Thursday a.m. Idea Post 04/29

Tonight, marking the last evening of blog writing for the semester, also marks the beginning of very important upcoming months; the months leading up to my last semester as a student. The idea of having four more months to closely work and critique with incredible peers and professors looms in my head and quite frankly saddens me. My class, my peers, the ones I've been with for three years now, have come to be consistent aids in my process of growing and making stronger work. On Monday, in Contemporary Issues, as a class we discussed the importance of being aware of the current state and life you live; the importance of understanding the now in reference to your artistic life. The more I thought about it, the more I understood why it was so important to our growth as contemporary artists. When the week gets real hectic and trying, I tend to block out what is currently taking place and move on to what is going to go on in the upcoming days. With that said, I feel that during those frequent blackout moments I am missing the comments and efforts from those around me; the comments and efforts coming from a peer group that is experiencing the same issues and dilemmas. Whenever again will I be surrounded by such a strong force of talented artists that are on my team?
As I gathered my thoughts for this nights blog, I was comforted in knowing that this was not a conclusion of my educational career tonight...or within the next few weeks when my high school graduation class are graduating from college. Luckily enough, I've been given one more semester in the department to push forward and further my conceptual thoughts while living in the present; acknowledging the now, for the future is quickly approaching.

Monday a.m. Artist Post 4/27

Photography based series artist, Barbara Probst, was born in Munich, Germany in 1964. From 1984-1990 she attended the Akademie der Bilende Kunste in Munich and from 1988-1989 Probst attended the Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf, Germany. Barbara Probst is known for striking photographic series work where the viewer has the opportunity to view the scene from multiple different camera angles. Her more popular current series “Exposure” is described as one that “breaks the photographic moment into several points of view through the use of multiple cameras in a single shot.” Probst currently has public collections in many museums and galleries around the world. Her collections are in places like the Museum of Modern Art in New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, Colorado, Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Illinois, and FRAC Bretagne in Charteaugiran, France.
As new to the contemporary art world as Probst is, she has established a strong name for herself and acquired a good number of awards and grants. In 1990 she received the Sanha Kaimer Fellowship: New York Residency, 1992 the Fellowship of Kunstfonds; Bonn, Germany from the DADD Travel Grant, Rome. Also, in 1994 she won the Photography Award from the Munich Arts Council as well as an award from the Cultural Board of the German Industry, Bund Deutscher Industrie in 1995. Others include, a Fellowship award from Bavaria in 1997 and a Fellowship of Kunstfonds Bonn, Germany in 2002 presented by Philip Morris in Dresden. Probst’s first solo show was at the Murray Guy Gallery in 2004 where she is still represented today.
Critic Reinhard Bryan was quoted when talking about Probst’s current series “Exposure.” “Facticity is enacted in the multipart, large-format tableaux as a construct of photography itself. The exposures show that omissions and contradictions, that replacements and appropriations in particular, are part of photographic practice itself, and that they indicate how a picture not only shows something but also causes something else, an other picture to disappear.” From the Murray Guy website, Probst’s work is described as one of “photogenic truth that is subject to fragmentation and cinematic drama, offering new interpretations of the classical fleeting photographic moment.” Exposure #59, shot in her Munich Studio and around Germany, is one in which the viewer’s eye is brought through the image by the movement that red scarf takes on. The first image of this four image series is the one that introduces a strong splash red color to the very monochromatic following images. Exposure #49, shot in her NYC studio, is a series comprised of 12 images. This series is also a mix of black and white and color images of her shielding the lens of the camera so it cannot capture everything in front of it. There are a few hints of green and yellow in the color images but mostly the palette is simple and colorless. When describing her work, Probst talked about the absurd number of cameras that have been used to complete a shoot; up to 12 cameras. In an interview with her she was asked if she felt her approach is a more complete or reliable representation than a single image from one camera. Probst answered by saying, “I think my work provides us with the implication that there is no reliable representation of “what happened.” Photography is like language: It provides us with an interpretation depending on the intentions and abilities of the person that told the story or made the photograph.”

