SNC Art

Kath's BFA Show in Moonshine Ink

2012-01-25T14:53:00.000-08:00

Student Kath McGaughey's BFA show was covered by Moonshine Ink. From Lis Korb's article:

“The show is essentially about inviting the viewer back in to talk about death,” she told me. McGaughey’s BFA show came on the heels of her father’s unexpected death 14 months ago. When she learned of his illness, she began to notice crows gathering around the wires and rooftop of her Truckee home. After he died, the image of the birds stuck with her, and she began a study that resulted in “Of Absence.”

To read the whole article, click here.

Pictures at a Junior Portfolio Review: Fall 2011

2011-12-02T14:18:00.000-08:00

Here are pics from the Junior Art Portfolio Review this semester, a few weeks ago – it had a really good turnout. A partial list of topics broached would include...

The desire to control the subconscious –

The general hypocrisy of the public face that people and institutions turn toward the world –

The mysterious integrity of found objects whose function is unknown or obscure –

What we take, and what we leave behind, when we travel –

The texture of ectoplasm –

Self-consciousness in the human animal –

The evolution of prosthetics –

And the physicalization of bliss in dance and ceramics.

Three Shows this Week

2011-11-30T09:58:00.001-08:00

Join us for our upcoming exhibitions in Tahoe and Reno this week

One week. Three shows.

It's an exciting few days coming up. We continue our winter BFA show season this Thursday followed by a double-dose of community shows in Reno on Friday. Check below for the details.

parallel figures white flags
Lexy Eich, BFA Candidate

Thursday, December 1 @ 5pm (Facebook Event)

Tahoe Gallery at Sierra Nevada College

parallel figures white flags explores the repetition of moments and moments of surrender through poetry, mix-media installation and personal experience.

New

Can't make the reception? You can still join the community during Lexy's talk by tuning in on our new livestream page! Check the SNC/FA Facebook the night of the opening for details!

RE: of stuff - Mary Kenny

Friday, December 2, 5-7pm (Facebook Event)

McKinley Arts Center, Reno

Solo exhibition of new paintings by Mary Kenny, Sierra Nevada College Fine Arts Professor.

The Hobson Gallery Presents:
SNC Student, Alumni, and Faculty Show

Friday, December 2, 5-9pm (Facebook Event)

The Hobson Gallery, Reno

The Hobson Gallery has invited the works of Sierra Nevada College community members, including students, alumni, and faculty, into their space. Come look at the amazing work artists in your area are up to.

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Copyright © 2011 Sierra Nevada College, All rights reserved.

Trashion Fall 2011

2011-11-29T21:22:00.000-08:00

I'm a few weeks behind the times on this, but here are pics from the Trashion show this semester – a tradition instituted here by Kat Hutter, with Mary Kenny taking up the announcer's baton this time out – a fashion show of recycled livery, catwalked out of the design class:

Screening of Miss Representation at UNR

2011-11-15T21:14:00.000-08:00

Via Joe DeLappe, here's news of a free screening at UNR Wednesday night:

Miss Representation
Wednesday, November 16th, 5:30pm
Theater Joe Crowley Student Union
Followed by a panel discussion including:
Jen Hill, Director, Gender, Race & Identity Program and Chair of Women's Studies
Ann Keniston, Accociate Professor, Department of English, GRI Faculty Associate
Mary Stewart, Professsor of Sociology and Women's Studies

Chris Ware Talk and Workshop this Fri & Sat

2011-10-30T21:11:00.000-07:00

I'm very excited to be participating in a talk and workshop with Chris Ware, a cartoonist who's coming to SNC as part of the "Writers in the Woods" series hosted by the Humanities department. Ware has been a real inspiration for me as an artist – I think he's one of a handful of graphic novelists who have not only produced interesting work, but actually moved the medium of comics forward – pushing the boundaries of what seems possible. I'll be talking with him in an interview format on Friday evening, and running the workshop with him on Saturday morning. The talk is free and open to the public; the workshop is free for faculty and students, $50 for everyone else.

Here's the "Writers in the Woods" blurb:

Please join us for the last Writers in the Woods events of the semester. Graphic novelist Chris Ware will give a talk Friday, November 4 at 7PM in TCES 139. Hot and cold appetizers and wine will be served. The event is free and open to the community.

Saturday, November 5, Ware will lead a workshop from 9AM-Noon in TCES 139. The workshop is free to students and faculty. $50 for community members. Students may take the workshop for credit. These events will be of special interest to students studying art, literature, creative writing, media studies, journalism, and popular culture.

CHRIS WARE is the author of Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth and the annual progenitor of the amateur periodical the ACME Novelty Library. An irregular contributor to The New Yorker and The Virginia Quarterly Review, Ware was the first cartoonist chosen to regularly serialize an ongoing story in The New York Times Magazine, in 2005-2006. He edited the thirteenth issue of McSweeney's Quarterly Concern in 2004 as well as Houghton Mifflin's Best American Comics for 2007, and his work was the focus of an exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 2006.

Workshop: Storytelling through Diagrams

A workshop with graphic novelist Chris Ware and and Sierra Nevada College Professor of Digital Art Chris Lanier

Chris Ware has often used diagrams as a storytelling device in his graphic novels – showing events taking place in a cutaway view of an apartment building, for instance, or using a medical diagram of a character as a jumping-off point to narrate her personal history. In this workshop, we'll look into Ware's techniques of "diagrammatic storytelling," and collaborate on a large scale narrative diagram, creating something that's partway story and partway map.

Since it's Halloween today, I thought it'd be appropriate to link a story Ware did for the New Yorker a couple years ago, which takes place on Halloween – click for larger versions of the pages:

Ware has also worked in other media – collaborating with animator John Kuramoto on some shorts for the "This American Life" TV show:

He's also created an interactive comics story for the McSweeney's app, called "Touch Sensitive" – more info on that here:

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1665117/chris-wares-ipad-only-comic-touch-sensitive-perfects-the-form

And if you still haven't gotten enough, here are links to a couple articles I've written about his work, for the Comics Journal and, many many moons ago, the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review:

http://classic.tcj.com/tcj-300/tcj-300-acme-novelty-library-19-reviewed-by-chris-lanier/

http://articles.sfgate.com/2000-11-26/books/17667810_1_panels-new-graphic-novel-jimmy-corrigan

Candy Dancers

2011-10-25T18:56:00.000-07:00

The annual Candy Dance festival in Genoa came and went last month, and as usual the SNC Gallery Club was in attendance, cooking burgers to raise money for the art department. Unfortunately I had no camera (in the rush to get out the door I left it behind), but Kath McGaughey came to the rescue and documented the experience nicely; all photos are courtesy of her.

Here is Thomas demonstrating the mysterious candy dance:

Here we are getting things set up at the main grilling and prep station:

The weather was gorgeous on Saturday morning, as seen here through the open roof of the grilling area...

Which of course meant that there was a torrential downpour Saturday afternoon. With an open roof, everyone in the grilling area was pretty much soaked.

But did we despair? Of course not. Look at us. Look at this resilience to adversity.

In fact I think Thomas just danced his way through the entire festival, rain or shine:

All in all a fantastic experience, and we sold every last patty in our possession. We are just that amazing. (Or, you know, burgers are delicious.)

Visiting Artists: Bill Gilbert Response

2011-10-17T19:26:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago, the Visiting Artists class went down to the lake to do individual site-specific nature installations as a response to Bill Gilbert's lecture. They were then asked to write up a paragraph to explain their process in making these installations. Though I'm not technically a member of the class, I went along as the interpreter and was kindly allowed to participate. Below are all the responses I have received so far; I will update this post periodically as more are sent in.

Karl Schwiesow:

Karl: "SO...I wasn't sure how inspired I would be first arriving on the site. After screwing around for about half an hour positioning buckets on and old snag I decide to lock in and commit to something cool. Literally, in the shade and cool. I used contrasting elements, stone and wood, but both of the earth. I formed a vertical row of twigs wedged perpendicular to the horizontal cranny that occurred between the boulder and the ground. Though the process of repetition and measurement a walled in space was created...a home, a vessel. The twigs and stone were a unique contrast when removed from their natural state of rest. I had conceived the idea thinking that it might represent a model of a contemporary living space in Tahoe. Really living in nature. Though the piece turned into a unique technical juxtaposition I still felt there were undercurrents of home, place, and, of course, the natural environment being augmented. Construction, The hand of man, and Nature combine."

Lexy Eich

Lexy: "I don't work much with nature in my art, but my music box fit well inside a tiny rock cave. I used to music box to be the voice of the message [the moss] in the bottle. I had never realized how the most simple organic objects could interact so well with the current concept I'm working on."

Hailey Kries

Hailey: "My piece was about a temporarty balanced structure, where at any moment it could change. Pieces of it could fall, all of it could crumble or it could last longer than I ever thought possible. It related to me in a way of life, that I dont know how long something is going to last or what is going to knock me down, I dont know how long its going to take to rebuild something if it falls but its all about the process and journey."

