Pictures at a Junior Portfolio Review: Fall 2011

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.

Of Prospectives and Pig Bladders

I'm still catching up on activities that happened towards the end of last semester or over the break; one of the highlights of that period for me was the Prospectives 09 festival, a digital arts festival organized by Joseph DeLappe, a Professor of Digital Art at UNR.

I wrote a review of a portion of the festival for Rhizome -- specifically, an exhibit hosted at UNR's Sheppard Gallery. Here's a quote:

It seemed there was a common desire to enlist the spectator as a participant. Open until December 16, 2009, the works included in the show involved a fair amount of “play,” but the artists seemed attuned to the complexities involved with the interaction between machine and participant, thus it’s play inflected with critique.

I didn't have room to cover the performance aspect of the festival, a cluster of multimedia pieces presented at the Nevada Museum of Art. The performances were worthy of a write-up in themselves, though at this point I only have a couple fugitive notes to offer. Below are two photos Joseph sent me. The first shows Stephanie Lie's Vibrating Milk, in which a camera trained on a drum head covered with milk sent a live feed to the big movie screen in the NMA's Wayne and Miriam Prim Theater. Modulated sound got the drum head vibrating, and the milk was perturbed into a variety of shimmering patterns -- on the big screen, we were treated to a mix of a constantly-shifting abstract expressionist painting, and a 60s psychedelia rock show backdrop.

The second photo is of Natalia Jaeger's Miranda. Jaeger offered the audience bananas, and then invited the audience to watch a clip of Carmen Miranda projected on her underwear. We watched the Busby Berkely-choreographed dancers navigate their giant bananas through their geometric progressions (even without the upskirt proscenium, it would be impossible to miss the phallic implications of a bevy of female dancers wielding massive bananas. But it was still a bit of a revelation to see the bananas, at one point -- as they were ranged into a circular bullseye -- suddenly become teeth in a canary vagina dentata). And while we watched, Jaeger regarded the audience with eyes of dull malice, slowly chewing the heads off a small bouquet of flowers.



Nor did I have space, in the Rhizome review, to elaborate on the swarm of flying pig bladders that were set whirling in the air above the UNR campus one evening. They were the work of Doo-Sung Yoo, who has created a variety of pieces that meld robotics with animal parts.

(first pic courtesy of Joe, the others are mine)




I actually caught the outdoor installation by accident, on my way to an unrelated dance performance at UNR. After the dance, on my way through the Church Fine Arts Building at UNR, I came across a cluster of the pig bladder balloons corralled at the end of an empty hallway, quietly jostling each other, unattended. It was gratifyingly eerie.

Local Event: Prospectives.09

UNR is hosting what sound like a very exciting three-day festival of digital artworks, starting this Thursday, Nov. 12. Events include a symposium, an exhibit at the Sheppard gallery, a projection at the Fleischmann Planetarium, and performances at the Nevada Museum of Art.


As the blurb has it:

Prospectives.09 is an international festival showcasing the work of graduate and Phd candidates working across a diverse spectrum of digital arts practice. The festival showcases the work of 37 artists and performers from throughout the United States and internationally (including artists from Australia, United Kingdom, India, South Africa, Chile, Sweden and Portugal).

The main link is here:
http://www.unr.edu/art/prospectives09.html

And even if you can't make any of the local events, they're hosting some net art as well, which you can experience from the comfort of whatever seat you happen to be sitting in right now. The direct link for that is:
http://www.unr.edu/art/prospectives09/netart.html

More on Hockney's Pawings

A couple days after making a post about getting my sea legs with iPhone's Brushes app, a really good article about David Hockney's iPhone paintings showed up in my mailbox, via the New York Review of Books. The article is also online, and I highly recommend giving it a read (although there is one piece of genuine misinformation in it: namely, that you can't use a stylus with the app. It's interesting info that Hockney exclusively uses his thumb to paint on the iPhone, but the pogo stylus works just fine).


One amusing detail from the article is the author's equivocal language when it comes to describing the act of digital painting:

...Brushes, which allows the user digitally to smear, or draw, or fingerpaint (it's not yet entirely clear what the proper verb should be for this novel activity), to create highly sophisticated full-color images directly on the device's screen...

At first glance, I thought this was a ridiculous hangup, but in thinking it over, "Brushes" really does blur the distinction between drawing and painting. Maybe it'd make sense to hybridize the words: "dainting" or "pawing," the latter being especially suitable for those who use their thumbs.

At any rate, the author of the article, Lawrence Weschler, displays a nice sensitivity to the technical aspects of working with the iPhone -- the way the black screen can function as a looking glass, and the appeal of the screen's self-illumination. The self-illumination makes the screen a natural for sketching in the dark, opening up possibilities for sketching at dawn or dusk (or in the dead of night). The flip side, however, is that full sunlight (which is a boon to paper or canvas) presents problems of reflection on the glass. I actually tried to make a picture of the beach at Sand Harbor one day, and found it fairly impossible to make headway against the glare on the screen.

Hockney, as usual, makes for a lively source of quotes. It's funny that he doesn't like the new version of Brushes, "Brushes 2" -- I haven't yet tried it out myself, but I'm kind of dying to, since it has layers, something I was really aching for in the original version. I don't know if he's just being cantankerous, but you have to love his explanation that he's not actually painting on his phone: "it's just that occasionally I speak on my sketch pad."

I forgot, in my last couple postings on Brushes, to post a link to the Flickr Brushes group, which has a wide variety of art made with the app. There's a lot of attractive work being posted there. Three participating artists whose work I've enjoyed are:

José Carlos Lollo


fhierro (from Madrid)


Fabric Lenny

Cody Cartoon

Congrats are in order for student Cody Garcia, who has an illustration in the current issue of Clay Times. Below is the illo itself, and then in the context of the page. You can read a little more about it on Cody's blog (from which I nicked the pics).