Assignment #3 Structure Tiffany Blashock

Matthew Richie is the first artist in this movie. He talks about using computers and being able to reproduce photos, and images with out changing the quality of the line. He uses the computers and then sends the design to another guy that also uses a computer and then cuts metal with high powered water. Matthew then puts all the pieces together to create his sculptures.

Fred Wilson likes to put a bunch of objects together. No matter what it is. He says if you do what you really believe in, it says more. My favorite is when he used black glass that was shaped like rain drops and placed them on the wall. He said they could signify oil, ink, or tar. He also used it to signify African Americans.

Fred Wilson also did printmaking. He dropped acid onto the plates to create a bubble effect. He liked how it would lay on his plate. After he printed it, he made the bubbles into cartoon bubbles that would talk to each other.

Roni Horn loves water.She feels it has the complexity of a portrait. She put photographs inside a university in Iceland. People like it because when students walk it's like they flow with the water through the hallways. She loved this locker room for a swimming pool. She loved how every where was tiles and there were no edges. There was also peep holes in the doors. She said the people that built the locker room made it like a game of chess.

At the end of the video artists Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler did a video. The video was about a lady cop that comes from a diner and gives the other cop his coffee. She then talks about her reoccurring dream. She says every time there's an old drunk lady in the diner that tells her to wake up and when she gets back to the car she wakes up.

Assignment #3 Romance Tiffany Blashock

The beginning of Romance the photographer Laurie Simmons made a movie of her photos. She was excited to make her work into a movie. The movie was about love within family and neighbors and problems between the two.

She said American song book and musicals is why romance came into her work. She made dummies and they all looked alike but with different suits. For the movie she used the puppet for the male and a real female to play as the female.

Lori Pittman made all of his paintings in the form of poltergeist or animism that's inhabiting the scene. He likes his paintings to be fake and artificial but able to take the viewer far away. He also prefers landscaping rather than nature itself when he paints.

Judy Pfaff was very interesting. She was born in London and came to America when she was 6. She was always a painter but started sculpture. She started welding. She thought it was weird to weld because she thought that was only for men. She also used other burning tools to create effects in her work.

She recently lost her mother and friends and started working on a new piece. She wanted the show to be emotional basing it on darkness and a wilder characteristic. She got big tree roots, cleaned and painted them. She had the white roots hanging from the ceiling with the black roots underneath with other materials used. She got emails from viewers saying they saw sadness and loss, which is exactly what she was trying to portray.

The last artist was Pierre Huyghe. He creates worlds out of his art. After he creates these worlds he wants to enter them. He wants people to experience more of an emotion than simple narration. He visited Antarctica to see all the whiteness. He then made a play about the island. He made the music sound like the island too.

Assignment #3 Printmaking Artist Tiffany Blashock

www.mustafahacalaki.com

Another printmaking artist I found very interesting was Turkish artist Mustafa Hacalaki. I chose him because his work caught my eye when i first visited his page. I didn't see his printmaking work right away. It was his photography that first caught my eye. Then I saw his printmaking work and they were all different and eye catching.

A lot of his printmaking is with insects. Each one is different though. Many of the silkscreens are different colors and are very bright. My favorite is the dragonfly. I really like the colors he used.

Mustafa used many different processes. He used silkscreen, with most of them in color. He also did engravings and lithographs. They were all black and white besides the dragonfly lithography I posted.

Assignment #3 Printmaking Artist Tiffany Blashock

http://www.gerardoruizart.com/

One of the artists I have chose is Gerardo Ruiz Maldonado. As I was searching for printmaking artists, I came upon him. His work caught my eye. It was very different.It looks like he put a lot of detail and time into his work. There really isn't any description of his work. But after looking at most of his pieces, it looks a lot of them have to do with Mexican culture or animals and plants.

