| Why hello |
[Jun. 7th, 2007|11:16 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | Sambassadeur - Coastal Affairs [EP] | ] |
Hi,
I haven't posted anything substantial in a while and probably will continue with that trend. I finished my thesis, Lovers' Discourse: A Visual and Feminist Re-Interpretation of Roland Barthes' A Lover's Discourse. I graduated college. I started working for a photographer part-time last week and a project I helped with should be in a medium-sized magazine next week or the week after. I can show you/tell you once it's out, if you continue to be interested. I also got a job with a photo retail place making photo albums, but I still have an interview with another photographer hopefully for another part-time job. Photographers are amazingly nice and it's very encouraging how many interested responses or supernice rejections I've gotten. I'm moving to Brooklyn sometime next month (TBD). I might start an art/photo blog after Seth's example or contribute to that one. We'll see.
Send me a comment, message, e-mail, something--I'd like to hear from you.
( Visual evidence: ) |
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| Selections from Winter Break, Part I |
[Jan. 14th, 2007|05:32 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | lee dorsey - the ep collection (see for miles) | ] |
Kiki Smith at Guggenheim
 Smith's work, which is preoccupied by body parts, ailments, fluids, and other such themes was particularly striking to me as someone who has dealt with a long list of medical problems in the past. My favorite pieces were sculptures made out of paper of people that were generally gorged open, exposed, and vulnerable. Their frailty, knowing how easily they could destruct and how tenuously they remained together, was particularly poignant.
What struck me as odd going through her retrospective was the amount of physical energy and ability needed to make these works of disablement. The exhibit made me ruminate on the many ideas I had last Winter and Spring while I was going from doctor to doctor, but my complete inability to do any photographic work.
Although that slight contradiction gave an insincere tone to some of the work, her mixture of fragility, morbidity, the female abject, with a hint of whimsy was, surprisingly, charming. Seth may have thought the weakness of the exhibit was a one-note morbid tone, but I think there is a sly humor present. Among kidney stones, you find woodland animals; next to portraits of Wolf Girl, starfish.
Tropicalia: A Revolution In Brazilian Culture at Bronx Museum of Art
I had been looking forward to seeing this exhibit for over a month, and it was not at all disappointing. Perhaps the best aspect of the exhibit was the many different sources that the pieces drew from: music, sculpture, installation, prints, magazines, and even clothing (although, notably, not many if any photographs).
 
The exhibit seems to repeatedly defy museum culture, inviting you to interact, touch, and play. It's unsurprising that the museums that it has toured are not "first tier," between the threat of audience manipulation and a large amount of "pop" media. The attitude was uniquely casual. My favorite pieces (and Seth's as well) perhaps best embodies this: two installations by Helio Oiticica that invite you to take off your shoes and walk around these favela-like constructions. Inside you find parrots, sand, a hammock, different textures and smells. The experience of walking on sand in the winter in New York City is itself somewhat invigorating, but going through the labyrinthine installations and discovering the many secrets is akin to being a child again. The pieces are rife with small spaces to rest, to hide, to read. Unlike the favelas they imitate, removed from the real context of these lower class neighborhoods, these are places to explore and discover--they regain an innocence unimaginable in that which they represent.
Unfortunately, the catalog, which does more than merely document the exhibit but also pulls together important texts and weaves a history of the movement was sold out and has already become out of print. If anyone has a lead as to where to find one, I'd be extraordinarily grateful. |
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| I don't have very much to say anymore |
[Dec. 21st, 2006|12:39 am] |
| [ | mood |
| | drained | ] |
| [ | music |
| | The Teddy Bears - Original Collection | ] |
My semester is over. My portfolio for grad school is all printed, and basically done. My Parreno paper is completed, and hopefully good. I've certainly become a big fan. I'm moving on to the thesis...soon. I have a stack of books like Unequal Lovers, The Language of Images, and The Culture of Love to get through. The language of love, meet the language of images.
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| Reality of a reflection of reality |
[Oct. 16th, 2006|04:11 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | tired | ] |
| [ | music |
| | WFMU - Special with Julia Vorontsova | ] |
I've been rather busy, but right now I'm home for break and I'll be living for Binghamton tomorrow. I have a topic for my thesis: a visual adaptation of Roland Barthes' A Lover's Discourse, which, if you're unfamiliar, is like a dictionary of lover's terms. However, my version will also have a few "corrective" elements in regards to his gender and sexual politics. (You can view excerpts here: http://www.koolpages.com/almalaika/Barthes.html.)
I'm reading all there is to read about Philippe Parreno for a paper I'm going to do on his film The Sorter's Bridge. I would really like to compare it to Marker's Letter from Siberia, but since that doesn't fit the criteria of the paper, I'm getting a crash course in Godard's "radical" period and trying to track down those films. I watched one of the first Dziga Vertov group films British Sounds the other night, which was incredibly didactic, but had an interesting play between two tracks of sound that overlap and conflict. I'm trying to figure out the relationship between representation and reality.
"A movie is not reality, it is only a reflection. Bourgeois filmmakers focus on the reflections of reality. We are concerned with the reality of that reflection." -- Jean-Luc Godard
But most importantly,
Poll #846253
Halloween
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 5
What should I be for Halloween? Please elaborate with photos in comments.
