innerbias

A Return to Arms (or Paintbrushes)

2007-02-28T14:34:00.000-05:00

SW-BBWH
2.2007
15"x6.75"

2.28.2007-6.08.2006 equates to unforgivably lax blogging on my part. I've been chronically bad at it. It's like quitting smoking... no matter how strong the desire is, it's far too easy to keep putting off the first step towards doing it. That said, this hopefully will signal a return to arms, so to speak.

In the past 8.5 months of ignoring the web, I've been through quite a few things.... survived two months in rural New York at the Chautauqua School of Art, at long last (and after many hectic dealings with Financial Aid and the Registrar) received my BFA from American, and learned yet more about the perils and joys of museum prep and installation at the American University Museum Quick, what's the connection between all three?

Tomorrow, I'll have a review of Anatomies, Graham Caldwell's current show at G Fine Art.

Til then, a couple drawings from the last week, as I now have some amount of leisure to get back to continuing my work. Click thumbnails for larger images.

KK-SMS2
2.2007
6.75"x15"

Awards! And Recent Work

2006-06-08T10:39:00.000-04:00

After being sick in bed all Thursday last week, I was more than pleasantly surprised to wake up that evening and find something in my inbox that wasn't spam. In fact, quite the opposite - I was quite happy to find that I am this year's recipient of the Washington Printmakers Gallery & Washington Print Club Excellence in Printmaking Award for undergraduate printmaking students. So thanks to my teachers & department chair for nominating me! I'll be showing a print at the WPG sometime this fall - more information when I know about it.

On that note, here's some images of one of my more recent prints. Untitled, but I like I refer to it as the P3 Last Supper because of the one (intentionally) misregistered print. 14 silkscreen and toner prints - each sheet 8"x10". Unfortunately the subtleties of the prints are extremely hard to capture in a photo, but oh well. The photographic element is actually directly printed with a laser printer over (and under) the silkscreen layers. The last few months of the semester I was exploring ways in which to effectively integrate digital printing with traditional printmaking techniques.

Untitled

Detail

Installed in Katzen Art Center but don't tell anyone or AU will try to charge me!

Al-Zarqawi Killed

2006-06-08T09:53:00.000-04:00

As reported by the Washington Post this morning, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed in an airstrike last night.

What's this got to do with the purported theme of my blog, since I don't make posts not related to art on here? Well... the US government sure knows how to present photos, don't they?

Photo from washingtonpost.com

Maybe Jack Rasmussen can get them to loan AU the photo for a late-term addition to Visual Politics: The Art of Engagement!

Completely Artworld Irrelevant

2006-05-23T02:25:00.000-04:00

But after... 6? 7? years... I am finally seriously trying to quit smoking. So if any subsequent posts seem a little overly angry... bear that in mind.

Big Al Carter

2006-05-22T13:05:00.001-04:00

If you happened to miss it, the Post's Magazine section had a nice front page article this Sunday on the infamous "Big Al" Carter. I was fortunate enough to meet him about a year and a half ago at the Pearl in Alexandria before it moved to Skyline (I'm still kind of ticked off about that since I live 2 blocks from it's old location). What makes this article particularly interesting - in light of the usual ado about the Post's coverage/non-coverage of DC art - is that it's in the Magazine section in the first place, written by a Post staff writer who it would seem is not affiliated with the Post's art coverage.

Meanwhile today there was a online discussion with the article's author, which brought up some interesting, thought not exactly new, points about DC's art scene and commercial viability - both specifically with regards to DC as it is for living artists, and in considering artists as "African American" artists.

For my part I can't really remember now whether or not Big Al said he got an MFA from AU, but I do distinctly remember him mentioning AU and the department advisor, who equally well remembered him.

Edit - if someone can clarify whether Big Al did actually go to AU or not, let me know, I hate not knowing things.

A New Return

2006-05-22T13:05:00.000-04:00

OK, this is the second (or third) time I've taken a prolonged absence from blogging. The end of the semester and numerous other things going on with my jobs kept me a bit too distracted to spend much time writing. Things will continue apace now, however.

To start things off again, many thanks to JT @ Thinking About Art for offloading a ton of MDF, which I'm already putting to good use. Images of new work, both from the end of the semester and what I'm working on now coming shortly.

New Pieces: P3 and Mardi Gras

2006-04-01T18:47:00.000-05:00

First update of April! And not in fact an April Fool's joke. Finished these two pieces about two weeks ago. On view at the AU Museum til.... tomorrow. But since you probably haven't been there, here they are. Click the thumbnails for a full size image.

P3
25.5” x 25.5” x ~4”
March 2006
concrete, wood, masonite, shellac, enamal spraypaint, construction chalk in oil and alkyd mediums

Mardi Gras
21” x 10”
March 2006
digital print, shellac, acrylic serigraph on Rives BFK

ALIVE! AU Undergraduate Fine Arts Show

2006-03-22T22:01:00.000-05:00

That's right. After a month of inconspicuousness, I have returned to the blogging world. So much to do, so much to do!

As previously scooped by my employer at the AU Museum, I had a fun time at Mardi Gras, and after three weeks my nose is now back to factory condition, and my face is (for the most part) back to the norm. Between all the fun doctor's visits (a quick aside to give MANY thanks to my wonderful mother and my friend Carrie Mallory for helping with all the administrative headaches incurred by the theft of my wallet while going to the ER at Tulane and all the subsequent trips to ENT doctors and surgery - didn't help that I not only had my wallet stolen when I was attacked, but that when my replacement health insurance card DID come, it was STILL erroneously listing my name as "Clave Teague") and my frantic attempts to finish work for the AU undergraduate show, the past three weeks have been insanely busy.