I chose him because his work is very different. His work also looks like it took him a lot of time to finish. The two pictures above are my favorite. I'm not sure what the bottom one really is but it reminds me of a dark flower. The other interested me because of all the detail and they way he etched everything. I also liked how the corner looks like there is light coming into the jungle.

Most of the words on his website were Spanish. But most of them I was able to translate. He used zinc and iron for a lot of his etchings. He also used nitric acid to make the images on the plates. Some of the mediums were dry point, mezzo tint, aquatint, etching, and experimental tech.

Blog Assignment #3 New York visit, Megan Combs

I visited both the International Center of Photography (ICP) and the Museum of Modern Art (the MoMA) while on the New York bus trip. There were quite a few interesting exhibits being shown at each of the sites. As a studio major with a photography concentration, I mainly focused on the photographic exhibits, but I did view other works as well while at the MoMA.

The first location that I visited while in New York was the International Center of Photography. Of the many photographic exhibits on display in ICP, the work of one photographer in particular caught my eye. Pinar Yolacan had a series of five large photographic prints on display. These images were portraits of five different women in front of a black background. Upon first glancing at the series from a distance, it appeared to be an ordinary, well photographed edition of chemical prints. However, what is not evident when viewing these photographs from afar is the key element in each of the images and perhaps what makes them so interesting and almost taboo—each woman in the display is draped in some type of animal innards.

As I read the artist statement, I learned that Yolacan visited Itaparica Island (off the coast of Brazil) and while she was there she met and took snapshots of the women that appear in this series. First, she took snapshots of these five women and then later revisited them to make these portraits after having designed garments for them using animal products and based on Portuguese fashions. She shopped at local market places to find these parts and mixed them with rich materials such as velvet to create these shockingly strange articles of clothing.

The women are posed in similar ways, always very direct and proud as if they are completely comfortable and content. Their eyes address the viewer in a somewhat startling way that seems to say: “There is nothing strange about this.” Each photograph in the series is well shot and well printed, with neutral colors and strong contrast. The arrangement of the photographs (as you approach the series from right to left) starts out with the less shocking of the images, the photograph with the most subtle animal innards incorporated, and then transitions into more obvious and startling photographs. I found this exhibit to be especially interesting. I was drawn to the photographs at first and then I became extremely interested in them when I realized that I was not looking at ruffles on a woman’s collar, but rather animal intestines. I thought this approach to the conventional portrait was very creative and unique.

I was also very interested in the work of a German photographer, Thorsten Brinkmann. He photographs himself wearing rather strange costumes created from cast-off clothing and salvaged household objects either found in the street or flea markets. This series is another example of a unique take on classic portraiture. His figure is often presented in conventional ways, mimicking many familiar portraits, however; his face is always masked entirely by some type of clothing or everyday item. Brinkmann uses a very diverse color palette, employing the use of both highly saturated, bright colors as well as very neutral, almost painterly, classic colors. His photographic work is displayed in a very unique and interesting way that creates an environment for the viewer. He does this by filling the entire space from wall to floor with found objects including a door, wallpaper and a bookshelf (to name a few). He also frames his photographs with salvaged frames. I very much appreciated Brinkmann’s self-created environment, which brought photography and sculpture together in one display.

At the MoMA, I first visited the New Photography exhibit. The work of six artists was on display in this section, which frankly I was not thoroughly impressed by. The New Photography exhibition included color photographic prints and collages. I did appreciate some of the collage images, the work of Sara VanDerBeek for example; however the rest of the exhibit underwhelmed me. One artist whose work I could not even begin to imagine why it had been selected by the MoMA was Leslie Hewitt.

Hewitt’s images were of mundane subjects and seemed very much like snapshots. However, the only seemingly interesting characteristic of this display of five photographs was that they were all turned upside down. Although this was obviously a unique way to display one’s work, it also seemed completely ridiculous to me. I hoped to find some amazing clarification of this while reading the artists statement and one sentence did come close to justifying this display of photographic prints, “destroying the illusion that photos are windows onto a particular world.” This I understood. The series seemed to have a solid foundation of intent; however, in my opinion it was not executed well. Although I completely understand one’s desire to take a photograph and remove it from our very literal and direct visual world, I do not think that taking pictures of bland subject matter and flipping them over as if it somehow makes the images more intriguing was a great way to go about this. I found this body of work extremely unsuccessful.