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| This is all sounding a little too La Jetee |
[Oct. 3rd, 2006|12:58 am] |
| [ | mood |
| | a little funny | ] |
| [ | music |
| | VA - Seth's Anniversary Mix | ] |
Everything suddenly feels very cyclical as a senior. When I went to convocation this year, I could only really think about when I was a freshman and we sat in the balcony and made jokes. (Why are convocation lectures so mediocre?)
Everyone that I see and don't know looks like a doppelganger for someone else, the younger version that's stepping in our place. I feel like I am constantly doing double takes to assure myself that these people really are strangers and I'm still in the present. I haven't found my own double, unsurprisingly, as they are never flattering to one's vanity. I'm realizing now how much I really have changed, that I'm generally a much happier person now even though I used to identify my freshman year as the happiest because it was all so new and exciting (and I was drunk all the time, it seems). I feel like I've gotten things together and (in a terrifying way) have a very distinct direction.
And, in other news, ironically, this mystery is solved and looks a little like fate in a lot of weird, small ways:
(Gabriel Orozco, first spotted in America Photo, age 14)
Furthermore, a livejournal post that I wanted to write this summer is instead going to be my final research paper for my art history seminar. I'm totally going to score some student work copy DVDs! |
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| Update |
[Sep. 15th, 2006|02:02 am] |
| [ | mood |
| | I'm sick of looking at beef st | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Christian Marclay - Records 1981-1989 | ] |
I'm back at school. I moved into a house. I went to Binghamton. I have 400 pages of Robert Smithson to read for Monday (I'm about 200 pages in). Here are some photos!
This is my new ant farm:
( people pictures promised ) |
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| Seth and I made Beef Stronganoff! |
[Aug. 11th, 2006|12:47 am] |
| [ | music |
| | the honeymoon killers - les tueurs de la lune de miel | ] |
But the best part of cooking, is eating. And no one is better at eating than Emerald.
Sethie tries to eat like Emerald, but let's face it, no one can compare.
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| Art Art Art: Part 2 |
[Aug. 4th, 2006|12:11 am] |
| [ | mood |
| | are these annoying? | ] |
I went to see the Data Mining show at Wallspace for the Gerhard Richter piece (disappointing), but ended up falling in love with Dora Garcia. They had the print version of All The Stories, a collection of story tropes, movie plots, and little anecdotes that comprise every story ever told. The stories all seem familiar, you've heard them before, you've seen that movie, but there's always something off, they can't be placed. The project has evolved into a weblog, but it lacks the elegance of the huge book with only a few sentences on each page that was featured in the gallery.
430- An irresistibly attractive man with a turbulent past and an uncertain future arrives in a small town and falls in love with the local beauty. Unfortunately she is engaged to the local tycoon.
866- A rich man pretends to be poor, just to be sure that the girl he loves will marry him for who he is and not because of his money.
1671- In a wonderland inhabited by fiery salamanders and winged spirits, good fights evil in search of a life-giving talisman whose finder will rule the world.
Garcia also has several other online projects, which like All the Stories have an element of performance to them. She seems to wear her influences on her sleeves, with obviously referential or derivative content based on work by Dan Graham, Jorge Luis Borges, etc.
The New Collage show at Pavel Zoubek was very hit and miss, but had a number of gems. There was a catalog to the show, but the reproductions were pretty awful and it was expensive.
Javier Pinon does collages, mostly involving chairs and cowboys in surreal and chaotic arrangements or the very moment before chaos occurs. I can't find much online, but here is the piece I saw and another piece that's quite different from the rest of his work.
Marshall Weber has apparently had run ins with Homeland Security: Department of Publication Control, which retracted the publication of one of his books. The work that attracted me to him, however, didn't have overtly political meaning (that I picked up on), but was a seamless photocollage that destroys space yet, at first glance, looks simply like a photo. I also can't find much by him, though he has a rather interesting story and has apparently put out a lot of books. Maybe I can ILL him in the fall? This is the piece from the show (sorry it's so small) and the only other piece I could find.
Micha Laury is another artist I unfortunately can't find much about, although he appears to be a fairly big name. His jellyfish are really dazzling--they come in vibrant colors, they're huge, they hang above your head, but it seduces you just to sting you.
---
Today was my final class of the summer and although I don't think I really gained many technical skills (although I was pushed to use the ones I know a bit more), the critique was really useful. Jeff was very encouraging and positive; he thought I had a really good shot at grad school and suggested I really look in to Columbia. We talked about how to organize a portfolio, which was really helpful because that's not at all how I thought it would work. Now I just want to go shoot, shoot, shoot! |
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| Cute cute cute |
[Jul. 31st, 2006|11:50 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | caaa-ute | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Chris Watson - Outside the Circle of Fire | ] |
Enough of serious art and serious movies, here's the latest in belly news...
And this is what I've been doing in my Pussycat Studies summer class. Selections from a project called "Observing Emerald."
Here she is enjoying her new sheets.
   
Then she and I settled down to watch The Cat Returns for my Kitten Classics of Cinema class.
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