Evan Cook

Evan: "The driftwood found hiding deep within the rocks has been liberated. Amongst the naturally shaped wood lies a naturally shaped piece of Styrofoam. The Styrofoam just like the wood resembles the rough journey of society. Through what remains, we deduce stress, age, hardship and heritage; though the same cannot be said about the Styrofoam. It may appear to be weathered but we cannot tell what its previous shape was. Although there is some scaring and marking on the surface, they don’t tell much about the life it has lived. We do know that this manmade object was shaped naturally; this is commonly the opposite of art. Most art is created by taking natural material and shaping it by manmade force. Here we see art as an emotional concept created by nature."

Heath Pierson:

Heath: "I picked my sight based on a passed experience and memory of another place that I have been. I was thinking of the small cliff dwellings in Utah and how they were hidden from site high up on the sides of cliffs. I built a small hut out of pine needles where would be able to imagine myself living."

Jessica Hayworth

Jessica: "I've been trying to address a problem with over-thinking my work, and so I tried to let this piece happen more by instinct than by thought. Of course, that didn't happen until the last minute. At first I was spending time looking at the materials - I was using a dead branch (not pictured), leaves in various states of decay, the cigar box, and a found piece of glass, trying to compare/contrast them. At the last moment I put the glass shard in the box, shut it, and piled the rocks on top to act as a sort of lock. The viewer would have to essentially destroy the piece to fully interact with it, which I thought was interesting."

Though I'm still waiting on some more responses from the class, here are a few pictures I snagged myself.

Crystal Phan:

Bianca del Cioppo:

Matt Mattson:

Nevada Museum of Art: A+E Conference 2011

2011-10-08T14:47:00.000-07:00

As you know, the SNC Gallery Club sponsored five student tickets to the Art and Environment conference at the Nevada Museum of Art from September 29^th to October 1^st. Out of the submissions, those selected were Anza Jarschke, Heath Pierson, Glen Cheriton, Karl Schwiesow, and myself, with Logan Lape also in attendance. We are planning to do a collaborative piece as a response to the conference, which I’ll post as a follow-up once it’s done, along with more of our thoughts as students attending the conference; in the meantime, here’s a brief rundown of some of the panelists and work that was discussed. As there were quite a few presentations, I won’t be covering them all, but here are a few that really piqued my interest.

Thursday night featured a lecture and performance from Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky) and four members of the Reno Philharmonic. Miller has created a project that he calls ‘Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica’, or just Ice Music; music composed as an acoustic portrait of Antarctica. He traveled there and set up a portable studio in order to capture and digitally reconstruct the resonant frequencies of the ice. It was a remarkable performance, in which he sampled, looped, composed, mixed, and spoke about the connection between music and information. Below is an example of the project; you can read more about it, and Miller’s book, ‘The Book of Ice’, here and here.

Friday was the first full day of panelists. The first panelist was Alexander Rose, director of the Long Now Foundation. Long Now is concerned with long-term thinking and an expanded sense of present time. Rose discussed the current Long Now project, a large-scale, fully mechanical 10,000 year clock that is currently being constructed in west Texas; the clock will be sealed inside a mountain, and will chime once a year, with a different chime each year, for the next 10,000 years. You can read more about the 10,000 year clock here.

10,000 year clock prototype 1, photo by Rolfe Horn

Next came a series of panels on the Altered Landscapes photography collection at the museum. Edward Burtynsky spoke about his work, photographing the effects of industry on the natural world. He uses images of quarries, tailings, refineries, mines, oil fields, etc., to remind us that we all participate in the degradation of nature:

Oil Fields 19a

Nickel Tailings No. 34

Oxford Tire Pile #8

Chris Jordan, who recently exhibited his ongoing project titled ‘Running the Numbers’ (digital manipulations which demonstrate the massive scale of human consumption), spoke about his work on Midway Island, photographing the decomposing corpses of birds whose stomachs are full of plastic. I won’t post those images here, for the sake of those who would rather not see them, but I would highly recommend taking a look here; it’s some incredibly powerful imagery. While showing these images, Jordan spoke about the need to reconnect emotionally with the ongoing environmental crisis.

There were many more presentations that day; Subhankar Banarjee, Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, Fritz Haeg, Thomas Kellein, Leo Villareal, David Benjamin, Geoff Manaugh, Mark Smout, and Liam Young all presented and spoke about their work and ongoing projects. As this is running a little long already, I’m going to skip ahead to Saturday and talk about a presentation that I really enjoyed, Amy Franceschini’s “This is Not a Trojan Horse”. Franceschini came onstage dressed as a pantomime horse, while Gaetano Carboni, commissioner of the project and director of the Polinaria Arts Center, introduced the project: a large-scale mobile sculpture of a horse, designed to travel through the Abruzzo region of Italy, where traditional farming techniques have suffered due to globalization. Franceschini spoke about how the traveling sculpture was designed to engage locals and farmers into conversation, and to prompt creative-problem solving. As they moved through the countryside, Franceschini and her group, FutureFarmers, collected/documented samples of traditional farming practices (interviews with locals, recipes, tools, etc).

Photos by Daniela d'Arielli

Other presenters on Saturday included Patricia Johanson, who creates functional and sculptural infrastructure projects; Richard Black, John Carty, Mandy Martin, Gerald Nanson, and John Reid, who all spoke about various aspects of water environments in Australia; Jorge Pardo, who gave a pretty fascinating presentation of his work in blurring the line between viewer and participant in design and architecture; and Bruce Sterling, a science fiction author and futurist, who gave one hell of a closing speech about the realities that we’re facing with the world at large.

Overall, I thought the conference was an extremely valuable experience to have as a student. We all appreciate the Gallery Club’s sponsorship of our tickets, and I’ll be sure to follow up with our collaborative response piece.

Driftwood Lamp

2011-10-03T21:39:00.000-07:00

Continuing in the tradition of installing artwork in the stairwells and hallways of the art building, Karl Schwiesow has decked out the lower landing of the back stairwell with a real beauty of an installation. He's calling it, if I'm remembering correctly, "Hunting and Gathering." Here are a few snaps, but by all means check it out in person (don't forget to click on the light):

Bill Gilbert - Physiocartographies Interview

2011-09-28T22:30:00.000-07:00

Bill Gilbert's show Physiocartographies is hanging in the Tahe Gallery through October 14th. Here's a short description of the show: Using a GPS unit and a compass, New Mexico-based artist Bill Gilbert attempts to walk carefully pre-determined routes in both space and time across landscapes in the American West. His carefully-made plans are invariably disrupted by the realities of terrain and the limitations of the human body. In the tradition of British artists such as Richard Long and Chris Drury, Gilbert's "Physiocartography" performances chart the distance between the map and the terrain, and are documented in drawings, video, and audio recordings.

I had a chance to interview Bill the night of the reception -- click on the audio file below to give it a listen. You can see photos of the Physiocartographies in the slideshow below that. It was a real pleasure to talk to him -- he's a hyperarticulate person with a lot of fascinating things to say about our world, and the ways we orient ourselves to it.

In the Flow

2011-09-26T05:45:00.000-07:00

Since leaving SNC, student Drew Satin has gone on to be the Global Video Manager at Flow Snowboarding.

He shot, produced and edited the new snowboarding flick "Was Here" -- and here's the trailer:

Stop and Hear the Music

2011-09-21T11:41:00.000-07:00

In Advanced Studio class, we recently had a discussion about value and the perception of value. Does raising the price of your art affect the viewer’s perception of its worth? It seems to; a piece marked for $2,500 has a very different impact than a similar piece marked for $25. A higher price seems to correlate with a higher status in the mind of the viewer; if it is expensive, it must be important. Later on I was discussing this with another member of the class, and we were both reminded of a perfect example, which I thought might be of interest: an experiment arranged by the Washington Post in 2007, in which Joshua Bell (one of the world’s leading violinists) appeared in the L’Enfant Plaza Station in Washington D.C. disguised as a street busker and played classical pieces on his Stradivarius for 45 minutes during rush hour. Over 1,000 people passed him by; only seven stopped to listen to his performance, and only one person fully recognized him. The perception of his worth was next to nothing. Under normal circumstances, Bell is critically acclaimed and it is difficult to see him perform due to high demand and ticket pricing.

Here’s a time-lapse video of the event:

And a very interesting article about it by Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post, which won him the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, here.

Monster

2011-09-16T23:28:00.000-07:00

So I thought I’d make a post about the graphic novel I put together last semester. It’s called “Monster” (weirdly, I stuck with the first title that came to mind) and it was probably the most fun I’ve had on a project, ever.

