Artist Talk: Ellie Honl

Last Thursday, the artist Ellie Honl gave a talk on the third floor of the art building (much thanks to the Capital City Arts Initiative, which is currently hosting a show of Ellie's work, "The Heart of the Quandry," at the CCAI Carson City Courthouse Gallery). Her work deals with the subjectivity of extreme psychological states, sometimes playing with the visual rhetoric of psychological tests. The above print combines the cockeyed Es of child vision charts with canaries in various states of horizontality and verticality, playing with the notion of the "canary in the coalmine" as an indicator of safety.

While at grad school, she started using video in conjunction with her prints, as a way of teasing out her pictorial narratives. You can check out some of those clips at her website.

Jon Winet talk and crit

Last week, Jon Winet gave a short talk, and administered a crit to a half dozen or so students. Jon, as well as being an artist and a Professor of Intermedia in the School of Art & Art History at The University of Iowa, is the Program Director for the Capital City Arts Initiative, and seems to do most of the heavy lifting for the CCAI's blog. A major project he's been working on for the past year is The Electoral College, which took the 2008 US Presidential contest at face value as a vast state-hopping piece of theater. Not merely as theater -- but certainly attuned to its theatrical qualities. That's the rub about elections -- they often play out as third-rate theater that, despite the ineptitude of the players and the hollowness of their lines, still manage to change people's lives. This past election cycle was the first time I found the play capable of producing scenes that actually managed to move me, beyond the default responses of annoyance, anger and disgust.

The below is an image from The Electoral College's flickr set:


And here's Jon talking about the project, and how it allows him to wander through an enormous, multimillion-dollar stage set for months at a time: