CCAI: Grad Night

I can't hope to do a better job of summarizing the Capital City Art Initiative's current show, "Grad Night," than Brett M. Van Hoesen did. Hoesen is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at UNR, and her essay on the show is here. The show itself features work by recent graduates of the Art Departments of both Sierra Nevada College and UNR, and runs at the CCAI Courthouse Gallery through September 2. The exhibiting artists are Bryan Christiansen, Aimee Doran, Jeff Erickson, Jonathan Farber, Jonah Harjer, Ahren Hertel, Christina Lee, Jocelyn Meggait, James Nagel, Dominique Palladino and Melissa Swanson. Here are a few pics I snapped at the reception:

Fractured Phobia

Melissa Swanson's BFA show, "Atychiphobia," opened today. The show featured prints, animation, and installation pieces composed of dried rose petals.


The prints hanging on the wall were "reduction prints" -- which also go by the name "suicide prints," if the printmaker is in a black humor mood. The printing block is gouged for the first color, then gouged away further for the second color, and so on, until eventually getting whittled down for the final pass. It's a bit of a tightrope process, since there's no going back. The block has to get killed for you to reach the end of the print.




For Melissa, the technique is tied to the show's title, which means "fear of failure." As Melissa put it, "Atychiphobia" isn't your everyday run-of-the-mill fear of failure -- the kind of fear everyone has, "the same way everyone has a fear of falling out of an airplane" -- but rather, it's a paralyzing fear. A fear so pronounced, it negates the ability to even try. Because if you try, there's that chance you'll fail, and then it will be confirmed: you really weren't good enough. It's better to not even put that on the table.




The floor of the gallery was strewn with rose petals that had images or words printed on them. They crunched nicely underfoot.



Three sheets of rose petals had been sewn together and printed on; at the opposite end of the gallery there was an animation, composed of several printed rose petals that had been scanned before they were discarded for the floor. The same image was printed on several petals, and the animation ran through the printed petals frame by frame: the repeated image remained fairly stable, while the rose petal forms themselves flickered out around them, their veined textures leaving faint impressions on the eyeball as they ran headlong through the projector. The printed imagery revolved around forms of birds and cages. Their silhouettes pulsed with a kind of brittle insistence.

Lo-fi and Proud

Melissa Swanson, a student, has completed a couple shots for a "trailer" for an animated film (an animated film she doesn't intend to actually complete). She's using a melange of techniques -- the backgrounds are woodcut prints, some of the animation is done in Flash and then printed out on transparencies, and then she's shooting the transparencies against the backgrounds with a digital camera -- then compiling the shots with QuickTime. She's also started using paper cut-outs, and painting on the transparencies. You can sometimes see light reflections on the transparencies -- Melissa's been wondering if that's problematic, or if it actually adds something worthwhile. I don't think she intended the shots to look so lo-fi, but she seems to be developing an affection for its lo-fi qualities.

It reminded me of some animation I'd seen by Brent Green -- he does stop-motion animation, drawing on transparencies whose edges you can clearly see -- sometimes the light flares along their edges to pleasing effect. He doesn't try to hide the seams of his process at all, and the layers of lo-fi attack accrete into a genuine aesthetic. Here are some excerpts of his short "Hadacol Christmas" -- I particularly love the scene at the end of the clip, where Santa's sleigh is held to the sky with flickering scotch tape, and a slurry of blurred snow makes the night look like a pulled-apart cotton-ball:



The full animated short can be found on youtube in two parts:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRefdcvqDfw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dcQtpSThEc&feature=related

More films can be found on his website, and he also has a DVD of his films for sale.