(Not pictured: my good qualities)

I had always been interested in doing something like this, but assumed I didn’t have the patience or the know-how. Then I had the opportunity to set up a project for Advanced Studio, so I started putting images together. Originally, the plan was to make a book about someone trying to make a book about something trying to make a book – the images would start out very realistically rendered, and degenerate more and more into childlike scribbling. To complete the joke, I thought the person trying to make the book should very clearly be me. I started drawing up pages of self portraits in which I would argue with a dead fly on the windowsill, who would act as a sounding board for story ideas, berating any plotlines I might come up with, angry that I had swatted it. This whole book-inside-a-book plan fell through pretty quickly, and I was left with lots of drawings of myself staring down a dead housefly.

I didn’t want to just scrap them. There was something about the wordless imagery that I really liked. When the dialogue was removed, the sort of absurdist element became something more serious. It reminded me of a child poking at a dead thing, trying to wake it up and slowly realizing that it won’t happen.

Not wanting to drop the comedic angle entirely, I split the book into three short sections that address the same issue in different ways. The fly section comes first. The second section is fairly abstract; it’s meant to address the same issues as the first, but in a more internalized way.

The third section is the only one containing any dialogue. Stylistically it’s much simpler and more cartoonish than the first two, and consists of an argument between an umbrella-headed child and a dying/dead fish, which made it the most fun to work on.

Which is all to say that it’s amazing what a little encouragement from professors and a deadline can help you come up with; I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have finished this project without those elements. I’m tentatively sending it around to publishers now, but in the meantime I’m self-publishing on Lulu.com. If you are interested in filling up your eyes with sweet, sweet images, this thing is for sale here. You could also ask for a copy if you see me around campus. I'm usually somewhere around David Hall.

Fake Rocks and Botox Redux

2011-09-16T12:40:00.000-07:00

Here's a slideshow from the reception of the Fake Rocks and Botox II show last night, at the Tahoe Gallery, featuring work by SNC alumni.

Work by Nikki Ballare, Jonah Harjer, Rebecca Kerlin, Babs Laukat, Jeffrey James Mohr, Ya'el Pedroza, Samantha Shaw, Sierra Slentz, Bryan Stieger. That's Bryan, Rebecca, Ya'el and Babs in the last few shots.

The New Xtranormal

2011-09-15T16:31:00.000-07:00

As a starter project for the Intro to Digital Entertainment class, the students wrote scripts for an Xtranormal short -- Xtranormal being a service where you can type a script for pre-built avatars to "act out," giving them gestures, picking camera angles, and so on. The class picked these two as the best of the batch:

I Am a Cat, script by David Arslanian, directed by Victor Gutierrez

Coffee Shop Career Change, written and directed by Trevor Jackson

Coffee Shop Career Change
by: tbyrumjackson

2011 A+E Conference at the NMA - Ticket Sponsorship

2011-09-13T11:36:00.000-07:00

Upcoming this month is the Art + Environment Conference at the Nevada Museum of Art (http://nevadaart.org/conference2011/) from September 29 - October 1. The conference "brings together artists, scholars, designers, and writers for a dialogue that fosters new knowledge in the visual arts. During the Conference, the Museum's galleries feature exhibitions that question our relationships with natural, built, and virtual environments, while serving as a springboard for Conference sessions
and keynote presentations."

Art museums can be temples to culture or cultural catalysts. They can be passive and predictable or unpredictably idea-driven. Museums can watch the world pass them by, or they can shape the trajectory of its course. Art and ideas matter here. We see art that challenges minds, melds environments and cultures, and responds to the uncertainties of the future. Art has a point of view and it deserves a voice at the table. That's what the Art + Environment Conference gives it.

This year, Gallery Club has sponsored the purchase of 5 student tickets to the conference. They are opening up eligibility to receive these tickets to all current Sierra Nevada College students. Any interested students can submit a 1-page, double-spaced paper addressing why they would like to attend the conference and what benefit it would have to their work. Submissions are due Tuesday, September 20 and selections will be made by the Fine Arts faculty. Please send all papers to Logan Lape (llape@sierranevada.edu). Notifications will be sent out later that week.

Due to the limited number of tickets available from Gallery Club, they and the Fine Arts Department invite any students not selected to purchase their own ticket join their fellow students at the conference (http://www.nevadaart.org/shop/productview?pid=659).

TOCCATA, Elizabeth Pitcairn, Donna Axton

2011-09-10T14:48:00.000-07:00

I'm behind the curve presenting the direct SNC connection to this event, but thought it would be of interest beyond the purely local angle. Elizabeth Pitcairn will be playing her Red Stradivarius Violin with TOCCATA in a series of performances from Sept. 11-17 in the Reno/Tahoe area. Pitcairn gave a wonderful recital at SNC two years ago, with Donna Axton, our music Prof, on the piano. Pitcairn is in fact playing with Donna as I type this, for a TOCCATA fundraiser in Gleshire/Truckee. The concert series will take place as follows:

Sunday, September 11 at 3:30pm at St. Theresa Catholic Church in South Lake Tahoe
Tuesday, September 13 at 7:30pm at St. Thomas Aquinas Cathedral in Reno
Friday, September 16 at 7:00pm at Trinity Episcopal Church in Reno
Saturday, September 17 at 3:00pm at the North Tahoe Events Center in Kings Beach

A copy of the press release, with more detailed info, can be found here.

And here's a video of Pitcairn playing Op. 14 Samuel Barber Violin Concerto with TOCCATA last year, with Donna accompanying her on piano:

Masereel, Herriman, Maggots

2011-09-10T13:11:00.000-07:00

Well, clearly I didn't make good on my promise to keep the blog humming over the summer -- I ended up jealously guarding my writing time for the graphic novel I was working on. I did have a small handful of pieces published elsewhere during the summer, so I might as well get the ball back rolling again with links to those -- a couple short appreciations of some "art heroes" of mine, and a look at a graphic novel I admire very much.

The two appreciations were for Hilobrow.com, for their daily "HiLo Heroes" feature, which gives a tip of the hat to a wide variety of people (artists, physicists, actors, and on and on) on their birthdays. On July 31st, it was Frans Masereel's birthday, of whom I wrote:

Belgian artist FRANS MASEREEL (1889-1972) raged against the stupidity of war as an illustrator for a series of pacifist magazines and books. He was a propagandist, the clarity of his high-contrast style suited equally well to the crude printing-press and the ideological punchline, but his agitprop kept strong strains of slapstick and poetry.

Read the entire piece here.

Then, on August 22nd, it was George Herriman's birthday:

GEORGE HERRIMAN’s (1880-1944) comic strip “Krazy Kat” spun its three-point wheel for thirty years on the axis of a perfectly balanced love triangle (or masochism triangle — same difference). Much has been written about that triangle’s principals: Ignatz Mouse, a napoleonic id; Offisa Pup, upholding the prosaic squareness of Authority; and Krazy Kat, embodying grace as blank abuse (laid out by the missile of an Ignatz-hurled brick, Krazy might’ve said, like Swayzee, “Pain don’t hurt”).

Read the whole thing here. The piece also includes a link to a full-page comic appreciation I did for "Krazy Kat" back in the day, on the back page of the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review.

And lastly, I had a short piece in the brick-sized The Comics Journal #301. It was a look at Brian Chippendale's graphic novel Maggots -- which took a very distinctive approach to showing the passage of time. There's a nice overview of The Comics Journal #301 here at Win Wiacek's blog; and here's a paragraph from my article, contrasting the way time functions in classical painting, and the way it functions when we have access, through film or video, to the brief split-seconds:

This traditional pictorial surface doesn’t so much freeze time, as to put time in abeyance. This is not a snapshot record of an event, but a memory of an event, reconstituted after the fact, all its pertinent details congealed in an authoritative simultaneity. The duration of time there is not measured by moments, but by experiences. This is in contrast to the way an animator must reconstitute time – or the way one becomes conscious of time when scrubbing through a video clip, looking to isolate from the stream a representative still. The weirdness of time there is most evident in facial expressions – the way human visages are distorted into strange grimaces when motions become moments. A visual stimulus does not always rise to the occasion of an image; an image or a gesture is something that sustains itself beyond the imprint of the moment – something that lives as an echo in the mind after it’s vanished from the gelled chamber of the eye.

The article isn't available online, so you'll have to actually shell out for a copy (or, you know, just swing by my office and ask nicely to borrow mine).

Sketchbooking

2011-09-10T00:50:00.000-07:00

Hello! My name's Jessica, and I'll be your student blogger for the month.

I thought I’d start by talking about an ongoing blog series at Book By Its Cover. The site manager, illustrator Julia Rothman, has built up some extensive documentation of working artists’ sketchbooks. Many of the contributors to the series are illustrators, but there are also sketchbooks belonging to painters, collage artists, and sculptors. I’ve always been very interested in artists’ sketchbooks, sometimes as much as finished work. It’s fascinating to see where ideas begin, and there is a real sense of intimacy when looking at these more private objects.

