Unctuous Meats, Glittering Displays.

"Artist Jennifer Rubell uses food as her canvas to create culinary concoctions carved straight out of a hedonist's dream. With a near demented sensuality, her installations, for example at the Brooklyn Museum and Simon de Pury's wedding, combine an appreciation for the rustic with a knack for the avant-garde: unctuous meats, glittering displays, an exact chocolate replica of Jeff Koons' rabbit sculpture, all to extravagant, delicious effect" -Gestalten TV
http://jenniferrubell.com/

Blog Migration

I've done some updating of links on the righthand side of this page, trying to get up to speed with art blogs by some our our alumni. I hope that this blog can serve as a hub for readers to keep up on students both present and past. Here is a sampling of material that has appeared on the blogs of graduated students, after having bid the SNC campus adieu:








I've also added a couple blogs by alumni that I probably should have added to the blogroll a while ago -- from Brittany Sterling, Alexandra Rubio and Mickey Ross. If there's any other student, past or present, whose art blog I should be linking to, let me know and I'll roll them in.

Lastly, this isn't a blog, but a current student directed me to a small online portfolio of some work by Jeff Calhoun, who went on from SNC to enroll in a graduate program at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. Here's a sample of what's he's been working on lately -- click here for more.

Arduino A Go Go

Logan is thinking of using Arduino for his upcoming BFA show. Per Arduino's website:

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It's intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.

Here are a couple projects that use Arduino, which Logan showed during his last BFA meting:

Robo rainbow:

robo-rainbow from mudlevel on Vimeo.

Fluid dress:

Fluid Dress from Charlie Bucket on Vimeo.

Light and a face

Godard famously said that all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun. In special cases you could strip that formula down even further -- sometimes you just need some light and a human face.



Well, even under the best of circumstances, maybe that formula doesn't give you a whole movie. I liked Antonioni's The Passenger well enough when I saw it on the big screen several years ago, but I have to admit not much of it really stuck with me. With the exception of the above scene. That I'll take with me happily to my grave. The dialogue and the idea of the scene are too existential-chic, but really, it doesn't matter: movement, color, light strobing across a face, wind streaming through hair, a shift in gaze. Those things can dive straight into your ribcage. The resolution on the youtube clip, of course, can't do it justice.





R.I.P. Maria Schneider

Invisible Photographers

Over break, some people pointed me towards some interesting photography online. First, some images rescued from the past:




These were taken by Vivian Maier -- who, as far as anyone can tell, kept them to herself. She died in 2009, leaving behind hundreds of rolls of undeveloped film; her work has been brought to light by John Maloof, an "eBay entrepreneur and real estate agent," who bought a box of negatives being auctioned off from a storage-locker whose owner had stopped payment. There's more on the story here:

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/07/new-street-photography-60-years-old/?hp

And Maloof's blog, featuring more examples of Maier's work, is here:

http://vivianmaier.blogspot.com/

Her talent is clear; and of course you begin to wonder why, after recording these moments -- many of them intimate, many with a sort of an aura of corner-of-the-eye privacy -- she chose to keep them private. Recorded but private. She must have been a quite circumspect voyeur. Towards the end of her life, what did she remember of her captured moments -- and did she suspect that some day, they would belong improbably to the world?

Photography had always had a stain (or an electric charge) of voyeurism. John Rafman's collection of photos from Google street view embrace voyeurism with the icy rapture of a predator drone lens. Some of the pictures arrest you with the helpless enthrallment of disaster just passed, or disaster immanent (and yet also passed, just passed invisibly). You'll have to click on the second one here to get a better view of it, to see why it's so terrible:




Although I shouldn't oversell the more dramatic images -- they amount to only a portion of the total work. Some of the views are simply beautifully (if accidentally) composed. And of course the accidental nature of their composition is part of their allure. I'm particularly drawn to the images of animals that show up. The animal is incapable of realizing its image is being recorded, and that image is being shot by a camera that is taking a picture outside of any pictorial intentionality (the picture is being taken to record a space on a map, not to really frame and take a "picture"). There's a mutual blankness of subject and perpetrator that amounts to a an almost perfect clarity -- something so clear it seems to dispense with the neccessity of a human eye to see it.

(The effect also has something to do with Victoria's post below, with the animals in the hotel rooms)





This work is quintessential postmodernism -- creating art by curating other peoples' images. Except in this case the images weren't really taken by another person -- they were taken by a machine, an automated camera attached to the top of a car. Postmodernism is partly a reaction to the endless proliferation of images in current culture; that profusion has long ago reached a point of metastasis. No one has to take the images, the images take themselves. This collection of Google street views holds forth the ideal of a disembodied photographer -- one who is everywhere and nowhere. A photographer whose physical safety is never at risk -- but whose punishment is that he's never there to see the outcome of any of his collected moments.

The idea of an artist's artist is familiar; Rafman is perhaps the voyeur's voyeur. And maybe he's simply a conduit for the camera's camera.

An interesting essay by Rafman on his work can be found here:
http://www.artfagcity.com/2009/08/12/img-mgmt-the-nine-eyes-of-google-street-view/

Doug Aitken image installation.

This capturing moving image installation by Doug Aitken is poetry.  To me it is dichotomous. It is quiet, loud, soft, hard, happy, sad etc etc. All the emotions in between that rise out of your brain like liquefaction.  It is the disconnect between known territory and unknown, the combination of a hotel and of wondrous wild creatures. Hence to say I digg it.

Calling for submissions!

The SNC Review is looking for cover art to use in the 2011 issue. Please email an electronic copy of your submissions to sncreview@sierranevada.edu. The dimensions are 11.25 by 8.5 inches and the resolution should be set at 300 dpi. We are looking for all types of artwork for the cover; photos, mixed media, paintings, ceramics, digital collages. Simply scan your work or take a photo and send it in before February 15th, 2011.