Fortunately on an upnote, I can happily invite you to see the American University undergraduate fine arts show at the Katzen Center. Along with a few other shows, the student show will be opening next Tuesday, March 28 - opening reception that night from 4-7:30 PM. Because the MFA students also have their shows coming up, the undergraduate show will be open only until April 2nd, so please make it out sometime next week! Check the Art @ The Katzen blog for more details on getting to the museum.

I have four pieces in the show (one painting - "P3", three prints - two untitled collographs done in Italy and "Mardi Gras", a digital print & serigraph completed Saturday). Wee! Feels good to finally get something accomplished this month.

Reading Assignment: Fantasy Beyond Control

2006-02-13T13:41:00.000-05:00

Crossposted from my class blog, innercomposition

Lynn Hershman's essay ("Fantasy Beyond Control") poses interesting comments regarding the value of viewer-driven, interactive pieces - particularly in the form of video where playback and sequencing is affected by viewer decisions.

The following notable points occured to me while reading the essay:

At what point does viewer-driven work go beyond the assignation of control from artist to audience to substantially become a tool for escapism in the audience?
Does interactivity change the action of a piece significantly from sequential presentation when there's still an underlying rhetoric to the piece?
What is the true value of virtual reality?

Addressing the first point.... To what end does art in general fulfill the role of escapism? Balancing the demonstrative values of art to influence audience towards the artist's end versus satisfying a presumed void which that artwork fills in the audience, is there a clear line between the two? If the desired purpose is to give freedom to the audience, should we give more credence to pieces presented in a decidedly artworld context - such as Hershman's pieces - versus the countless people who are addicted to games like The Sims or Everquest? Going with Hershman's thoughts, one might make the distinction that pieces such as hers operate differently because the interactivity is an exercise in shifted perceptions on the part of the audience, but is that collateral purpose overriden by the direct (or indirect) content of the piece? On a higher level one might say the heightening of perception is a sublimated effect of the interaction, but what significantly differs in that from the changes in perception experienced by people addicted to mass role playing games such as the ones previously mentioned? The high minded view of contextual associations increasing the value of the interaction in Hershman's pieces seems elitist, to put it one way - though the time lapse between her work and computer simulations does give the aura of validity.

The question of interaction's value versus sequential timing opens a rather large can of worms. To analyze just one example cited in Hershman's writing: "Whilst the Demon and Zen Master are played by the same actor, indicating different aspects of our personalities, suggesting that the same even can appear frightening or enlightening, depending upon its context." To extrapolate the message Hershman points out here, is interaction truly necessary? Despite the use of nonsequential access of the images she presents in the piece, does the value of perception increase significantly in making these comparisons when the images given in the piece are necessarily canned previous to viewing? Could alternative presentation methods create the same effect

So, does virtual reality play a truly valuable role in life beyond escapism? The notion that it increases perception is one potential bonus, but does that perception shift translate to real-world changes in the viewer's actions or is the divide too clear between reality and virtual reality, causing the viewer to inherently regard them as different systems? If "[p]erceptions become the key to reality," does perceiving virtual reality truly improve our real world perception? The reality of addiction to immersive, real time computer games suggests that to some extent the boundary can become blurred for many people, unfortunately in favor of virtual reality in some cases - is the difference between the two at the same time both too similar and too distinct? The countless science fiction books that speculate on the matter tend to paint an unpleasant theory of the matter (Dick especially, Noon, Gibson, others). Is interactivity so tempting because it's so dangerous to us?

More Top Influences of 2005: #5, 6 and 7

2006-02-07T19:15:00.000-05:00

Most people would probably have finished this list by the first week of January, but I'm a slacker like that. With six more to go, I should probably give some more now, so without further ado:

Number 5: Smashing Pumpkins

What does it mean to eschew trends? Or to come to them late? I vividly remember in high school that one of my best friends was possibly the biggest Smashing Pumpkins fan I've ever met, but I had a habit in high school (and still kind of do) of avoiding things because I think they're overly popular - not necessarily the most positive outlook, but it is what it is. I've had a bunch of Smashing Pumpkins albums for years though, and in one of those odd little changes in mood, ended up listening to them heavily the past half year or so. Thus, they seemed an appropriate addition at number 5, especially in light of the fact that Billy Corgan is now trying to reunite the band after years of separation.

Number 6: Dorothea Rockburne

Finally, an actual art-related influence?! Well, sort of. Dorothea Rockburne was a visiting artist at AU last spring, and frankly she annoyed the heck out of me. Not simply because she came to give her slide talk with four (FOUR!) carousels of slides and spent almost three hours going on and on about how amazing she was... but more so the fact that she pretty much incessantly talked about the mathematical basis of her work, when I don't believe her rhetoric on the subject substantiated it to a very significant degree.

While I may have made a bit of a Freudian slip towards the end and accidently called her work decorative to her face (whoops!) I do think that any math theory behind her work loses a lot of it's credence in favor of an aesthetic utilization (which is practically speaking, diametrically opposite to the functional basis and nature of math) that somewhat defies the conceptual basis of her work. So maybe that is an inclination towards the decorative.... Nonetheless, she's someone who sticks in my mind.

Number 7: Candace Breitz

And now for an artist I actually like! Candace Breitz does some whacked out video installations, the two I've seen (Mother/Father and Diorama (Dubrovnik Version), at the 2005 Venice Biennale and Palazzo delle Papesse, respectively - Mother/Father is pictured at left) being based on the use of short samples of characters from movies or TV. Mother/Father is a schizoid installation in two separate rooms... all father characters from movies, screened from their backgrounds, one actor per each of the six screens, and all mother characters in the other set of six. The characters begin to establish a dialog between their multiple self images and between the screens in a very chilling manner. This is one of the few video pieces I've seen where I immediately sat down and watched the entire thing without checking my watch and wondering how much more I'd have to last to get to the end (or rather the restart of the loop).