Murray Guy Gallery: Barbara Probst page
Jessica Bradley Art+Projects
Museum of Contemporary Photography article
The Morning News interview with Probst

Thursday a.m. Idea Post 04/22

At my meetings with three panel members on Monday, Julie Sanders, Page Bond, and Robert Hobbs, I got a great amount of feedback from my work and also got the same question during each meeting. What was I planning on doing next seeing as I have one more semester at VCU? I find my performance series to be very exciting and a great part of who am I right now, however after those meetings I am more strongly considering moving forward and developing a new concept while maintaining the performance sequence composition.
Robert Hobbs and I were talking about potential opportunities for me to see great performance work while I am up in NYC for the summer and he suggested artist Barbara Probst whom is represented by Murray Guy Gallery. Her series work simultaneously depicts scenes with photographs from a few different angles and is presented in diptych or triptych form depending upon the series. She has a strong use of still objects that hold the pieces well together. In her imagery, she has a very striking way of using color and I enjoy how she uses some of the same layouts (the long landscape layout) that I find myself very attracted to with series work. In my series work, I have very few still objects and I would like to explore that realm of self-interaction with objects. Even though I have been considering taking myself out of the shot, I still have convinced myself with valid reasons why I feel that would benefit my work. I think for right now and the near future, I am going to focus on exploring new possibilities using myself and then having the option of rotating someone else in.
An idea of a new shoot that I have been considering involves certain objects interacting with each other, either balancing or leaning on each other. With these objects I want to recreate that same scene but using a person. This person will need to mimic the composition to their closest ability. Paying attention to, color, form, negative space, environment, facial expressions, and the relationship that the body has with the objects it is mimicking. Ideally, I would like to start shooting my series in a studio spaced with controlled lighting and possibly a white background and displaying these as a series of two or more images together.

Monday a.m. Artist Post 4/20

Associated with the Fluxus movement and an avant-garde inspired artist, renowned artist Yoko Ono was born in Tokyo, Japan on February 18, 1933. The Fluxus movement was founded by George Maciunas and characterized as an association of Dada-inspired avant-garde artists that developed in the early 1960s. However, Ono chose to work as an independent artist and just claimed that she had simple interest in the movement; was not a member of it. Her famous marriage to Beatle John Lennon, Ono has made quite a name for herself in the performance and conceptual art world. While living in NY with her family, Ono attended Sarah Lawrence College where she fell in love with the artistic world and became a follower of La Monte Young, a minimalist composer and a follower of performance art. It was here at Sarah Lawrence that Ono was introduced to Bohemian freedom and would soon charge her peace activist lifestyle.
Ono’s early work can be described as performance and conceptual art. For example, Ono had a gallery opening where paintings were set on the floor and were not officially complete until the viewers walked over them and smudged, smeared, and made footprints on the paintings. Characterized as an explorer of her time, Ono’s performance work is still well known today. Her very famous piece, “Cut Piece”, was performed in 1964 at the Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo. This performance consisted of Ono, loosely fitting clothes, a stage, a pair of scissors, and an eager and willing seated audience. This piece was described as a “performance in Tokyo by walking on stage and casually kneeling on the floor in a draped garment. Audience members were requested to come on stage and begin cutting until she was naked.” Ono used her performances to solicit help from others to help her form a clearer self-identity. An article from the Media Art Net explained that “Cut Piece entailed a disrobing, a denouement of the reciprocity between exhibitionism and scopic desires, between victim and assailant, between sadist and masochist.”
Ono’s early exploration of performance work, was during a time where series and more abstract performances were not as popular and readily available for the public. Ono began to get out the point of performance work though her book titled “Grapefruit” which was a book that was made up of several different groupings of instructions “to be completed in the mind of the reader.” These ready-made instructions she included in the book became a good basis for a solid amount of her performance work that would come in the future. She actually had a show at the Everson Museum in Syracuse, NY (one of her instruction based pieces) and because her fan following was getting larger by the day, the show was almost closed due to a fan riot.
On June 6, 2009 Yoko Ono and John Baldessari will be awarded the prestigious Golden Lion at the 53rd Venice Biennale 2009 for Lifetime Achievement. In the article Ono is explained as one who “shaped our understanding of art and its relationship to the world in which we live.” Also, a few years ago, “Yes Yoko Ono” her First American Retrospective” showed from October 18, 2000 to January 14, 2001 at the Japan Society Gallery.
Ono is described as a performance artist who uses her art to communicate her internal suffering with her audience. Her reasoning and emotions behind her work remind me of what goes into my performances. My performances encompass something personal going on in my life and then are translated metaphorically through performance art. I feel that I can learn a good amount more from her and her large role that she still plays in the contemporary art world.
Wikipedia Article
Article: Venice Biennale
Media Art Net Article
"Yes Yoko Ono" Article