Also at the MoMA, I walked through the other photo exhibits where the work of photographers such as Richard Avedon was on display. Unlike the New Photography exhibition, I thoroughly enjoyed this. I also ha d the chance to view the paintings on display on the fourth floor which showed works by artists such as Picasso, Dali, Pollock and others. I found it fascinating to see such well known works in person and get a real sense of their scale and overall appearance. I also found the Erotic Object: Surrealist Sculpture exhibition to be rather interesting. There were sculptures on display by artists such as Man Ray, Alberto Giacometti, Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp and several others. It was fascinating to see sculptures by so many different artists who are more well-known for their paintings or photography than for this type of artwork.

Blog Assignment #3 Printmaking Artist (#5) Sarah Monaco

http://www.ouidatouchon.com/index.html

The artist, Ouida Touchón, is another exceptional printmaking artist. I like this artist because she uses a lot of color as well. She uses a variety of colors adding detail to the simple subjects portrayed in her pieces. A wide range of tones gives each work its own uniqueness

and leaves the viewer with a aesthetically pleasing feel. A lot of movement is displayed on her piece by having swirls and objects flow off the page. This causes the viewer's eye to follow the stream of movement and look at the entire piece. She sets up the movement of the pages flawlessly because she'll have something start off the page and continue around until you reach a spot more in the center that changes color or the restricts the flow for a little. This sudden break in the flow of the piece forces the viewer to focus on that object which causes the obstruction. However, the viewer's eyes once again pick up on the movement and weaves her way across the piece. The movement of the pieces is done perfectly to ensure that the viewer notices every aspect of the work of art.

I picked the two artworks above as my examples of her artwork. I chose these two pieces because they were the most visually pleasing to me. The first piece, "Long Otter's Shirt", using an assortment of colors and have great movement. There are various patterns and textures involved causing a greater attraction to the eyes. I also really like how the bright yellow shirt is is so vibrant and airy. The media used was 2 plate reduction woodcut In the second piece, "Ascending Spiral", I love the brown and blue colors used. They complement each other perfectly and the spiral causes you to following the page downwards. The blue light-bulb looking object really pop against the background. The media used was woodcut/ solarplate etching.

Blog Assignment #3 Printmaking Artist (#5) Sarah Monaco

http://www.worldprintmakers.com/english/lieberma/liebetch.htm
I found the printmaking artist, Meyer Lieberman, to be an interesting artists. I really like his artwork because it is rich in brilliant colors. He uses bold colors that attract you eyes immediately while at the same time he adds contrast to the pieces by utilizing neutral tones. The composition of his pieces focus on simple ideas but are carried out with such vibrant colors that it causes one to be drawn in. I also really like his use of warm and cool colors together like in the pieces above.

The piece "Friends", with the woman and the cat, is appealing because of the cool blue and green tones that are complemented by the values of orange. In the second piece, "Lighthouse", I love the use of red and yellow together in this piece because it makes me think of the sea during a sunset. The shadings in the water is pleasing and also the little boats in the background. In both works the space is used nicely, but at the same time it is not too busy. He gives movement to the pieces by having dots of color go off the page (for example in "Lighthouse" the red dots flow off the page). Meyer Lieberman's artworks are screenprints with multiple layers of color.

His pieces remind me of Impressionism in painting. The artwork is much like Impressionism because he focuses on catching the "fleeting moment". It looks as if he is trying to capture the simplistic beauties found in life. Also, similarly to Impressionism the ink on the piece is not soft but rather visible like little dots all over the page. Lastly, he seems to capture the light beautifully in his landscape pieces.