"Interface" Review

2006-02-06T13:59:00.000-05:00

So here's the deal. For my Composing With Media class, I went to see Interface @ Fraser Bethesda last week - it closes this Wednesday (Feb. 8), so if you haven't seen it... you've missed out and probably aren't going to get there before it closes. Oh well. Purporting to be "a group exhibition focusing on what happens when contemporary art and evolving technology meet...," it is certainly a very unique show that you're not likely to see anything like in one place again too soon, and for that reason alone it's a valuable experience.

Despite that, I'm pretty negative on some aspects of the show, and most significantly on the use (or misuse) of technology that I saw there. Let me preface the full review by saying that I grew up not being interested in art but in computers, and transitioned to studying fine art after I'd spent about 4 years writing 3D animation software, doing software training and developing tool chains for some rather esoteric real time computer driven systems. Despite that, I'm not sure I have answers for what I see as problems in some of the work shown, or even that what I perceive as problems exist for others in viewing the work.

Following is a list of the artists showing work in the show, and thoughts on each. I was in a rush to get to the gallery before it closed and neglected to bring a notebook, so I don't have names for most of the pieces.

David Page - Hopscotch
I can't really say much about this piece. Sitting in the middle of the gallery, it's visually impressive, but without having seen the performance there's no room for me to make much of a commentary on it's driving force - which brings up a point - if a piece's inherent nature requires performance, what are the messages given when you leave the object portion of it on display, devoid of it's action?

Kathryn Cornelius

People have raved about Cornelius' video work in recent time - particularly from Seven last summer. Sorry, but the video on display at Interface is painful to watch, which brings up my first big annoyance with the work in this show - installation methods and requirements. When I went, I couldn't figure out what was going on in the video beyond that it appeared to be the top of clouds seen from an airplane window, and as far as I can tell there is no perceptible sounds - just flat background noise with no audible changes. Exciting. If it were just a matter of video work I didn't like, however, I wouldn't feel as aggravated by the installation as the fact that it was prominently playing off a Video iPod from a stand in front of the flat panel screen. So now I start questioning all sorts of things that I don't think are part of the piece - though I may be wrong. Things like... why can I see the iPod? Because it's a valued object in itself that I'm supposed to consider vis-a-vis the travel video? Am I supposed to take things into my own hands since I can't stand the video and scan forward myself and maybe be rewarded with something exciting? Is the audio track not really completely devoid of anything interesting, and someone screwed with the iPod and turned the volume down? Am I going to get yelled at by the gallery owner if I touch the iPod? Are there more videos on the iPod I can change it to (since the unbacklit screen seemed to say it was on track 10 of 17)? If I am supposed to touch the iPod, why can't you leave the backlight on, since it's docked and powered, and give me a clue that way? Ugh. Maybe the piece is supposed to make me question all that - but considering from her artist statement online - "The intention is to let go of the skin and surface, and slip into a state of challenging silence", I can't say it succeeds - it just makes me angry. If one is to assume that I have to work, as a viewer, to achieve that state of challenging silence, then what value does the piece serve, since it causes the opposite affect in me?

Scott Hutchison

I'd previously seen some of Hutchison's work at an open studio at Arlington Arts Center last year. I consider some of his pieces in Interface to be pretty delicious stuff, particularly the collaboration with Thomas Edwards. While the roving eyes have a pretty significant computer world history - there've been little desktop widgets in old, old versions of the X Windows system on older UNIX operating systems, as well as the other graphical OS' - the idea of drawings or paintings that clearly, on their own, inhabit the fine arts sphere as well as becoming animation cels for a reactive piece is a wonderful take on this co-mingling of media. On the other hand, the "Paper Portrait" piece stuck me as nothing more than a retread of William Kentridge's video work with the acts of drawing and erasure, and also significantly in Kentridge's use of self and self-portraiture in his video work.

Thomas Edwards

Edward's colloboration with Hutchison in the show, as previously mentioned, was a great use of mingling two worlds of media with a great result. Something additional about that particular piece that I appreciated was the weave conduit covering the power line coming out of the box the piece is installed in, and the "black box" approach of having the necessary motion sensors built into the installation. Wholeness of presentation is something that often is neglected in installations, and while that may function for some pieces... it does not for everything. Which brings me to Edward's "Blame" piece - a cartoonish pointing finger hand on an armature that swings around on top of a pretty standard sculpture pedestal - all the while, following people who pass it by use of a motion sensor, and making accusatory statements like "I blame YOU for increasingly partisan politics" and other non-sequiturs following that general format. Interesting enough technically, kind of annoying after a while, and gets its point (ha, ha) across well, but presentation made me disappointed in it. While the fact that the swiveling structure the arm is mounted on is all exposed mechanicals doesn't bother me - tech chic maybe... I don't particularly like that, but I can accept it - I just can't stand the fact that the motion sensor and speakers for the piece are just sitting on the floor next to the pedestal. Build those things into the base! If for no other reason, the motion sensor would be more accurate if placed in vertical symmetry with the base of the hand swivel, not sitting off to the side. When the mechanicals and support are built with a sense of some sort of pristine quality of things being where they are for a purpose, and having clear mechanical functions that wouldn't work correctly if, say, a gear was out of line, why are you putting the speakers and the motion sensor just out there on the floor, with wires laying around the back in clear sight? Urgh.

Philip Kohn

Two pieces by Kohn - both LCD/tablet PCs mounted as if they were 2D artwork in kind of junky looking frames reminiscent of mass produced business certificate frames - it's hard to think of that veneered wood document frame look with a black matte as anything else. By hiding a miniature camera in a hole in the matte, the computers inside can record video in real time and do weird things to that video - time lapse, image color shifts, otherwise re-combinatorial video processing with the active images it gets - namely, people walking in front of the piece. Super. These get visual interest points... for about a minute. Then it just dies - what is the point of this manipulation? Sucking the viewer's soul in, kind of literally, for it's own purposes - which aren't terribly deep. Supposedly presenting some visual rhetoric on interpretations of time and space, they reminded me of nothing so much as screen savers - which is only enhanced by the decorative type frames.