Thursday a.m. Idea Post 04/16

Using artist research at last minute.

Sunday as I was becoming increasingly more worried about the presentation of my performance work for both exhibition panel and the juror, I decided to fall back on some previous performance artists I have looked at in the past few weeks. In my last working critique with the class I got a good amount of feedback concerning the one image, the “relic” image, which I decided to place with each series. After that critique I re-shot a few of the “relic” images but then became lost when figuring out how I could incorporate them with the performance series it belonged to. Some suggestions I got during the critique actually involved having the “relic” being present with the work at the show opposed to having it documented as a photograph. So Sunday night, the night before I took all of my images to the printer, I found myself looking at how performance artists show their work and how they essentially sell their work. Because performance work is definitely a “in the moment” genre of art, it can be a great challenge to exhibit the work to its fullest. One artist, Aine Phillips from Ireland, had her website set up with multiple images from the set, the performance itself, and also after images for many of her performances. I really enjoyed getting to see small bits and pieces of these quite elaborate performances that some time took place in multiple locations. Artists who I am very fond of, like Ana Mendieta, almost uses that sort of “relic” idea in a similar sense. For example her ‘Silhueta’ from 1975 were photographs of the imprints her body made in multiple different landscapes. Her images were in a sense the aftermath, the leftovers or result of what had just taken place.

Because of their influence on my work, and me I decided to definitely stick with the “relic” images and build them up. The series in themselves make quite a statement on their own. So for these images that will be incorporated with the series will be framed and matted and seen as a glorious keepsake of what the viewer is seeing in front of them.

What about history?

Kate,

I have been thinking about your summer plans and what we discussed the other day in my office. You should really start looking into the birth of performance art. Seek out answers for why it happened, how, what was left, etc. I know that we have discussed this in other classes but it relates more to your work now than it has before. Look for work from John Cage (possibly the most important artist of the 20th century) Merce Cunningham, Yoko Ono, Dan Graham, Vito Acconci, and so many more.
I want you to start considering your presence in your work. Look at the attitudes of the above artists, why they did what they did, how their bodies were involved and why. Knowing the history of your area of interest intimately will provide a more solid ground for you to stand on. Also, your future projects will become more confidant in their direction.

