Smell Like You Mean It

Here are some images from Karl Schwiesow's BFA show reception last week:

Karl himself, in piscatorial attire:

He walked up to one of his pieces, attached a small bellows, and began pumping with his foot.

Along the way to inflation, a few adjustments were made.

The crowd watched the emergence of a green silhouette.

Once the green silhouette was raised to its full stature, Karl produced a poem from his slicker, and read it (the title of this blog post is taken from the poem's concluding line).

The poem was returned to its pocket.

The performance's devolution was diligently recorded.

The bellows was used to deflate the inflatable.

Or perhaps the inflatable should simply be called the "deflatable" at this point.

And I'll leave you with a few more images from the show, both populated an abandoned.

Glen Cheriton- BFA presentation images

I'm posting Glen's presentation images in conjunction with the other great pictures that are in the previous post.

Much of Glen's work and presentation was a discussion of the fine line between art and science. The meticulous documentation of his work is as much apart of the show, as the show itself. So much of science is the documentation of process. So much of Glen's art is the experimentation of process- mutual dependence, action and influence- reciprocity, the title of Glen's blog.

I think I was most caught up in the discussion of time. I have always had a strictly linear view of time- like many, I imagine. Our society and relationships and experiences operate on the premise of past, present and future. However, recently I have come to view time, or emotions in time as being something far more fluid and cyclical in nature. The idea of a linear quality to time is perhaps a construct to deal with the emotional nature of existence.  

Glen's time lapse photo of the stars (below) gives time an orbit. The images of stars that exist now to us, are potentially long gone. The 16mm film reel loops, no beginning, no end. The cup exists always as matter is exists infinitely. 

In the words of Carl Sagan, a 'humbling and character-building experience'.

Glen Cheriton BFA

Glen’s show, Aggregate: of all our joys and sufferings, displays many different photographic processes that work out his interests in both space and time. A flickering 16 mm movie reel, star-like pin holes of light coming from the window and wrapping around the body, negative strips of warped sequences, and a very large image of stars in their orbit were all a part of the gallery space. The title of his show comes from a quote by Carl Sagan, about an image of earth from taken by the Voyager space probe when it reached Saturn, in which Earth is just a mere blue pixel.

“If you look at [the picture], you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.”

Glen spoke about how he believes time to not be a linear and how photography does not just capture a moment in time – every photograph is of a duration of time. He showed how it can encompass a whole event. One idea that came up during his talk is how art and science can mix with one another. One of the reasons Glen enjoys photography is that it uses an instrument – the camera – which has been used for both artistic and scientific ends.

Art is often used to display scientific processes, or to simply illustrate an organism. Film and photography have been integrated into many scientific explorations to obtain footage for research, and to share with the public. Since we began exploring the moon – some sort of photographic process went along with us. Photography helps to connect us to the world we live in- but Glen wants to see it even farther, connecting us to our entire universe.

Jessica Hayworth BFA - Every Night a New Ghost

  "I'm interested in what happens to a prominent thought when it’s not in use, because thoughts never seem to leave us or go anywhere; they tend to rise up from somewhere and then sink back to somewhere. And that got me wondering about the subterranean mental space that thoughts could occupy." Jessica -opening reception for Every Night a New Ghost

Jessica's multiple images and simple line quality of the voice from the depth of the hole  reference her long interest in graphic novels and story telling. While we (desperately) want to know who or what is in the hole, it is not important - it is more an indefinable space. These images are in contrast with the rich, velvety drawings that seem to explore and grasp at memory,perception and interpretation- those things that become faulty over time.  Two large, neutral colored paintings oscillate between graphic simplicity and the unanchored, ghostly quality of the graphite, echoing our need to understand and resolve the occupant of the hole. 

All the imagery speaks to trying to peek into those places we can't fully know about- our anxieties, fear, death, the soul- ultimately with a sense of humor....