Andrew Wodzianski

Beautiful paintings, and an interesting idea in the use of giving viewers a cell texting number to message in order to get more information about the pieces, in addition to the mp3 players on hand for more information. However:

I don't text on my cell, because it costs me money. Sorry, not interested. That's my call, but still. Don't make viewers pay to get something with no other alternative.
Those mp3 players were out of juice. Maybe that's the gallery's job to check, but artists should think about things like this when they invade new territory in presentation.

Claire Watkins

Claire Watkins is deservedly getting a ton of attention from her work at Interface. Gorgeous, interesting, terribly unique work with magnets and delicate balances of matter and formal composition. The "Flock of Needles" piece in particular gets a lot of publicity, but I found myself more drawn to the small wall hung assemblies, which occupy an odd place between 2D work and sculptural - 2.5D is a good term to use, since they're predominantly 2D and make limited use of the dimension of depth. The only issues I had with them are: Clear acrylic on the sides of the boxes? Only from the fact that the last piece on the wall is on a wall with a convex corner let me see a little bit of the motor action inside the box, which makes me wonder: does the artist want me to see that stuff going on? The acrylic seems to say "Yes, look at me" but the size of the pieces and being wall hung prevents much of a look at that. Power cables hanging down! Argh! Maybe it's just me being easily set off again, but I really loathe the appearance that cables are just an annoyance that's there, so just drape them a little bit and it'll be ok. The seven wall hung pieces are invariably grouped by the fact that the middle three have their power cables drape together, while the outside pairs have theirs grouped. That's an unnecessary and counterproductive read, assuming they're not supposed to be perceptually grouped in that way. And about the power cords - can we just have them neatly taped over or something? I'd rather see a nice straight vertical lump on the wall that blends in than see an extension cord hanging down - at least pretend to lie to me that it needs power, please!

Despite my acrimonious words, I think the artists gathered in Interface collectively deserve the attention they're getting - "new media" is a tough world to be in and it's pretty much impossible to please everyone, or even to have the kind of assumed languages in talking about it that come with more traditional art forms.

Top 10 Influences of 2005, #s 3 and 4

2006-01-23T21:44:00.000-05:00

I took a while to get past number 2, so here's a couple at once.

Number 3: Sex And The City

Laugh if you will. While living in Italy I was cut off from basically every form of popular entertainment, American or otherwise. Without even a TV to watch Italian shows, which I still wouldn't have understood, I was reliant on the DVDs others had brought, and somehow got sucked in to it and ended up watching all six seasons of Sex And The City in a far shorter time than I'd like to admit. As a result, I acquired a bit of a shoe addiction and in general a greater interest in fashion than I'd had before, which to some extent explains some aspects of the motivation behind the installation previously mentioned in this blog.

Number 4: Japanese Anime

I've had an interest in anime and manga (Japanese animation and graphic novels, respectively) for a long time, as well as Japanese culture in general (my parents lived in Japan for a few years before I was born when my father was in the Navy, and as a result we have a wide variety of cultural artifacts from Japan at home). In the past year something sublimated into my consciousness about some of the prevalent trends in Japanese pop culture and how they relate to trauma of WWII in Japan. Specifically, there is a fascinating range of themes in anime that are pretty directly analogous - a post-apocalyptic future where civilization tries to rebuild itself while still having the issues of internecine strife in competing groups. Some examples (don't be fooled by the ones that appear geared towards children, they're far more significant thematically than any Disney movie - which explains why the only contemporary movies that Disney has perform well are licensed from Studio Ghibli or Pixar):

Future Boy Conan (1978), a TV series by Hayao Miyazaki (director of most Studio Ghibli films, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle being the three most recent)
Nausicaa of The Valley Of The Wind (1984), also by Miyazaki (easily in my Top 10 favorite movies, and absolutely tremendous).
Super Dimension Fortress Macross (1982-1984), a TV series adapted in US distribution in the 80's as the first series of Robotech
The well-known Akira (1988)

In accordance with this realization, I discovered a catalog at the B&N in Georgetown a few weeks ago and picked it up on Amazon last week for a show presented by the Japan Society in NYC last summer - one I really wish I could've seen: Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture - Little Boy being a reference to the code name for the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in WWII, as the show description explains:

Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture explored the culture of postwar Japan through its arts and popular visual media, from the perspective of one of Japan's most celebrated artists. Focusing on the phenomenally influential subcultures of otaku (roughly translated as "pop cult fanaticism") and its relationships to Japan's artistic vanguard, Takashi Murakami explores the historical influences that shape Japanese contemporary art and its distinct graphic idioms. The exhibition's title, Little Boy, refers to the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, clearly locating the birth of these new cultural forms in the trauma and generational aftershock. In Murakami's perspective, a resonant figure for Japan's contemporary condition is that of the "little boy"--both the nickname for the bomb dropped on Hiroshima and an image of Japan's infantalized culture.

The catalog (Amazon link) is definitely worth picking up.

Number 2 Followup

I just picked up another book at Olsson's, this time a collection of short stories edited by George Pelecanos, with one of the sixteen stories penned by him as well. It's called DC Noir (Amazon Link). Go read it.

Multimedia - Composing With Media - Indeterminancy

2006-01-23T14:03:00.000-05:00

As part of the coursework for one of my classes at AU this semester (Composing With Media), I will be making posts to my blogs for assigned class work. Please feel free to take a look at the blog for the course if you're interested in what my posts relate to.