David Walsh Lecture

Lecturer, David Walsh, is an American Film Critic and a writer for the World Socialist Web Site. A lecture made possible by the International Students for Social Equality, took place on the night of Monday, April 13 in the student commons. David Walsh’s lecture was introduced as one about the negative effect that our nations current economic and social crisis is having on contemporary artwork. The World Socialist Web Site is built upon the Fourth International that was originally founded in 1938 by Leon Trotsky. Walsh clearly stated his strong socialist beliefs by saying on numerous occasions throughout the lecture that our country needs to take more recognition of the great problems that are occurring and have been progressively getting worse the past three decades. Walsh opened up his lecture by stating that the last 5 Presidencies or what he called “regimes” were great attempts of failure and in those attempts only awarded the national government more and more power. He spoke for a few moments about issues he had with the current political situation and how our country placing Obama
in office has only proven to be a disaster. Saying, “Obama’s regime is placing such great attention on Afghanistan and in turn bring more catastrophe to that country while Iraq is in great need of assistance. At this point I was unclear how Walsh, a film critic, was going to integrate the subject of contemporary art with politics and the unstable condition of our country as well as the rest of the world. However, not much later into his discussion he made quite a bold statement about where he stands with the accessibility and worthiness of contemporary artwork. Walsh stated that contemporary artists are not aware or prepared of this great transformation our world is going through and because of their naiveté the production of successful good quality art work has hit a brick wall and become stale. He also said that because of the deep social dysfunction, we are in serious need of a universal change in critique of work. He said that as of right now the work that is being produced is not being felt or seen. Walsh explained that because artists are neglecting the world’s current state of affairs in their work, they are not producing work that is objectively exemplifying the state of the existing world today. He described postmodernism as cold, clever, uncommitted, conceptual, and socially indifferent. He feels that postmodernist artists do not feel deeply or think critically about what kind of work they are producing.

I felt that this lecturer, David Walsh, made a few too many sweeping generalizations that I began to find myself frustrated while listening to him boast about his socialist views. He expects all artists to hold a mirror up to the world and make their work according to what is going on outside. How then does he expect the public to get any chance to escape the current world and nations crisises? Why can’t art deviate from these worldly issues and become an optimistic and cheerful outlet for the population?

Show Entries

Monday a.m. Artist Post 4/13

Professor and head of the Sculpture Department at Burren College of Art, Aine Phillips is a contemporary artist working with installations and performance art. Burren College of Art was founded in 1993 by Michael Greene and Mary Hawkes-Green in order to offer students to explore their creative potentials in the Burren. The college is surrounded by bare and fissured terraces made out of carboniferous limestone. Phillips currently lives in Derrymore Crusheen County, in Clare, Ireland which is located in the western part of Ireland. She earned her BFA in Sculpture at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin from 1984-1988. From 1999-2001 Phillps earned a MFA by Research at Limerick School of Art and Design. And more recently, from 2005-2008 she earned a PhD in Fine Art Sculpture at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin.
Phillips is greatly involved in many events around Clare County and the surrounding areas. She founded and is the curator of Tulca Live, which is a festival of live and video art in Galway that started in 2005. Also, Phillips has shown her work in The Museums of Art in Stockholm, Liechtenstein, and Cleveland. She has created work for club and festival events and public places including Morcambe Pier Cumbria, the Moving Image Gallery and the Kitchen New York. She has also shown her work numerous places in Ireland including Galway Arts Center, Granary Cork, Irish Film Center, Arthouse, EV+A Limerick City Gallery, and Hugh Lane Gallery. Phillips is publicly supported by Clare County, the Live Art Development Agency, London, and the Arts Council of Ireland.
Some of Phillips notable performance work are "Sex Birth & Death" 2003, "Harness" 2007, and "Love Lies Bleeding" 2004. Her piece titled "Harness" was performed Friday, April 6, 2007 at the Hotel Ballymun in Dublin. She described her performance by saying, "In this performance, I re-enact experiences of growing up with a profoundly brain damaged brother. This boy who is beautiful and disturbed was harnessed and helmeted in childhood to protect hi face from falling in epileptic seizures...My performance script speaks their modes of harness, translating constraint into tenderness, torture into rapture, helplessness into power." The images that went along with this performance were ones of Phillips harnessed into these white straps and struggling with simple daily tasks. She was able to clearly explain to the audience the daily struggle her brother and now daughter go through because of their condition. Her performance titled "Love Lies Bleeding" from 2004 is a much more seductive and emotional piece that seems very personal internally to the artist herself. "It is about passionate expression, intensity of emotion in the moment and its release...The intensity is presented not as raw emotion but framed and formalised allowing for a cathartic identification in the audience." This performance that took place on February 10, 2005 at the National Review of Live Art UK at the Arches in Glasgow, was four hours in length. The performance involved Phillips tearing her black dress off in shreds, crying vocal lamentations and an "abstract and extemporized referencing traditional Irish Caoineadh." A Caoineadh is described as a formalised weeping song performed by women at funerals and wakes in Ireland. The images that were alongside the performances' descriptions were ones of Phillips mourning and ripping her black dress into shreds and laying all the pieces everywhere. Also, there is a scene where she is interacting with edible flowers that is sexually charged inferring a type of beauty that can come from Caoineadh.

