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.