Indeterminacy

Indeterminacy in media is a method of structure in media that removes the linear aspects of time in an absolute way compared to traditional linear structure of media. Even in non-linear media editing, there is a general resolution that the decomposition of time as an aspect of the media is simply a tool to facilitate the work of the creator and not a favorable aspect in of itself.

Where indeterminacy becomes important is in considering the relationship of work to viewer; the traditional nature of work is as static object for discussion versus active participant in dialog between art and audience. Linear structures of media composition enforce the absolute control of creator in a way that prescribes how audience reacts to the composition, rather than allowing and enabling the audience to become both feedback to composition as well as being of central importance; the audience gives to the piece and the piece gives back to the audience.

However, is there a problem inherent in making the audience too central to a piece? If the audience becomes too important to the function of a piece, do the precepts the work stands for become untenable because the piece's value has diminished in relation to the value embodied by the actions of the audience? If an audience's input is too central, is the work still establishing its worth instead of becoming another tool in the way linear media compositions are tools?

New Leipzig School Followup

2006-01-23T13:47:00.000-05:00

Talking to Jack Rasmussen, director of the museum here at American's Katzen Art Center, it seems we will be having a show of New Leipzig School artists in September. The Katzen will be the third stop as the show goes from MASS MoCA in March and April to SITE Santa Fe in April and June, then following the Katzen show will be at the Frye Art Museum and end at the Salt Lake Art Center.

As I mentioned in this blog post, Matthias Weischer is an absolutely tremendous painter from the New Leipzig School. Make sure to catch the show when it comes to the Katzen to see his work, it is very much worth the attention it gets.

Mannequin Blast Party

2006-01-23T13:26:00.000-05:00

As I said I'd do (eventually), here's the video which was included in the installation mentioned previously in my blog.

Installation in Corciano, Italy

Movie link: Corciano Blast Party - if you don't have it, the movie requires Quicktime 7 to view due to the use of H.264

It's preferable to crank up the volume and bass when watching.

In addition, during open studios I introduced a live performance aspect - people were kind of ambushed by seeing me dancing in the middle of the installation when they walked by the opening to my studio, while my camera was positioned at the entry to encourage the local Italians who came to take my picture. Pleasingly, the idea seemed to communicate itself pretty clearly as they snapped away with no encouragement needed - not that I could have, with no command of Italian to my name. Some examples:

NYT Article: New Leipzig School

2006-01-08T02:30:00.000-05:00

Interesting article on the New Leipzig School in today's New York Times: Here. One name jumped out at me: Matthias Weischer. He had a number of paintings at the Venice Biennale, and they were by far my favorite paintings I saw there from someone who I was not previously aware of.

Eigen Art, Berlin

His paintings are pretty delicious, from the colors to the thick, heavy wood panels, to the almost obscene amount of paint they're built up with.

2 of 10: George Pelecanos

2006-01-06T17:46:00.000-05:00

Second on my continuing list of my top ten influences of 2005 is George Pelecanos, a local mystery writer. His particular flavor of contemporary hard boiled mysteries take place in the DC of the 20th century and the present, and address many of the continuing issues that the nation's capital has with crime and the conflicts between classes and races.

As a native of the DC metro area, these are topics that are relevant to me both in understanding the mindset that constitutes my home and in understanding how I function as part of it - as a product of an nth generation White American, upper middle class, white collar family and having had the exceptional privileges of education at the top high school in the country and living my whole life in the relative safety of the suburbs of DC, how do I fit into the picture when I consider DC my home and embrace things native to the city as being part of my heritage, while my parents are from the Midwest and a farm in Maryland? Am I an inhabitant or an immigrant to this city, and how should I consider that in the sense of privilege - as a white male Caucasian, have I appropriated the city as my home with a sense of entitlement or am I naturally a product of the city?

Three Resolutions, and 1 of 10

2006-01-02T19:02:00.000-05:00

It's a new year, and so here are three main resolutions for 2006:

Produce work more consistently and more often.
Go to more shows.
Blog more and post more art criticism.

To kick it off, over the course of the next week or so I'll be posting my own personal Top 10 of influences from 2005, in no particular order. They are not necessarily from the contemporary arts world - or even from the general world of visual art - but all have had a significant impact in my thinking as I approach a new year.

First on my list are two local artists I've had the privilege of having as instructors in the last year at American. Luis Silva (chair of the visual arts department at AU) and Rex Weil (graduate seminar and criticism teacher at AU's Italy program the past fall) have significantly contributed to my focus as an artist in the last year, and both are exemplary of the union between theory and practice both in their own artwork and in their ability to stimulate others. I won't say more at risk of sounding like I'm attempting to curry favor, but the growth I've had in the last year is in large part thanks to their help.

It's good to be back.

2005-12-23T12:10:00.000-05:00

And as this Italian graffiti I found in Arezzo says, Virginia will always be in my heart.

An Update At Long Last, and Mannequins

2005-12-23T11:06:00.000-05:00

Yes, it's been over two months since I posted. Sorry. The living situation in Italy was kind of rough on getting online very often, especially as the semester wound down. I'll post much more regularly now, and very soon I'll have some thoughts on here about the things I saw and did in Italy.

In the meantime, here's some documentation of an installation I did towards the end of the semester, in Corciano's commune anthropological museum. Click the thumbnails for a bigger version. I may post the video portion of it once I get it compressed suitably for the web.

Studio Update

2005-10-14T06:23:00.000-04:00

Finally, some pictures of my studio in Corciano, and some of the prints I've done thus far. The self portrait just got started last night. Click on the images for a larger version.

October Update

2005-10-01T11:23:00.000-04:00

September has passed and work continues apace in Corciano. We've had some great visits already to a number of museums and the Pallazo Papese in Siena, the Gori Collection (amazing, but stupid me forgot to charge my camera battery the night before so it died about 5 minutes into the sculpture park, argh), and looking forward to Pompeii next weekend and the Venice Biennale towards the end of October.