Below are a few examples; for the whole series, go here.

Anders Nilsen:

Mattias Adolfsson:

Lars Henkel:

The Biggest Little Tree

2011-06-30T17:00:00.000-07:00

For those of you who are still in the Reno area, I wanted to mention that Terrence Malick's film The Tree of Life is currently playing at the Century Riverside, a couple weeks ahead of its general national release. I think it's a remarkable film, and like all of Malick's work, it really cries out to be seen on the big screen. It's too bad that it wasn't playing during my indy film class last semester -- it would've made for an excellent field trip. The film centers around the coming of age of a boy in 1950s Waco, Texas, but it's filmed in an audaciously elliptical style, which makes room for extended sequences that measure the family's history against the scope of geological and celestial time.

The celestial passages in Tree of Life have been compared to the "stargate" sequence in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's a probably-inevitable connection, as the special effects sequences in both films were overseen by the same man -- Douglas Trumbull, who has been behind a number of special effects sequences that have burned their way into the collective consciousness (including work on Blade Runner and Close Encounters of the Third Kind).

In some ways, the Tree of Life/2001 conflation is too easy, and the case could be made that, in terms of positioning human life against the scope of the cosmos, the two films have diametrically opposed temperatures. Where Kubrick contemplates his human characters at an icy remove, Tree of Life is suffused with tremulous empathy. That said, the sequences themselves have the same stately sense of awe. Trumbull hasn't worked on a film for almost 30 years, having devoted himself to various media technologies and multimedia rides and environments (his website showcases the work of a restless inventor -- with recent pages devoted to a humvee customized for UFO-spotting, and a prototype for an oil spill cleanup system, devised in response to the BP catastrophe). Despite his prolonged hiatus from special effects for feature films, there's a remarkable consistency of vision. Scott Bukatman, in his excellent book Matters of Gravity, summed up the Trumbull approach (the book was published back in 2003, but his analysis is still apt for Tree of Life):

An examination of Trumbull's work reveals a surprisingly coherent aesthetics. A Trumbull sequence is less a description of an object than the construction of an environment... "I like the idea of creating some crazy illusion that looks so great that you can that you can really hang on it like a big master shot of an epic landscape." ("Epic landscape" suggests the affinity between Trumbull's effects and the majestic paintings of Turner, Church, Bierstadt, and so on)... Where [special effects artist] John Dykstra's work in Star Wars or Firefox (1982) is all hyperkinesis and participatory action, Trumbull's work is especially contemplative.

If anything, the Tree of Life sequences are a culmination of that contemplative, "epic landscape" approach -- even the prolonged "stargate" sequence from 2001 had the urgency of "what will the astronaut find at the end of this?" It might have been a rudimentary suspense -- one that's short-circuited by the sheer length of the sequence, which arguably batters you to submit to the state of contemplation, like smashing you over the head with a pile of Rothko and Pollock and Kandinsky canvases. But in Tree of Life, the sequence comes as a sort of musical movement, a recapitulation of the movie's themes in another register. There's no plot to be chewed through while the effects unfold -- they stand as self-sufficient as musical notes.

I especially liked the organic character of the effects. The fact that Malick approached Trumbull because he didn't like the look of CGI is perhaps a bit overstated in this interesting WIRED piece on the film's special effects (digital means were clearly used to get the final results -- it's more that there was a combination of the analog and digital, rather than a complete banishment of computer technology). But clearly, part of the heft of the effects comes from their organic origins, the way Trumbull exploits the formal coherencies between macro and micro scale -- the way the curved arms of a galaxy appear when you drop cream into your coffee cup.

The film also incorporates work by some experimental artists, including the filmmaker Scott Nyerges, who was interviewed at the Fandor blog:

Nyerges is puzzled that amidst all the hype surrounding The Tree of Life, more attention hasn’t been given to artists whose work clearly feeds into Malick’s vision. “In the media coverage on this film no one’s really mentioned that they used the work of experimental filmmakers in these sequences.” But for Nyerges, the overlooked, perpetually co-opted status of the avant-garde is nothing new. “This kind of filmmaking has influenced everything from commercials to music videos to movies. And now you can buy iMovie, punch a button and get an effect that took avant garde filmmakers years to develop.”

Here's the Nyerges short which was excerpted in Tree of Life:

An image that's used as a sort of "chapter break" in the Tree of Life -- a diaphanous whatsit composed of interpenetrating warm colors, which appears onscreen as characters ask whispered questions of God -- was also, it turns out, a borrowing from another artist. It was the filming of a work by Thomas Wilfred, an early pioneer of "light art" (a New Yorker article tipped me to the fact).

From William Moritz's article The Dream of Color Music, And Machines That Made it Possible:

Danish-born Thomas Wilfred came to America as a singer of early music, and got involved with a group of Theosophists who wanted to build a color organ to demonstrate spiritual principles. Wilfred called his color organ the Clavilux, and named the artform of color-music projections "Lumia." He stressed polymorphous, fluid streams of color slowly metamorphosing. He established an Art Institute of Light in New York, and toured giving Lumia concerts in the United States and Europe (at the famous Art Deco exhibition in Paris). He also built "lumia boxes," self-contained units that looked rather like television sets, which could play for days or months without repeating the same imagery."

Here are a couple recording of portions of Wilfred's Lumia, as well as a trailer for a documentary on Wilfred:

It appeals to me that the trascendentalism of the film is a kind of grab-bag transcendentalism, splicing together the work of artists whose concerns with light and the sublime stretch over the span of nearly a century. Measured against the lifespan of a star, that's a pretty modest blip -- and so is pretty much everything else, which is more or less the point. Light isn't a fixed substance, which is why it's so easy to project ourselves into its modulations, fluctuations, its negotiations with darkness and cessation.

Windows, stairwells, walls, mirrors

2011-06-20T13:29:00.000-07:00

Just before the semester wrapped up, I snapped some pics of student art that had materialized in various nooks and crannies of the art building. Stairwells and windows often form a distributed display space in David Hall -- here are a few examples of uncommissioned "public works" -- I'm making a couple educated guesses as to the authorship in a couple cases, and if I've guessed wrong, please correct me in the comments to this post and I'll rectify the situation.

I think this text application was done by Molly Allen:

I know this is Victoria Buck's -- she did it for the final for my independent film class:

The clocks above the windows in the printmaking area were done by Jesyka Hayworth; I think the raindrops are hers, too:

I don't know who painted the "instant hairstyle" mirror, also on the third floor:

The rose prints, I believe, are Jennifer Yordy's:

More work by Jesyka Hayworth -- her take on the indepenedent film class final:

And this four-part sculpture, unless I'm mistaken, is the work of ~~Anza Jarshke~~ Pete from the New Genres class (anyone got a last name?):

Ben-Day Dots and Bugs

2011-06-03T13:14:00.000-07:00

I've taken a breather from the blog in the past couple weeks, doing a bit of a wind-down -- but this summer I'll be keeping up a flow of posts, so keep your eyes peeled here. I have lots of stuff to catch up with (several BFA shows included), and lots to write about -- and here to begin to pick up the slack is a link to a post I put together for hilobrow, as part of their "4CP Friday" series. The series invites several people to curate a handful of images from John Hilgart's 4CP blog, where Hilgart posts beautiful scanned blow-ups of comics panels. The theme for my pick was "resolution." Click here to see the gallery.

And this also reminds me -- I neglected to post a link for my prior piece for hilobrow, a short appreciation of botanical/entomological illustrator Maria Sibylla Merian -- click here to read the whole thing:

"Even today, a sketch of her biography would mark her an eccentric trailblazer: a divorced woman of 52, after a stint in an anti-materialist religious commune, leaves the comforts of Amsterdam for a two-year sojourn in Surinam in order to paint insects hitherto uncataloged by science. That MARIA SIBYLLA MERIAN (1647-1717) did this in 1699 is a genuine shock..."

Covering Poetry

2011-05-14T13:17:00.000-07:00

The latest issue of the Sierra Nevada Review is out, with a cover by student Jesyka Hayworth -- I had students in my "Art & Advertising" class submit designs for the cover, and Jesyka's was chosen. The editor for the SNC this year was Jenna Bache -- more info here:

http://www.sierranevada.edu/news/detail/?id=681

Student Group Show 2011

2011-05-13T12:49:00.000-07:00

Here's a slideshow with some pics of the end-of-the-year group student show, curated by Seth Curcio:

The Art of Howl

2011-04-29T17:11:00.000-07:00

I'm co-curating a show at the Cartoon Art Museum, opening May 14 and running through the summer. The show, called The Art of Howl, has been a great opportunity to re-connect with a couple of folks who have been important in my own artistic development: Eric Drooker, who kindly blurbed my first graphic novel and has been a friend and artistic resource/inspiration ever since, and John Hays, who was crucial in shepherding my web cartoon Romanov into the world. I owe a debt of gratitude to both of these guys, and am glad to have the occasion to toot the horn for their recent work.

