Sunday, September 18, 2011

Response to 9/13 Lecture

I was interested in Gabriel Orozco's work in particular. Although I'm pretty ignorant of sculpture, I thought that he used the medium really well to create visual icons, the way one might draw something in the center of a piece of paper--something that stands out starkly against a background. He used usual items to produce unusual outcomes, and he use the ordinary to create the whimsical. I thought the two-headed bike was pretty neat.

That technique is something I'd like to incorperate into my process as an artist.

Orozco collected ordinary images that he'd see every day. He's catalogue them, and then begin to distort the way people percieved these things by portraying them differently. He built a collection of work that is itself a collection of compounded images that he took care to remember. He described himself as a very attentive person, and something of a collector.

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Game Theory Exhibit and A Relationship to Chance

Tim Knowles' Tree Drawing series utilized the element of chance throughout. The technique, here, was to tie a pen to a tree branch, and place a pad of paper in front of that branch. The wind would shake that branch and result in a sketch executed by the tree. The results were actually quite nice.

The wind that drove the branch which drove the pen was random and mostly uninfluenced by the artist. In this case, the artist is the tree. At first I wondered if these pieces, although pretty, could be called art. Art is an artifact. It's something that's created. This series to me seems more like a happening than a creation, but maybe that's a misguided and malformed opinion?

100 Interesting Things That i Have Generally Observed

9
gas giants
tweezers
that fleshy nub that supplements Barbie genitalia
cat paws
stairs
starting an iv
loose teeth
bruises
tomatoes
technical manuals
steer horns
my cuticles
wisdom teeth
x-ray photographs
amputees
pug dogs
slugs
morning breath
normalization
fear
penises (and the fact that penis wasn't in my top ten)
sensory deprivation
music
foreign accents
mixtapes
sewer drains
legend
handwriting
burning insects to death
immune systems
cookie baking
old photographs
webcomics
black pens
wells
"the grid"
paper airplanes
food courts
knives
knuckle hair
science fiction
pulp science fiction
fetishes
fatal accidents
triage
facial piercings
drag queen makeup
whales
christmas baubles
asymmetry
drawing
b-style horror movies
werewolves
ridiculously long acrylic nails
spectacles
Patrick Stewart
harry potter
feet
swamp mummies
tattoos
portmanteau
tiny condiment containers
miniature things in general
corgi dogs
tasty foods
the internet
sea snails
manacles
fire
rock-gut alcohol
other-wold/ off-world fiction
the Titanic ruins
deep sea fishes
ceilings
cartoons
outlandish and colorful desserts
emergency medicine
elaborate fantasies
electric toothbrushes
post-apocalyptic scenarios
talking to myself
seeing patterns and shapes in stucco walls
dreams/ nightmares
suicide
lyricism
creative writing
jokes
mazes
alter egos
fad diets
binge eating
prismacolor markers
fingerprints on glass windows
medieval torture equipment
dominatrices
other peoples' sketchbooks
hiding places