The group here is amazing and I'm getting a number of nice prints done, and starting to get more done with painting and sculpture. Sculpture is definitely getting to be very associable with some of the images I'm working with, so I'm pretty eager to get some of these mask things I'm working on cast. Also have some things I'm working on with printing that I think are going to turn out very well, but I've got a good bit to do on those before I have anything to show from that.

Siena's Duomo

Butchers are important

Ciao!

2005-09-19T18:31:00.000-04:00

Yes, after two weeks, I've finally managed to get my computer online.

I don't speak a lick of Italian, but somehow I'm surviving nonetheless.

Italy is spectacular. The faculty here are amazing. In a stroke of luck, Barbara Bernstein, the art history teacher, turns out to have taught my friend Adam Grossi while he was at Carnegie Mellon. Already I'm already thinking about the fact that I only have 3 more months here.

In the meantime...

A full month with no update?

2005-09-06T02:09:00.000-04:00

Maybe that indicates how busy I've been. Lots has happened. Suffice it to say that in 14.5 hours I'll be on a plane leaving Dulles for Frankfurt, Germany... and then after an hour at the terminal there, I'll be headed on to Rome. And a few hours later? Corciano. Not only is this my first time leaving the country... but 3.5 months with few enough commitments besides art? (I don't even want to get into the fact that I have to telecommute from Italy to work while I'm gone...) Not to mention that I'm turning 24 Thursday. This fall will be exciting. On a side note, good luck to all the victims of Katrina, and to all the AU students doing their part to help relief efforts. I know Sam Wolov is selling some prints for disaster relief; and Rob Saccardi is going down to Louisiana with Red Cross to help out. Makes me feel slightly guilty to be practically going on vacation... but I wouldn't miss out on this semester for anything. Most likely I'll be blogging more often once I get settled in Italy; if for no other reason than to get my money's worth out of my new Nikon D70s with some sweet travel photos.

Thought of the day

2005-08-09T18:13:00.000-04:00

The City of Alexandria recently installed wireless internet access points along King Street in Old Town, so I'm sitting here on a step in front of one of the buildings that has been under internal reconstruction for seemingly half a decade at the end of the road. While I sit here working on my PowerBook a homeless woman is sitting on a step ten feet away asking for change. While the costs of school and other debt stress me out and keep me grumbling about not having enough money, I feel fortunate that I have the means to keep doing what I want to and enough (equally grumbling) room support from my parents to not truly need to worry about where I'm going to be sleeping at night. I suppose in some way I should say this juxtaposition should make me feel more sympathetic for the people I see panhandling on the street, but at the same time I'm reminded of the more frequent people I see out here, like the woman who has been asking me for change for two years now on the premise that she's homeless (no doubt true) and pregnant (somewhat unlikely considering how long she's been saying it for).

Random amusement

2005-08-03T20:26:00.000-04:00

Some would call this low art. Some would say it's not art at all. They're probably right, but Spamusement is a collection of "Poorly-drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines!" and I found it amusing.

Ecological art

2005-08-03T19:58:00.000-04:00

Son of a. Apparently blogger decided to screw with this post when I posted the last entry and most of this one was wiped out. I'm too tired to rewrite it now; I'll touch on this subject again in the future when I'm not so tired and annoyed.

Destroying your work

2005-08-02T03:05:00.000-04:00

I just put about 90 pounds of paintings out in the trash. It was more or less an utter demolition of about 17 or 18 paintings... very early work from when I first decided I was going to study art, all from probably the first year or so that I was taking classes. I was fairly displeased with how they'd held up vis-a-vis my improving technical abilities, to the point that I didn't really want to try selling any of them because I feel they reflect poorly on me. On the other hand, it's hard to just throw them out. So instead I tore them off their stretchers, excepting the ones where I used 5/8" deep staples (those things are hell to get out), and twisted the stretchers apart. The garbage men are going to love my huge bags of pointy wood shards, I'm sure. I know someone probably could've used the canvases or stretchers, but I felt it was my prerogative to destroy them insofar as, regardless of the quality of the paintings, I'd made them and therefore their negation was equally at my whim. And I chose to essentially thrash them apart 'til they were no more. It was quite cathartic.

Hyperactive Blogging

2005-08-01T21:18:00.000-04:00

Sam's new blog spurred me into finally getting around to adding links and whatnot to my blog. So, without further ado, there they are. The AU undergraduate links are to the sites of other students I've had classes with at American - Jackie graduated this past December, Rob just graduated, and Sam will graduate this December. Me? I have to wait til the end of next summer it seems. And out of them, I'm the oldest. Better to come later to art than never. As for why my site just has a placeholder... between class and my jobs (one of which is developing "portals" for the government), I never seem to have the motivation lately to work on mine. Sorry! The artists I edition for are three for the artists for whom I have editioned etching or drypoint plates. All three have studios at the Torpedo Factory Art Center in Old Town Alexandria. I also happen to be BJ Anderson's assistant. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays you can generally find me staring out the window at the Potomac River while I frame stuff. Come visit!

New blog-o-blog from another AU undergraduate

2005-08-01T16:33:00.000-04:00

Samantha Wolov is an art history undergrad at American University. She has stuff up at Seven at the Warehouse in DC right now. I previously knew her as one of the fifty million females in my Cubism/Surrealism art history class last fall, and now I know her as the girl who takes pictures of naked people pleasuring themselves or others.

Her blog: Nekkid With A Camera
Her website: Samantha Wolov

Grids

2005-07-16T01:12:00.001-04:00

Nothing artwise to show at the moment that's fleshed out, and I've misplaced my digital camera somewhere. Here're a few pics of some digital two layer prints I did for an independent study this spring. Click on the thumbnails for full size. Yes, they are tacked to the crit board.