In addition, the show allows me to tip that hat to some "art heroes" who I've admired but never met: Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, whose documentary The Times of Harvey Milk is an exemplar of socially committed historiography, and of course Allen Ginsberg himself.

And while there are no paintings or even doodles by James Franco featured in the show, I'd like to think it offers at least a small extension of his project to establish all reality as an emanata of the all-encompassing Francoverse.

I'll have a small bit of my own work in the show (for past posts on my involvement with Howl, click here) -- what follows is the official press release:

The Art of Howl at the Cartoon Art Museum
655 Mission St. San Francisco, CA 94105
May 14 – September 11
Opening Reception Thursday, May 19, 7:00-9:00pm

Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's film, Howl, produced by Werc Werk Works, opened the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. Featuring James Franco as the beat poet Allen Ginsberg, the film took an experimental approach to documenting the creation and performance of Ginsberg's revolutionary poem, "Howl"– as well as the obscenity trial that followed when, after undercover policemen purchased copies of Howl and Other Poems from City Lights Bookstore, the state tried to suppress its publication. The film blends glimpses of Ginsberg's personal life, recreations of the obscenity trial, and animated sequences that accompany Franco's performance of the poem, riffing on its ideas and images.

The Art of Howl gives a revealing look behind the scenes at the creative process of turning poetry into animation. The film directors enlisted Eric Drooker to design the animation; Drooker, a graphic novelist and painter, was friends with Ginsberg and had collaborated with him on the book Illuminated Poems. John Hays, a San Francisco-based animation veteran, directed the sequences, which were animated by The Monk Studios in Thailand.

Translating Ginsberg's incendiary, oracular, stream-of-consciousness language into moving images was a unique challenge. The animation, like the poem, conjures a world of outcasts, "deviants," outlaws, poets and prophets digging for scraps of connection and enlightenment under the shadow of "Moloch" – the overpowering industrial cityscape that demands submission, conformity, and ultimately annihilation.

This multimedia exhibit includes character design drawings, animation keyframes and concept art, photos by Allen Ginsberg, storyboards, animatics, and images from Drooker's graphic novel version of the poem. The Cartoon Art Museum is pleased to present this animated interpretation of a piece of literary history – just a couple miles from City Lights Bookstore, the launching-pad for Ginsberg's poetic career, and through their victory at the Howl trial, a historic ground zero for freedom of expression.

Curated by Andrew Farago, Eric Drooker and Chris Lanier

Telling Pictures: Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman
Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman have been making non-fiction and feature films together since 1987 when they founded Telling Pictures, a San Francisco production company. Their films have played in movie theaters, at festivals, and on television throughout the world. Between them they have received two Academy Awards, five Emmy Awards, three Peabodys, as well as Guggenheim and Rockefeller Fellowships. Their films together include Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (Academy Award, Feature Documentary, 1989), Where Are We? (Sundance Documentary Competition, 1991), The Celluloid Closet (Emmy Award for directing, Peabody, duPont-Columbia Awards, 1995), and Paragraph 175 (Sundance Film Festival jury award for directing, 2000). Their website is www.tellingpictures.com.

Werc Werk Works
Werc Werk Works is an independent film production and finance company dedicated to the production and financing of high caliber, story-driven films with wide appeal. Recently released films include Howl starring James Franco, and the multiple Spirit Award nominated Life During Wartime. Upcoming releases include The Convincer and the new Lawrence Kasdan film Darling Companion. Werc Werk Works is also co-producer of the Béla Tarr film The Turin Horse that was recently awarded the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. Their website is www.wercwerkworks.com.

The Monk Studios
The Monk Studios is a boutique Visual Effects and Animation Studio, located in Thailand. The philosophy of the company is to focus on producing world-class imagery using highly skilled artists and cutting edge technology. The company produces high quality Visual Effects (VFX) and Animation for both feature films and commercials in the Asian and Western markets.

Eric Drooker
Eric Drooker is a painter and graphic novelist, born and raised on Manhattan Island. He's the award-winning author of Flood! A Novel in Pictures, and Blood Song. His paintings appear on covers of The New Yorker, and hang in numerous collections. His website is www.Drooker.com.

John Hays
John Hays is an award-winning animation producer and director, having worked at ILM, Colossal Pictures, Lucasfilm, and co-founded W!LDBRAIN Studios. His projects range from Howl to Yo Gabba Gabba, and a recently completed animated dream sequence in Lawrence Kasdan’s new film Darling Companion.

Tethered

2011-04-24T21:25:00.000-07:00

Logan's BFA show, "Connective Laboratory," was strung along a horizon line - actual and metaphorical. On one wall were three photos - waterscape, desertscape, and architecturescape - the horizon line in each aligned with the others, connecting them on a level across the blankness of the wall. The contrast between upper and lower spaces - water and sky, wood and floor - was sharply defined in the flanking photos, but the middle one (taken, I assume, on the playa at black rock) was smudged and ambiguous, the border erased by a scrim of airborne sand. At the other end of the gallery was another smeary horizon, a square light array with a diffusion material in front of the lights, the bottom and top halves changing color every now and again, in response to data being collected in the gallery.

And the data being collected itself? Noise and temperature levels, both given a spike when people interacted with the two pieces in the center of the room: a pair of miniature tetherball courts, which you could operate sort of like a foosball table or pinball machine, using paddles to whack the ball on its spiral gyre around the pole, clockwise or counterclockwise crossing the horizonline marking the side of Player A and Player B. One tetherball table was completely human-powered, each player given a thin, rotatable slat that could slide closer or further from the pole; the other table's sliding paddles were pneumatically powered, the press of a red joystick button thwacking them forward, both players' paddles drawing from a common tank of air. People were especially eager to try the pneumatic one, probably due to the allure of technology and power, but the other was more fun to play - more easy to manipulate, and not prone to breakdown (Logan has a screwdriver on hand, and had to fiddle with the pneumatic table a few times during the opening).

In two dimensions, a horizon can be cleanly cut - in three, it invites ambiguity - it's not really the point of contact between earth and sky, it's an appearance of contact, a contingent relationship between viewer and vanishing point. In a show called "Connective Laboratory," it begs the point of connection. What is a "genuine" connection? What gets exchanged at a point of contact? In connection, what is merely apparent, and what is actual? And how dependent is that distinction upon the way contact is mediated - through play, through competition, through observation (both spectatorial and scientific), through winding and unwinding spirals, through pneumatics?

If that seems like a long series of question marks, it's because there's a genuine open-endedness in Logan's enterprise- his "Laboratory" was truly (if not rigorously) an experiment, a set of parameters with a non-prescribed outcome. The one thing that was a prescribed outcome, I think, was linked to the obvious desire for people to have a good time - to participate, and not just ruminate.

In the Q&A, there was much discussion about the context and depth of the work, probably best summed up by someone asking Logan if the show would still work if it were installed at Rookie's (a local watering-hole). To which he replied absolutely not - for the work to function, it had to be in an atmosphere that encouraged awareness - perhaps even (I'm extrapolating here) a bit of self-consciousness. Part of the appeal was one of transposition - Logan was asked "Now that you've brought a party to a gallery, would it interest you to bring art to a party?" - but for Logan, the draw of "situational aesthetics" required more than place-swapping. He explained the art-apparatus in the gallery as an assertion of himself, extending his role and personality beyond that of a host. For me, the most fertile part of the work was the fraught and not entirely resolved interface between invitation and experimentation. The notion that the audience becomes the artwork is relatively old hat by now - not passe, but an accepted and respected modality, one that could even be said to have developed its own traditions. Logan invited us to be the work, and to have a good time being it besides - but I most enjoyed the itch of the asterisk he placed there - that being the artwork also entailed being a specimen. The figurative pedestal was also a figurative petri dish.

Verisimilitude

2011-04-14T09:25:00.000-07:00

Just a reminder that Jenna Bache's BFA show has its opening reception tonight at the Tahoe Gallery, from 5-7pm -- I don't think I'm giving anything away with these few snapshots of the work being tweaked through its install process. Instead, I hope you wonder what the heck you're actually looking at in these pics, and it will further entice you to attend, to figure that out.

EXTRA EXTRA READ ALL ABOUT IT

2011-04-12T21:20:00.000-07:00

Some SNC alums are putting together a publication, and they're asking for submissions:

Extra Extra is a curated public collaborative: a creative laboratory for “all the Extra Extra stuff.” Extra Extra is quarterly publication whose core is an interdisciplinary approach to contemporary culture: production, art, music, new medias, science, literature, entrepreneurship and all systems thinking participating in imaginative dreaming.

