the dust is here to stay

Sue Webster made some great trash pile art.....

Currently the New Gernres class is preparing to install the long anticipated exhibit "NWGN 430: Starland" this weekend. We have been brainstorming on how to make a large sculptural piece made of cardboard and other things we can find. I was playing around with making box piles and here are some phone snapshots.
I like this but it needs to be 100,000,000 times bigger :)

Bugging

Student Jesyka Hayworth has painted a mural in the back stairwell of the art building -- it was a midterm assignment for New Genres. Check it out when you get the chance -- here's a taste of it:

Static

Two weeks ago I completed an installation in a secret niche on the SNC campus. It was up long enough for some friends and the New Genres class to pass through. Here is some documentation, though it seems to fall short of the actual space.

The piece was done in two parts, the first part consisted in following a map to a special aspen grove (while the leaves were changing) and collect data. the second part was rebuilding the space with the data I collected.

Things I speculated/ buzz-words:

Databases

language barriers and translations

man machine vs. natural machine

pixels/leaves

Abbreviated Nut

Brittany Sterling staged a bit of the Nutcracker for the New Genres class (and a couple other classes too -- she basically closed down the third floor of the art building for a half hour as she set things up). She's been performing in the Reno Dance Company's production of the venerable Nut, and ported over some of the dancers to do the Waltz of the Flowers on the scuffed linoleum of the printmaking area.


It was all very intimate; no room for the ellipsis of any stage wings. A few stretches with pointe shoes poking out from under some sideline curtains, and they were off.





Off to the side, "offstage," Tchaikovsky's music had to compete with the noisy bodily imperatives of the dancers, breathing heavy and swigging bottled water. At one point, there was a brief collision, followed by a whispered "sorry," and one strip of the side curtains was taken down either by a curving arm or a whirling foot -- that bit of business might've been followed by a balletic expletive, I'm not sure.





Bonus pic: after the dancers were done, to the right, Lane was piecing together a big grid of a picture of the ebola virus. It was hard not to think of it as a floorplan for some of the interweaving waltz patterns.

Nesting

Back in 2008 I did a brief blog post about "The Nest," a structure Babs Laukat put together for the New Genres class; the nest still stands, though winter (and probably other forces) have removed the light fixture and the strands of twine. Kristin has been talking to Babs about staging a performance in the Nest; earlier today, Kristin worked with Teryn Jackson, a dance student at UNR, on working out some movement for the space. Sometimes a place just calls out for an activity. Teryn was very game, playing out suggestions from Kristin, me, Babs, and Bab's brother, Daniel. By the end she was covered in strips of bark and bits of wood; we gave her a little round of applause. Here are some pics:

Flayed & Displayed

Andrew Hoeppner (aka "Heppy," if it isn't presumptuous to tag him by a nickname in a blog post) had some pleasantly gruesome work displayed behind the art building -- a piece he worked up for New Genres.


The latex pieces looked like patches of skin -- while having some painterly qualities, too, as if someone had razored off and magnified some brushstrokes from an impasto canvas.

They hang somewhere between expressionist extravagence and slaughterhouse effluvia.


In the pictures where there are people in the frame along with the sculpture, I find it impossible to avoid drawing correspondences between the two sets of figures.

The last two photos were nicked from the SNC/FA facebook gallery and Brittany Sterling's blog, respectively.

Curtains For You

For the New Genres class, Becca had people follow a path through the woods behind the art building, reading notes that had been tacked to trees, as sort of markers on the path. Or creators of the path.

She had people walk along the path a slight distance from each other, so everyone could have a kind of "private" stroll through the words. The etiquette was a little weird and provisional. I was behind Russell and I kept slowing down, because I didn't want to intrude on his space.

And then the person behind me (I won't name names) actually lagged a bit too far behind, because he lost the thread of the path, and ended up taking a shortcut around the last few sentences.

These pics are somewhat out of order, and very incomplete. To piece the words together into a coherent thought, you'll have to venture into the woods yourself. I doubt the papers will be there for long; I have a feeling Becca won't want her work to turn into litter. Though the idea of the papers being left, and the sentences decomposing via the whims of rain and wind, is somewhat appealing.

But even if the papers are gone, it's a nice walk. I haven't done much exploring back there, so I saw a few things that were new to me -- between one piece of a sentence and the next, sometimes finding an interpolated backyard.

At the end of the path, there were closed curtains. Some curls of smoke wafted up from behind them. When everyone arrived, the curtains were parted, and a brief performance took place. I didn't have a camera with me at the time, so I have no visual record of the performance itself. I'm in the mood to just leave it at that.

And here, after the audience was gone, is the view from the stage.

Babs' Butterflies

Babs Laukat recently posted up some nice work on her blog. Click here to get a little background, and to see a video of the intallation piece, which involves some projected animation.