The final versions use silk tissue instead of vellum for the top layer, which eliminates the bleeding of ink and gives better color reproduction. Waiting to edition them until I have access to a printer with pigment ink so I can chine collé the tissue layer on top.

Lax

2005-07-16T01:03:00.000-04:00

I've been horribly lax in updating. Unfortunately the demands of work this summer coupled with my car problems (I now have two practically identical Volvo 245DL wagons sitting in front of my house until I can find a body shop to repaint the hood & fender I need for mine) and my laptop problems (replacing the hard drive in PowerBooks is not for the faint of heart) and my upcoming trip to Italy have prevented me from fully developing some of my recent ideas in order to post them. In lieu of that, I recommend seeing Mysterious Skin - saw it at Landmark E Street tonight. Very disturbing but excellent movie.

Volvo station wagons

2005-06-27T13:54:00.000-04:00

This is not really art-related, but I recently made the mistake of introducing the front end of my 1981 Volvo 240 wagon (same age as me!) to the rear bumper and tow hook of a Suburban. Suffice it to say that my car didn't like it too much. So now I'm trying to find a Volvo of comparable age (1980-1985) that could become an organ donor so I can rebuild my poor little wagon before I go to Italy in September. If you have an older model 240 (preferably a wagon, but I believe a sedan should also work fine) or know of someone with one that they're trying to have taken off their hands, please let me know. The only real needs are:

the front right quarter panel and front end should be in reasonably good shape, as those are the body parts I mostly need for sure.
the right front turn signal lamp assembly

The following things would be nice:

light/neutral color (white/tan/brown) to make it easier to repaint to match my car's tone
a wagon with a brown interior that I could cull parts from to fix up my car's interior
leather seats would also be nice - I could live without matching the brown interior for leather seats, my driver's seat is pretty much shot
a GL/GLT model with power windows
a grill and headlights in good condition, I think mine are ok, but it'd be nice to have a spare
Virgo rims or a turbo engine that I could yank off to upgrade mine at some point in the future
a working odometer

Your consideration is appreciated :) I'm trying to make my 245 last until it hits 25 at least so I can put Virginia antique plates on it.

Soft Openings: American University Katzen Art Center

2005-06-22T15:48:00.000-04:00

If you didn't already know... American University's new Katzen Art Center is opening this fall, and to inaugurate the (enormous and absolutely delicious) gallery space, the first major event will be "Soft Openings". View the flyer here on the Katzen Art Center blog. It will go from July 16th to September 17th, with a reception on the 23rd of July from 7-9 PM. On a side note, the Katzen building is just incredible. The facilities are a huge step up from Watkins and Nebraska Halls, the current residences of the undergrad and grad art programs, respectively. I'm looking forward immensely to dirtying it up next spring after a semester in Corciano, Italy.

Mr. Bailey's response

2005-05-31T20:24:00.000-04:00

Due to the length, I will not copy and paste Mr. Bailey's response to my comments on digital media, check the comments on my last post (here). To address a couple points.... He continues to believe that digital media is inherently evil. He's entitled to his opinion. However, at no point in his response did I find quantifiable evidence to support any of that. There are plenty of vague assertions and hyperbole about the apparently intentional conspiracy of multinationals to subvert the minds of people. I haven't quite figured out yet what the intention of that is... unless digital media is literally supposed to be Satan's work. Rather than address the many points he makes... I believe it comes down to this. If you're going to call something evil, it implies a value judgment, and if digital media's going to be judged on the basis of a conspiracy theory, then it doesn't hurt to give an example of the counterpoint. AGFA was part of a larger company of conjoined "Jewish" companies (IG Farben) during the Third Reich. As part of the various Nazi atrocities, AGFA was purged of all it's Jewish employees. To it's credit, or due to the nature of many of it's employees as highly skilled and talented scientists, most were able to escape becoming victims of the Nazis. However, AGFA color photographic paper was developed and used solely by the Wehrmacht (Nazi military). AGFA used concentration camp labor from the Dachau camp in Munich. By any sane or rational standards, this is unquestionably a complicit act to evil behavior by the Nazis in not only taking advantage of their atrocities but continuing to supply them for the company's well-being. However (perhaps I'd feel more strongly if I were Jewish) I can't say that I would not use AGFA's products today because of this, or believe that using them would constitute my use of an evil medium. Similarly, while there may in fact be health problems associated with electronics (to say this is a non-issue for electronics manufacturers is ridiculous), I fail to see any substantial basis for disregarding digital technology because of it's potential to be used to incite violence. And I will say that I think it is truly preposterous to claim that violence is incited because of some inherent evilness in the technology. I'm pretty sure those drawings at Lascaux depicted violence against animals in hunting, not drive by shootings in DC, or lynchings in the South, or Incans slaughtering their conquered victims. Images of those activities can certainly be seen to incite feelings of violence in people. To deny that is preposterous. All forms of expression are equally capable of causing ill as they are of causing well-being. The question I think it begs is, if we are to assume that mediums do have inherent properties of good or evil that we do not culturally assign to them, how can that then be balanced by our own efforts in creating them and in using them to create images? Sand doesn't seem particularly evil by itself. The single most important element in digital technology makes up a quarter of the world's crust. Scary, if Bailey's right.