Spring Issue Submissions Due Sunday April 24th 2011

Step One: Fold a regular 8 1/2” piece of paper in half, creating a tall rectangle. You can use 1 or up to 3 pages. Place the folded papers within themselves to make a mini booklet. Creating up to 12 workable surfaces, total. It is highly suggested to put the author(s) name and the title of the piece on the first page.

More info/ details here:

http://weareextraextra.tumblr.com/

French Film Festival starts tonight on campus

2011-04-06T13:26:00.000-07:00

Sierra Nevada College is hosting The Tournées Festival, featuring contemporary French cinema April 6th-9th, 2011. The Festival is hosted by SNC's language program and made possible with the support of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and the French Ministry of Culture. Community sponsors have also added to the French theme with wine tastings, receptions, and discounted dinners for the event. French cultural games, door prizes, and lively discussions will accompany each screening. The films will be free to all students and the public is encouraged to attend for a suggested $10 donation, which will support future programming.

Click on the poster above to see a larger version with readable film titles & time. More info here:

http://www.sierranevada.edu/news/detail/?id=658

Pictures at a Junior Portfolio Review: Spring 2011

2011-04-03T21:23:00.000-07:00

Despite the fact that the campus was closed two Fridays ago, Junior Art Portfolio went on. Because the Art Department is tough. And crazy. Here are some pics:

A partial list of topics broached:
Why dancers dance
Surrendering to airplanes
The appeal of Fibonacci numbers
Whether a Rod Stewart album in a thrift store will be missed by anyone
The humor and the horror of uselessness

Don't want to be an ugly dead body

2011-03-28T12:59:00.000-07:00

I'll have a write up on Nick Geankoplis' BFA show, but in the meantime, here's a video he prepared as a sort of BFA defense:

Semiotics from Nick Geankoplis on Vimeo.

Form and Fetish

2011-03-27T13:10:00.000-07:00

Andrew Hoeppner's BFA show, "Uncanny Reminiscence," got this semester's run of BFA shows off to a strong start. Like Aurora's show before him, the Tahoe Gallery was turned into a dimly-lit, almost cavelike space. It was a very theatrical atmosphere -- I felt like I was walking into an abstraction of a locked attic, or perhaps a shuttered bedroom.

Heppy has been creating biomorphic forms using ceramic and other materials for a while now (you can see glimpses of some progenitor figures from Heppy's Junior Portfolio Review two years ago, here), and this show seemed to mark two phases of those forms. One phase had the figures incorporated into antiques -- a fanged, goopy tapeworm emerging from a grandfather clock, or a headless torso poised at a sewing machine table, its single leg encased in fishnet, the blunt footless tip hovering over the foot pedal. Two figures in the show had mouths; the antique clutter and the implication of a voice and appetite gave these figures a cartoonish presence. I wasn't sure if they were meant to scare or amuse me -- they reminded me of cheapo monster special effects that goose your nightmares when you're a kid and then, when you see the movie again as an adult, you chuckle at them, and at your own childish susceptibility.

Heppy enjoys playing at the crossroads of the alluring and the repellant -- which is one way of saying his work seems to have a lot to do with sex. Appendages and proboscises allude to or sometimes embody human parts that are tagged as "obscene" -- if a form can at once suggest a breast, a buttock, and the swell of an ankle, well, those somatic locales tend to be charged relativistically, depending on the particular taboos of one culture or the next. Which is more enticing, the curve of a neck or the slope of a thigh? It's not impossible to imagine (and given the range of human proclivities, it's almost certain) that for someone, the locus of of sexual desire, the most transfixing and obscene part of the body, must be the earlobe.

In the Q&A I asked Heppy where he placed himself on the graph between the erotic and the pornographic, and he said he didn't identify with the word "pornographic" at all. Which surprised me, because if he saw his work as above that sort of thing, then: why fishnet? Afterward, I pursued him a little further on the subject, and he said the word "pornography" conjures a whole industry, and his work isn't about that. And then it made sense; though the idea of a "fetish" is tied to an industry (the manufacture and sale of desire through the production of latex, silicone, nylon, etc.), a fetish doesn't really need an industry to operate. At its most basic, a fetish isn't a desire manufactured but a desire reified, embedded in a texture or an image. That a texture can be produced by an industry is almost beside the point.

For me, the two most impressive figures (and the figures that seemed best to represent a second phase of Heppy's forms) were the two white, large-scale "characters" at the far end of the gallery. These figures weren't entirely free of props (both were situated in relation to rolling sheets that were stiffened by beeswax), but as well as being monumental, these forms also seemed more purified, less cartoonish. One form reclined on the bedding; the other hung on the wall above, hovering some distance from a depression on the surface of the bedding -- a spot it had perhaps recently vacated. It hovered like a lover, voyeur or ghost (and when it comes down to it, aren't ghosts perfect voyeurs -- voyeurism given the metaphoric resonance of folklore?). There was something sad about the hovering figure, and something droll about it, too. It commanded the space because of its size, its presence, its apparent defiance of gravity -- and also because of the fact that it looked less like a self-contained figure than an excerpt from a much larger figure -- it could've been a blow-up of Michelangelo's David's family jewels.

When the Q&A was over, someone requested that Heppy start up the audio that he'd arranged to emanate from the clock (which had been silenced for his artist's talk). Heppy started it up, and for several moments everyone sat quietly while the space was filled with a broken, faraway sound of chimes. The chimes didn't sound in a regular, metronomic fashion -- they were measuring a different sort of a time than is usually marked by a clock, a more liquid and subjective time. Maybe the way time passes in memory. And then someone's cell phone rang, and we all laughed, de-hypnotized, released back to our ordinary minutes.

Soldner Site

2011-03-22T15:42:00.000-07:00

Sheri put together a website for the show she's curating in honor of the late Paul Soldner:

This exhibition is intended to honor Paul Soldner who was a great mentor inspiring so many successful ceramists. As one of the founding fathers of contemporary ceramics, and Raku, Paul was not only a teacher to so many, but a life changer. His work ethic and lifestyle influenced and forever changed everyone he met, from students, colleagues, and friends. Paul taught by example, as he worked alongside of his students in the Scripps College studio and at an endless number of workshops worldwide. Often when asked how he thought some technique would work, he would respond, “Try it, and let me know what happens”. His encouragement by example, boundless interest in the experimentation and open lifestyle freed a new generation of ceramic artists to explore the unknown and live life to its fullest.

More info here:

http://web.me.com/sleigh4clay/Site/Soldner_Society.html

let there be

2011-03-15T21:51:00.000-07:00

I'll have more to say about this show in the future, but wanted to post a quick note about the Leo Villareal show that just opened at the Nevada Museum of Art. I'm going to try to run a field trip to it for my current "Art & Advertising" class -- we'll soon be doing a project around projecting images onto non-traditional surfaces, and I think the show will be an inspiring point of reference. It's also pertinent in the way it translates visual operations you'd normally associate with advertising, and moves them into a "fine art" space. It's actually very appropriate that this show is running a few blocks from downtown Reno, where animated light is put to different ends (and on an even grander scale).

It's the first art show that my daughter Julia has attended. She seemed to dig it. If ayone out there is on Reno for the spring break, you should check it out. The show runs through May 22.

Kirbrick

2011-03-11T09:39:00.000-08:00

Not too long ago, I wrote a post mentioning a great pairing of a cartoonist and a filmmaker I both admire; today, on the culture site hilobrow.com ("Middlebrow is not the solution"), I have a short essay on another pairing of a great cartoonist and a great filmmaker, although the results from that one -- Jack Kirby's adaptation of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey -- are more decidedly mixed. Here's the link to the essay:

http://hilobrow.com/2011/03/11/kirby-vs-kubrick/

The essay is attached to a series hosted by hilobrow called Kirb Your Enthusiasm, in which several writers took on a panel from Jack Kirby's staggeringly prodigious oeuvre, meditating on his affects and effects. I highly recommend the series -- a great exegesis on a peculiar and influential artist, in bit-size increments. Each essay has a scan of the panel in question, which you can click on and blow up to pseudo-Lichtensteinian proportions:

Kirb Your Enthusiasm

BFA Season

2011-03-09T16:32:00.001-08:00

This week is the beginning of BFA season -- the reception for Heppy's BFA show is this Thursday, and then we have student BFA shows running in the Tahoe Gallery through the end of the semester. Here are a few informal snaps from some recent BFA committee meetings, as folks plan and adjust and get things prepped.

Victoria:

Nick:

Logan:

Cirque du Leigh

2011-03-06T20:58:00.000-08:00

Our Department Chair (and ceramics prof) Sheri Leigh has some work in a couple upcoming shows. Via Sheri, here's the info:

"Dry Run" (above) is going to the "Soldner Society" exhibit, which I co-curated with T Robert. It will be in Tampa, FL in conjunction with the NCECA conference. The show is intended to honor the life of Paul Soldner, who passed away this year on January 3rd.