Aine Phillips Artist Website
Burren College of Art Website
NCAD Website
LSAD Website

Elizabeth King Lecture: 04/08/09

Elizabeth King, multimedia artist and VCU School of the Arts Research Professor, spoke at the 1st Annual Powell-Edwards Lecture in Religion and the Arts. King is a graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute and is a recipient of the 2002 Guggenheim Fellowship. Also, she was awarded the 2006 Academy Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Currently, King is a professor in the VCU Sculpture and Extended Media department where she has taught since 1985.

King's most recent sculpture and stop motion work, that has recently been shown at the Visual Arts Center in Richmond, was the subject of a small part of her lecture series. King's animated tone had the ability to grab my attention from the start and bring me into the historical journey she was about to take the audience on. Because so much of her work is research based, her lecture was heavy with historical art references concering the idea of existence and more specifically the amount of information and emotion one can gain from the recreated eye in all art. She referenced several historically known artists such as Bernini, Michelangelo and even more contemporary artists like Tony Orsler who have mastered the technique of exposing the visual spirit of substance in art. She spoke about how all of these sculptures and paintings that were discussed utilized human accurate human movement and mimicked fugitive non iconic gestures.

King also showed a few slides of her pairs of eyes that she had worked on for the past 10 years. These eyes were carefully crafted out of heat, hard acrylic, soft acrylic, and oil paint; and several years studying under her mentor. In the present, King is currently studying objects from history and reseaching the "automaton", a self operating machine sometimes referred to as a robot. She first saw this automaton in the Smithsonian and since then has done extensive work on the very mobile and brilliant creation.

Thursday a.m. Idea Post 04/09

“I should have read it much more slowly and I must re-read it many times- Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to” (Excerpt from Susan Sontag: Reborn, Journals & Notebooks by David Reiff). We’re dating; somewhat being in a relationship with my work. Lately I have been working with a certain goal in mind; to find a connection with my work that will drive me crazy. At this moment in time, I am at the early stages of the relationship. I’m nervous; I shy away from it quite often and occasionally even disown it if I don’t know how to handle “it” and myself simultaneously. The anxious tears, the hesitant smiles and the uncontrollable odd smiles are emotions that seem to be running in a continuous loop through me. With these constant emotions and feelings within me, and the strange idea of entering into a relationship with a somewhat intangible thing, has sparked a strong interest in understanding how to live and breathe through this; and making a permanent spot for me within it.
The idea of reaching “intellectual communion” with my work has been on my mind a good bit lately. After I read that short passage from Sontag’s journal explaining her experience with Gide and his writing, I have found myself applying that statement to many parts of my life; and then questioning its existence. I can relate my relationship with my work to many relationships in my life. The uncontrollable hives that exist on my epidermis at specific times when I'm either feeling uncomfortable or overwhelmed, occur both when with my work and when in social scenarios. These instances are a definite personal signifier for me when assessing what can "get under my skin" and affect me the most. However, simultaneously, I then realize that the subject matter caused this outer reaction is something that I have personal feelings about and feel very close to.