Here is a link of last year's cover. http://www.flickr.com/photos/brittanysterlingart/4480269172/ 

The photo was submitted by student, Molly Allen, and the review was edited by alumni, Brittany Sterling.

Logan's SNC Redesign

This has been covered pretty well on SNC's main website itself, but I wanted to at least make a brief tip of the hat to student Logan Lape's great re-design for sierranevada.edu. Logan did the design for this blog and the prior iteration of the Fine Art section of the SNC site as well -- I was happy at the time at how far he pushed that beyond your typical college webpage design, which tends to be a bit staid and square. I figured he could get away with that for the Fine Art Department (you know, because we're "artsy"), but if anything, he pushed the design of sierranevada.edu even further out there. I'm glad the administration had the guts not to balk and water it down.

The redesign got a stellar rating from EDUCheckup:

SNC’s site skyrocketed to 93% and was awarded a rock solid ‘A’ when reviewed on January 11th. Lape commented how phenomenal SNC’s score was “considering Nick DeNardis gives out an average of one or two A's a month on the show.” DeNardis’s assessment criteria includes three categories—visual, information, and code and SNC’s site (97/92/90) totaled 279 out of a possible 300. He lauded the site for capturing and embedding SNC’s uniqueness into every aspect, “Too many institutions ‘follow the leader’ and end up producing design and an experience that is just like the rest. SNC made sure there was no way for people viewing the site to mistake who or what it is talking about.”

You can read the whole press release, set attractively in the pretty pretty design, here.

The EDUCheckup review is below:

Our Lady of the Preserved Sphere, & a Deadpan R.I.P.

Hope everyone had a safe and enjoyable new year's. Here's a parting shot from 2010 -- a few days ago the Library of Congress announced the 25 films they're preserving for 2010. In addition to catching up on some SNC art-related stuff over break, I wanted to link & embed a variety of interesting stuff to read & look at, for any of you out there jonesing for wider art-related material in between the family pleasantries and the wintersport exertions. The Library of Congress list provides a good excuse to embed some of the shorter films -- which can be found on youtube or elsewhere. There was a wide range of selections, ranging from pop-culture heavyweights to independent experimental films. Here's the list (If you want to read some descriptions of the films, click here. There are several personal favorites on it: "McCabe and Mrs. Miller," "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," which is more tough-minded than its reputation might suggest, "The Front Page," "Airplane!", and I still have a soft spot for "The Empire Strikes Back," despite all the oxygen Star Wars sucks up in the culture. The one I most want to see, but haven't yet, is "make Way for Tomorrow," which sounds kind of devastating.)

1) AIRPLANE! (1980)

2) ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN (1976)

3) BARGAIN, THE (1914)

4) CRY OF JAZZ (1959)

5) ELECTRONIC LABYRINTH: THX 1138 4EB (1967)

6) EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, THE (1980)

7) EXORCIST, THE (1973)

8) FRONT PAGE, THE (1931)

9) GREY GARDENS (1976)

10) I AM JOAQUIN (1969)

11) IT'S A GIFT (1934)

12) LET THERE BE LIGHT (1946)

13) LONESOME (1928)

14) MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW (1937)

15) MALCOLM X (1992)

16) MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER (1971)

17) NEWARK ATHLETE (1891)

18) OUR LADY OF THE SPHERE (1969)

19) THE PINK PANTHER (1964)

20) PRESERVATION OF THE SIGN LANGUAGE (1913)

21) SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (1977)

22) STUDY OF A RIVER (1996)

23) TARANTELLA (1940)

24) TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN, A (1945)

25) TRIP DOWN MARKET STREET, A (1906)

Of the experimental shorts, I've never had the chance to see Mary Ellen Bute's "Tarantella" (if you drop her name in youtube, you can see several of her excellent animations). Larry Jordan's "Our Lady of the Sphere" can be seen in a muddy transfer here (come to think of it, it's probably another source for the Ramona Falls video I blogged about a while back).



Click here for a bio of the San Francisco-based Jordan; if you want to see "Our Lady" in a decent transfer, it's on a DVD called "The Larry Jordan Album" -- review here, and you can order it here.

Another selected short available on youtube is from the Prelinger Archive, a great resource that I leaned on heavily, for raw material for the documentary class last semester. "A Trip Down Market Street" is one of the purest expressions of film-as-a-time-machine I've seen: a camera, affixed to the front of a trolley, glides down Market street in san Francisco, recording all the horses, bicycles, pedestrians, cops, and so on, that pass before its fixed gaze -- shortly before the 1906 earthquake hit, and obliterated much of the scene. As someone who made the Market street traverse several times in my decade+ as a San Franciscan, it holds a special sort of temporal whiplash.



You can download a copy of the film from the archive here. A youtube user going by the name lunarparcel created a side-by-side juxtaposition of the film, and a film taken on Market street after the earthquake, here.

Lastly, the inclusion of "Airplane!" allows me to segue into something I saw at the local Savemart a couple days ago -- a Leslie Nielsen birthday card that probably should've been retired, still hanging about on the racks. I hope Nielsen would find it funny. Though now we're beyond knowing:

2010 Trashion

After a bit of a holiday hiatus, I'm starting to bring the blog back to life a bit. Couldn't let these shots go to waste -- from the Design Class' "Trashion Show," a tradition brought to SNC by Kat Hutter, and now continued by Katie Lewis. At the end of the semester, the students walk the runway in outfits fashioned (in both senses) from recycled materials. Here was the 2010 line, paraded back in mid-December -- enjoy.