or lack there of African representation at the  UAAC Universities Art Association of Canada annual convention and the American equivalent CAA  College Art Association.
http://www.congress2013.ca/blog/resisting-invisibility-black-faculty-art-and-art-history-canada

Digital Print: Afrocentric/ Diaspora

I've begun to create and compile a series of prints related to african culture and its relationship to colonization and the African diaspora. In fusing these ideologies, with the digital process, the amalgamation of  the modern and traditional creates a hybrid of patterns embedded with a multitude of meanings. I'm hoping to incorporate color through screen as well as compile color using stop motion for a small video.

Art & Ecology : The forest for the trees

Vertical sounds and horizontal noise