Digital media in the art world

2005-05-27T20:59:00.000-04:00

In a recent essay by J.W. Bailey, the author makes a number of comments regarding Blake Gopnik's review of Thomas Demand's photography of constructed paper replicas of scenes Demand has culled from the news media. In reading it, I found that I had trouble stomaching some of the things Bailey offhandedly with regards to digital media. They struck be as being not only self-serving but hypocritical in the extreme from someone who obviously feels they're championing the high art status of their chosen medium. Namely, Bailey's comments in the past with regards to Gopnik's Demand review and the publicized statements by Gopnik and Levy on Gopnik's suggestion that the Corcoran should focus on creating a museum of American photography have made it clear that Bailey, who refers to himself as an experimental photographer, finds it offensive to relegate the whole of photography to being "status quo" art - that photography is "accessible" by dint of it's being a snapshot medium. Frankly, it doesn't matter to me what Bailey or Gopnik's positions are. Both are entitled to their opinions; Bailey clearly has issues with the vast majority of what Gopnik has written lately. However, it seems that underlying all of this is the fact that Gopnik has made statements about photography that Bailey feels undermines the furtherance of photography as being more than a snapshot - both in the assumptions by Gopnik (and presumably most of our Western culture, primitive cultures' fears of photography as "stealing the soul" certainly stands at odds to this) that it is "accessible," either in fact or in the minds of a public with a lower familiarity with so-called "high art", and that as a relatively recently developed medium, that it's inherently less "art" than painting or sculpture, say. I won't comment either way on this - I don't know enough to say if one is more right than the other, or if they're both equally right (or wrong). So what's this got to do with anything? As digital media has indeed become more accessible to people of all sorts in the past 15 or 20 years, it has suffered from misconceptions on the part of people who view it from all walks of life - both the general public and for lack of a better word, the art cognoscenti, just as much as photography has over the past two centuries, if not more so. The general cultural assumption that computers make everything easy is a constant source of vexation to people who exhaustively work in the field of computer graphics - and when I say this, I'm not referring solely to artists who use computers as part of their process, but to everyone who uses them to create images - digital artisans, one might say. As someone who came to fine art by way of writing computer 3D animation software, I feel adequately qualified to provide a counterpoint to the following snippets from one paragraph -

"... in the world of digital media... easily be pulling a gigantic art world hoax."

"... easily be pulled off by a teen-age high school dropout with a flatbed scanner and Abode Photoshop"

"... criminally inclined children have been known to create high-grade counterfeit US currency that easily passes by experts"

Why am I so annoyed by this small part of Bailey's essay? He's equally polarized by the words snapshot and quick glance, it seems, as I am by this assumption that digital media, art or artifice, is "easy." As someone who transitioned from work writing software to "fine art," I have a broader exposure to both worlds than most people, and feel just as much shock at this dismissal of the efforts of others. From looking at Bailey's work, it seems that he may make use of computers, or he may not. His beliefs are clearly stated in more statements from some of his press releases on his website -

"Once you get past all the infantile digital tricks that untalented computer geeks can perform using sophisticated software and hardware that is unaffordable to 99% of the world’s population, what are you really left with?"
"... comfortable upper middle class white American digital artists are ‘creating’ their art using wireless connections to offsite computers while skiing down the slopes of the Rockies in Aspen, Colorado..."

"All things digital were developed by multi-billion dollar multi-national corporations and spread like a virus through the machinations of their aggressive marketing and advertising departments. Digital artists are now addicted to this technology like a crack addict is to crack."

I think it's a shame that someone feels the need to trample on other people in order to add value their own work. Bailey speaks of the untalented computer geeks and the ease of creating digital images... apparently he believes the public is susceptible to having the wool pulled over their eyes when looking at digital artwork, and accepting digital work as "artwork" is invalid due to the facility of computers to "create" it for us, but how is this different from his own anger at photography being dismissed as a "snapshot"? Apparently photographs lie. I'm sure Bailey very much believes what he says when he continually dismisses digital media as being a virus, but I take strong objection to it. The simple fact is that whatever his conceptions may be, digital media is not "easy", computers do not "create" the artwork for you at the whim of a button push, and that if people can adjust their conceptions of art to accept the fact that digital work may in fact be valid artwork, it becomes easier to realize that this acceptance doesn't translate into believing that ALL digital work is artwork. Clearly the vastness of photography is composed far more of simple family snapshots than it is of art, and similarly the vast majority of work in digital media is not art any more so than it is in photography. The dismissal of that slice of digital media as art because of prejudice against the medium is truly frightening from someone who regards the dismissal of photography for similar reasons as such an indignity. Digital artwork is not EASY. Computers are a tool and as such they can no more create valid artwork at a thought than can a camera or a paintbrush in the hands of someone who does not understand what it is they're trying to do, what they can do with the tool, and what the relevance is of what they're depicting. These high school dropouts Bailey speaks of; I can't recall seeing too many galleries showing painful Bryce and Poser renders as art. Bailey's belief that the financial inaccessibility of digital media puts it beyond the reach of 99% of the world's population (which doesn't seem to be an source of mental anguish for the software bootleggers which make up the majority of Photoshop's users, say) seems yet another bitter irony to me; I don't see too many aborigines with access to dark rooms and chemical suppliers, do you? The "average artist from Brasil, or Nigeria or India" that Bailey bemoans as being disadvantaged to those with access to sophisticated equipment; so what? Did those people have broad access to photography equipment in the 19th century? Until the Brownie, did poor Americans have access to cameras? Would poor Americans even have had the money for a Brownie when it came out? Should we wear scarlet letters of shame because of what we have access to? Bailey is entitled to his opinions. I'm going to continue to make use of computers and hope that at some point people like Bailey can accept that it's possible for computers to be a meaningful part of an artist's process without taking away from the fact that, in the end, it is the artist and not the tool that is what makes art worthwhile. Below are links to two international artists who have training or background in natural media and now utilize computers to create digital artwork - in both, the displayed image is (for my purposes, happily circumstantial) example of their use of computer 3D software (ElectricImage Animation System) to create digital pieces using art historical references. Both are examples of work that is far from EASY. Are these examples quantitatively any different from the tradition of copying work by the old masters?

From Michelangelo Buonarroti

Malcolm Thain (Australia)

From Caravaggio

Cristóbal Vila (Spain)