Here's the info from the NCECA Exhibition tours site:

This exhibition is intended to honor Paul Soldner who was a great mentor and inspiration to so many successful ceramists. He was one of the founding fathers of contemporary ceramics, and Raku. His lifestyle influenced and forever changed everyone he met. Paul taught by example as he worked in the Scripps studio alongside his students. Often when asked how he thought some technique would work, he would respond, "Try it, and let me know what happens". His open lifestyle freed a new generation of ceramic artists to experiment and live life to it's fullest. Organized by Sheri Leigh O'Connor and T Robert.

Above Shows: Mar 29-Apr 2. Tue-Thu 10am-7pm; Fri 10am-8pm; Sat 10am-5pm. Reception Apr 1, 5-8pm

The other piece "Zebran Nuptials" or "Here Comes the Zebran" is going into "Top That."

Here's the info from this website:
http://njwedding.wordpress.com/2011/02/02/long-beach-island-art-gallery-partners-with-wedding-road-show-for-cake-topper-exhibit/

During the Wedding Road Show on Sunday, April 10th, look for the m.t. burton gallery to be promoting “Top That” and the sale of the toppers at the Surf City Yacht Club. After the festivities the exhibit will continue through May 19th at the m.t. burton gallery, located at 1819 Long Beach Blvd, Surf City, NJ. For more information contact the m.t. burton gallery at (609) 494-0006 or http://www.mtburtongallery.com.

Dust Notes

2011-03-06T13:36:00.000-08:00

I'm still playing a bit of catch-up with last semester's gallery events, and wanted to at least post a few quick notes on the Burning Man show. If something happening twice is the minimum threshold for it to be considered a "tradition," then the show could be framed as the continuing tradition of having students enrolled in the Burning Man class metabolize their experience at Black Rock, via the creation of artwork and a debriefing to the rest of the community on What Went Down. The last time the class took place, two years ago, most of the students were going to Burning Man for the first time; many of the students who were in on that initial experience participated in the second round, so there was a sense of continuity and guidance from the "grizzled veterans" to the newbies. There was also a decided shift in the artwork that was produced in response to the Man.

I have to admit, purely on the level of "artwork" and artifacts, the prior Burning Man show engaged me more. That first reaction to the Man seemed to express itself in a variety of installation objects and approaches; this time, it seemed less about the the objects than about creating a space for socializing. The focus was on creating an environment where interaction could take place, rather than on making things that attempted to riff on the sorts of art-objects that could be encountered on the playa, bending those sparks of inspiration to one's personal sensibilities. This year the environment itself was more explicitly tuned to the low-impact sustainability ethic that Burning Man attempts to cultivate -- the attempt to re-imagine our vast quantities of cultural detritus as the raw materials of a next phase of communal social organization.

However, the discussion at the opening was, I thought, more interesting than the one two years previous. It was less like a panel presentation, and more like an open-ended discussion on the issues -- artistic, social, political -- that Burning Man raises. It was a lively seminar on the ethics and aesthetics of the Man, and how they might (or might not) apply to a wider order. A principle from Burning Man that seemed to hold great charge for the students was the ethic of "gifting." A mode of exchange not entirely governed by the tit-for-tat equations of capitalism; the students found it liberating.

[Below: Nick's shoes, still impregnated with playa dust. Several of the students retained articles of clothing whitewashed with the playa dust, as if the dust were precious as gilding. One presumes their lungs are equally gilded.]

Logan framed Buring Man as an exercise in "ephemeral community" -- I tweaked him a bit on that, wondering whether "ephemeral" and "community" were two concepts that could be considered in opposition. Logan replied that Burning Man creates networks that last beyond the event itself; to restrict the notion of community to the temporal and spatial confines of Black Rock is too narrow.

And shortly after it hit me that this picture of "ephemeral community" -- where semi-structured intimacies occur, where people produce work that leaks outside the normal logic of supply and demand (while also not being entirely apart from that logic), where models of social organization are essayed in an experimental fashion, and where the participants, after a while, depart to their own lives, hopefully sustained in part by some of the ripples generated at the epicenter of the experience -- can more or less find an echo in what is called, for lack of a better term, "college life."

Flash Mobbed

2011-03-04T15:12:00.001-08:00

Via Leroy Hardy, here's a video of SNC's first flash mob. As you can tell by the thorough video coverage, it was perhaps the least surreptitious flash mob in flash mob history. But it was a fun intervention in the ordinary cafeteria hubbub.

This is probably an admission of how out of the loop I am, but I had no idea that we had an actual life-sized mascot on campus. My sources tell me it's a mystery who's in the suit. Which means I will have to suppress and urge to tackle and unmask him (her?) next time Eli makes a public appearance.

CARMINA BURANA by the SNC choir March 24th and 26th

2011-03-04T07:14:00.000-08:00

Via Dona Axton:

CARMINA BURANA may not sound like an everyday term to you. But you have heard the music from CARMINA BURANA many places. The Doors played it. “O Fortuna” from CARMINA has been featured in many movies, including “The Lord of the Rings”, “Excalibur”, “Hunt for Red October” (and even “Jackass, the Movie”) .

The SNC Choir will be performing this iconic work on March 24 and 26th at 7pm at St. Patrick’s Episcopal Church.
It is powerful and amazing. Come and cheer on YOUR SNC choir . We’ll be singing with a 10 piece orchestra and we will raise the roof. You’ll love it.

Admission is free for students and faculty – just sign in at the door. You’ll be seated after those with reserved seats.

WHEN :Thursday, March 24 7 pm
Saturday, March 26 7 pm
WHERE: ST. Patrick’s Episcopal Church , 341 Village Blvd. Incline Village

WHAT: CARMINA BURANA with the SNC Choir

Photo of Carl Orff:

Christchurch Coping

2011-03-04T00:35:00.000-08:00

Victoria Buck, whose BFA show is coming up shortly, grew up in Christchurch. So of course the news of the earthquake has been weighing on her, and by extension, on all of us who know her. Via comicsreporter.com, I read a short comic strip on the quake by a New Zealand author and cartoonist, Sarah Laing. Click here to read the whole thing (the page includes links to relief organizations).

Victoria also sent along a link that's a fine example of using humor to cope with adversity -- some Christchurch residents who are selling "Rocky," the giant boulder that crashed into their home, on the NZ equivalent of ebay:

For sale 1 owner 25 - 30 tonne landscape feature (answers to the name Rocky) ...

He is in pristine condition (just a little bit of concrete dust). Suitable for garden feature, or as in our case a magnificent addition to your living area.

Rocky will enhance your "indoor outdoor" flow considerably, especially if you load him in through the garage roof like we did.

More pictures, and more on "Rocky" (including the opportunity to bid) can be found here. Proceeds go to earthquake relief for Christchurch.

Events this week

2011-03-03T21:51:00.000-08:00

Need some art in your life this week? Here it is:

Leo Villareal - Animating Light at the Nevada Museum of Art

Saturday from 6-8pm there is an opening reception at the NMA for Leo Villareal's exhibition of light sculptures.

This one is SURE to be a party!Celebrate the artist’s place of inspiration by wearing your favorite burner costume outfitted with LEDs. Meet the artist and experience his vibrant artworks accompanied by the beats of DJ James Healy (Escape Art) live in the atrium. Come and be dazzled by Reno’s-own Controlled Burn and BoHoHoops. A cash bar will be available.

Admission is free for Museum members with valid member card. Kids Open Art Studio is available from 6 – 8 pm / $4.

Non-members may attend for the general Museum admission price.

Website | Facebook Event

Bella Petunia's Winter Art Show (Featuring works by Molly Allen)

Wednesday, March 9 · 5:00pm - 10:00pm at the Fat Cat in Tahoe City

Showing the photography of Molly Allen and art of John Hawley and Jill Colbert. Also featuring the DeFlowered Arts Market with locally handcrafted jewelry, clothing, accessories and more. Fire dancing by the Tahoe Burn Tribe. Incredible balloon sculptures by Sean Rogers. Soundtrack by the super groovy DJ Double Digit. After party by micah j. Complimentary hors d'oeurvres. All ages until 9pm.

Facebook Event

Andrew Heoppner - Uncanny Reminiscence

The BFA show season begins!

Thursday, March 10 · 5:00pm

Facebook Event

Counting Down

2011-02-27T12:31:00.000-08:00

It's that time of the semester again; that time when the deadlines creep faster than we all can comprehend. Graduation in 2.5 months? Absurd! In spirit of the whiteboard countdowns that seem to crop up from time to time, I thought a nice post with a collection of dynamic countdowns could be a good bookmark for the coming weeks.