Monday a.m. Artist Post 4/06

Contemporary female photographer, Tarrah Krajnak, currently lives and works in Burlington, Vermont. She received her BFA (1997-2001) at Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio and then went on to get her MFA (2001-2004) at the University of Notre Dame in Notre Dame, Indiana. “ I am interested in the archive and its relationship to self-hood, the body, and personal memory. The nature of the photograph itself, both structural and psychoanalytical theories, also play an important role in my creative process. My work is an exploration of multiple approaches: altered found imagery, collage or works on paper, performance, collaboration, and video.” (Excerpt from Artist Website)
Krajnak has a strong background in the art education field as well as being an independent photographer. Her public lectures include talks at Johnson Sate College, Elmira College, Cornell University, DePauw University and a National Conference put on by the Society for Photographic Education. Her career in the arts consists of art and art history lecturer for the University of Vermont in Burlington and Visiting Assistant for the art, art history, and design department at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. In 2004-2005 she was a photography technician and instructor at Cornell University and in 2001-2004 Krajnak was a teaching assistant in the art department at the University of Notre Dame. With a great photographic background, Krajnak was employed by NBC Studios in 2001 as a photography studio assistant for Saturday Night Live in New York, New York. Also, Krajnak has won several awards in her early professional career. In 2006, she received a Cornell Council for the Arts Project Grant from Cornell University. In 2006 she received a Cornell Council for the Arts Individual Grant from Cornell University as well. From 2001-2004 Krajnak received a Graduate Teaching Fellowship from the University of Notre Dame. In 2003, she was the recipient of the Juror’s Prize from the Annual Region Competition from South Bend Regional Museum of Art. And lastly, she won a National Scholarship Photography Award in 2004 from the Society for Photographic Education.
A good amount of work that I looked at by Krajnak was her collaborative work with another female artist; Wilka Roig. Krajnak and Roig have a joint website where they display their collaborative photography and film work. One of their collections titled “Untitled #” began in 2005 and is still in the works up to the present. “In (Untitled #) Tarrah and Wilka present the hidden layers behind images to be consumed: the processes, the performances, the negotiation, the relationships that make up the final image and the ultimate meaning. (Ultimate #) allows them to analyze themselves as minority/collaborative/women artists in the same way they analyze trends in photography. Krajnak and Roig place themselves and their own images amidst the photography they are critically investigating.” (Except from Krajnak and Roig’s website) Their “Cast of Characters” series is one that I feel is very visually and conceptually pleasing. This collection is a series of diptychs with a portrait of the photographer and a portrait of the model side by side. The two are dressed similarly and are placed in similar positions. The lighting and feel to the diptychs are studio set-ups and clean white lighting. These portraits are for the most part emotionless and have very little movement to them.
A collection of theirs, Krajnak and Roig, that I felt very drawn to was one of their recent collaborations titled “Aftermath”. Taking place in a gallery setting, with clean even light, both females are dressed in white body suits and moving into identical positions with one another. They seem to be serving as this sort of mobile sculpture among the flat work that is hanging on the gallery walls behind them.

Artist Website of Tarrah Krajnak
Tarrah & Wilka's Website
Wilka Roig Bio

Thursday a.m. Idea Post 04/02

Being a hermit within my work has been the daily routine lately. On Monday in my topics class we had a discussion about the responsibility of a photographer and their responsibility to their culture and outside cultures. Mentioned, was the idea that photographers have the potential to be viewed as aggressive and predatory. Because I have been so stuck in my head and work recently, thinking of how my presence with a camera could cause someone anxiety and fear rarely crossed my mind; as naïve as that sounds. Because my series performances involve me in the frame, I have only viewed the camera as a tool and have rarely felt afraid of what it could do to me. After thinking more about how not just the camera affects the public but also how the actual work affects the public made me reconsider my choices of presentation for my performance series. Decisions on presentation for this series have been haunting me for quite some time now because I want my viewer to feel comfortable with the amount of vulnerability and distress that they are seeing. I have put together a few different presentation formats where it breaks down the performance in three or four larger photographs while also incorporating the whole performance in a smaller size placed at the top of the layout. I felt like this template could speak well to the audience in that it gives them an inside look at the performance while also being able to look at the pulled back view of the whole performance and the movement that occurred with the different placements of my body.