Countdowns created with OnePlusYou

Posterization

2011-02-21T13:21:00.000-08:00

I've been meaning to do a blog post showing the posters for the films I'm screening in my independent film class, and some recent poster news is giving me a good impetus to close the deal. Chris Ware, one of the most interesting cartoonists around, has created a very distinctive poster for Uncle Boonme Who Can Recall His Past Lives, the latest film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, one of the most interesting directors around. It's an unexpected intersection of two of my favorite artists. Click the image below to see a larger version of the poster:

I also might as well post a few more links pertinent to the art of movie posters, since I've been collecting that sort of thing in my bookmarks for a while (and it'll provide a helpful jumping-off point for my "Art & Advertising" class, which is starting a poster design project this week). First off, a link to posters commissioned by the Alamo Drafthouse, a famous venue for screening offbeat films; the Alamo is probably the most prominent source for limited-edition artist-designed posters for repertory films. I think of them as film-poster versions of a good cover tune. Below is an Alamo poster for The Shining:

An artist who's done several posters for the Alamo is Olly Moss, who has made several in the vein of the great designer Saul Bass -- here's a Bass-inflected design by Moss:

And to pick up again for a moment on The Shining kick (for some reason, that flick has inspired a lot of great repertory posters), below is a treatment done by Moxy Creative, for a series of redesigned posters inspired by Men's Style (thought in this particular case, it's more like ectoplasmic adolescent style):

Those Moxy posters trade on knowledge of the film -- they make more sense if you've already seen the movie. There seems to be a whole set of designers who make retroactive poster designs based on this sort of inside-baseball visual punning (like the Back to the Future 2 riff below, which I swiped from a blog post on "Minimalist Movie Poster Designs"):

And if you want to go really minimalist, you should check out filmtheblanks.com, a site where you can see movie posters reduced to their most iconic design elements -- The Deer Hunter gets the abstracting treatment here:

Another transformative tack on movie iconography comes from Andrey Kuznetsov, who has drawn images of blockbusters as if they were being advertised via Medieval woodblock print:

Any look at outre movie posters would be remiss to leave out the Polish poster designers who have both managed to create some perfectly poetic images for great films, and even some perfectly poetic images for terrible films (check out the Crocodile Dundee 2 poster at the link):

If you want on ongoing supply of great eye-candy and commentary on movie posters, Adrian Curry writes a Movie Poster of the Week feature for mubi.com. Curry is smart about the power of single images, like this one for Black Swan:

And he's equally adept at noticing trends in poster design -- for instance pinpointing the recent vogue of using title text to obscure the faces of the actors:

And here, finally, is the run of posters for the films in the indy film class. I tried to find original posters (not subsequent redesigns). One thing that becomes apparent is that the 80s were as ugly in movie poster design as they were in everything else; the posters for Before Sunrise and Do the Right Thing are easily the worst of the batch, in my eyes. It's funny how few of the posters actually conjure a flavor of the movie they're promoting -- the one for Persona does it, and that's about it (though several of the other posters are still attractive on their own terms).

There's an interesting story behind the poster for Nothing But a Man, an emotionally intense neo-realist look at a black railway worker in the American South. In listening to an interview with the filmmakers, Michael Roemer and Robert Young, I found out they were angry about the poster. Nothing But a Man was a pioneering film with a largely black cast; the filmmakers intended the film to play in black neighborhoods, but the distributors confined it to the art-house circuit of the time (1964). By making the image a drawing against a white background, you could almost not know the movie stars black people -- the poster actually unwittingly recapitulates a monologue delivered by a preacher's wife, played by Abbey Lincoln, late in the film. She mentions to her husband that she has more latitude than he does, in the white-dominated South, because she's not seen as a physical threat to white men. And there her face stands on the poster, whitewashed and also obscuring the masculine (and unmistakably African) features of the actual protagonist of the film, Ivan Dixon.

Friday Random #2

2011-02-18T12:05:00.001-08:00

On certain Fridays I'll post five more or less random images, culled from a folder I keep for images downloaded from the internet. I offer them without comment or context -- sometimes I've forgotten the context and origin of the images myself (you can always avail yourself of tineye.com if you're feeling desperate). They're simply things that, for one reason or another, caught my eye and imagination. You can click on them to see larger versions. Here's today's batch:

A place. An object.

2011-02-17T10:43:00.000-08:00

John McCraken
Magic
2008
Stainless steel.
104x14 1/2x17inches 264.2x36.8x43.2cm

Tribute on Glass

2011-02-16T17:51:00.000-08:00

Several poems have been transcribed on the glass of the second-floor entranceway of David Hall. I don't know who did the transcribing, but when I saw the attribution, I saw the story behind it was a sad one:

In loving memory of
Dayton William Lane Moore
Aug 1, 1992-Feb 6, 2011
a collection of original poems

Stop on by and have a read, when you get the chance. An obituary for Moore can be found here.

[Edit: Anza did the transcribing; more info at her blog here, and here.]

Ruined

2011-02-16T00:30:00.000-08:00

Still playing a bit of catch-up with last semester -- here are notes and pics from Aurora's BFA show.

It's perhaps a little surprising to see such a young artist preoccupied with the idea of the "ancient" -- in the way Aurora Winkler filled the gallery with newly-minted ruins. Although it could be argued that the tremulous state of contemporary culture -- the weightless burden of instant obsolescence, the way everything is made from air, blown into different shapes from one moment to the next -- could easily drive one to the refuge of the past. It's a refuge that may be fragmentary and shattered, but what remains at least gestures to a form of permanence. Seeing Aurora's work, I was reminded of Manuel Neri's deliberately eroded figures; I wrote about them elsewhere that they seemed a kind of "pre-emptive sculpture": if time was eventually going to have its way with them, why not cut to the chase, and invite the connotative gravitas that accrues to history's scars and amputations?

There were certain details in Aurora's work that tweaked the idea of a vanished past -- indications that we, the audience, were not standing in the present looking backward -- but rather were were being sent into the future, to view the present day through a scrim of disaster and abandonment. On some of the cracked clay surfaces were spatters of iridescent paint -- vivid, unnatural, chemical -- that were meant to reference the toxic bequeathal we're making to unknown generations. We won't just be leaving ruins -- we'll be leaving irradiated ruins.

Some of the smallest pieces were the most evocative. There were a few ambiguous forms set on simple wood shelves; perhaps they amounted to fragments of vessels, but it was hard to say for sure. It was impossible to tell how "complete" these forms were, or if they suggested a certain self-sufficiency of incompleteness (maybe that's too contradictory, but I'm thinking of artifacts like Sappho's poems, which, with their accidental elisions, seem almost boldly Modernist).

At the risk of being too syntactically cute, the work played with the tension of intention. There was something provisional about the presentation -- shelves, wood palettes, lighting that seemed to derive more from excavation than exhibition -- suspending the objects between the fictional culture that created them, and the equally fictional culture that dug them up and put them on display. How much of the meaning of the objects emanates from the "originating" culture, and how much from the anthropologist culture, reassembling the pieces in its own image? One wall had a scattering of fragments assembled in the broken shape of a human torso and head. Was it a forensic reconstruction of an original configuration -- or did it simply speak of our desire to see our human image in the flotsam and jetsam of the past, even to the point of projecting a human image onto pure rubble? (This thought was probably provoked by the time I spent in New Hampshire, a state that had as its emblem the Old Man of the Mountain, a profile of mountainside granite that had to be lashed together with bolts and cable to preserve its human echo -- until gravity finally overtook resemblance).

The torso-assembly worked especially well with the shadow-play in the gallery. A floorbound lightbulb threw the silhouettes of the audience up there on the wall, to fill in the fragmented outlines of the shape. The whole gallery functioned as a shadow-theater, and that was key to the show's success: in direct light, the pieces looked unconvincing as stage-props seen up close. On the stage, props are leant history by the blur of distance; in the more intimate gallery space, distance was leant by shade. My favorite element of the show was an archipelago of wrecked clay, with a bare lightbulb laid on the floor in front of it. It was easy to imagine a play, with miniature actors, transpiring there -- among the ruins of a volcano-smashed Pompeii, or a bomb-smashed Berlin. A drama had taken place there, and it was primed for a drama to take place there once again.

I have to admit I was skeptical of Aurora's decision to hold her artist's talk in the gallery itself, just because the acoustics and cumulative body heat there can be oppressive. But among the shadows she'd invited, reading from an oversized book on Jung, I understood the importance of her maneuver. It was appropriate for her to step into the shoes of a storyteller, reaching back for that ancient continuity: the person holding court via apparition and firelight.

TateShots Issue 2 - Anthony McCall

2011-02-13T11:40:00.000-08:00

Random Exhibition Title Generator

2011-02-07T11:35:00.000-08:00

I've recently been past along a link to Rebecca Uchill's Random Exhibition Title Generator, and thought that with the upcoming five BFA Exhibition's this semester, it may come in handy to a few. If you aren't one of those few, it is definitely worth checking out for a chuckle.

Look forward to my show in April, now tentatively titled Arbitrary Gaming? The Politics of Too Many Dinner Parties.

-Logan