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It's done! All of the pictures have been taken (967 in total) and the video edited (2min 45sec)! After a month of my self imposed stop-motion crash course, I have more ideas and have learned a ton. But am certainly ready for a break. At the last minute I decided to add a flip-book to the mix. I choose 100 pictures and printed them in both black and white and color. Funny thing is this is the thing I think I'll do again soon, it's very fun to have a tangible little book to play with! The opening, where all 25 or so artists involved displayed what they made,was amazing. All in all, it was a hysterical party. As group shows often are, it was packed, barely room to breath, and tons of energy. But as people came and went a lot of the artists hung around, watching people interact and react to our work, but mostly releasing the energy we'd all been building up alone in our studios all month long. By the end of the night we were grabbing at our cheeks in pain from laughing so much. It turns out, as my friend Jenny pointed out, that fun-a-day didn't refer to all of the fun we had in our studios, alone, day after day, but to the month's worth of fun that exploded that night. read more about this project on my projects and collaborations page
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I'm ending the third week of my fun-a-day. I've actually stuck with it! It's funny, how things are never really what you expect them to be. Every day at work I can't fathom going home and working on it yet again, but I do. It keeps moving forward. And though it is taking up quite a bit of time in the evenings, I seem to have more time and energy for the rest of my life. Maybe woking in the studio is similar to working out in that way? At the first of the year I was teetering on the edge of quitting my job (which wouldn't be that simple, but it was what I wanted on most days), barely had the energy to come home and make dinner, and the house was turning into a complete disaster. I just couldn't keep up. Now, three weeks into this I'm on top of the world at work, I've completely rearranged my house and attic (I didn't see that one coming), I'm getting rid of things, clearing out the cob-webs metaphorically and actually, and producing this video and installation. Could it be because of the time I'm spending in the studio? It just seems too simple. What ever it is, I'm rolling with it. Here is week two of the video, I'm posting this special for Danni, I'm keeping you hanggin with the third week and all of the smoke and fire. I've got to keep you coming back somehow! I'm still having an issue with the first few seconds of the video. I'll have to really figure out how to use youtube soon...
Okay, so the reverb challenge was a bit of a flop. Not a total waste, but truth be told, writing is not my "thing". It's part of all of the good stuff, there is writing involved in everything I do but writing to write, not so much. So, staying true to form and not knowing when to say no, I've taken on a new challenge. I can obsess with the best of them, it just has to be the right subject, I guess. The writing didn't hook me (it may have been to reminiscent of homework) but the art has. Fun-a-day is being organized locally, there are something like 60 people signed up for it. Similar to reverb, the challenge is to make one piece of art a day, everyday in January. To start the year off right! Logically it makes no sense, I could write a blog post in 1/2 and hour, but this little project has me hunched over my studio table for several hours every night after work. But somehow, it speaks to me. At first I thought of making a small object every night, adding them together so that by the end of the month I would have a small installation, much like the 12x12 I did a couple years back for the Harwood. But no, finally being hit with the creative bug that I've been waiting for, I had to make it complicated. Rather than making something new each night, I chose to document my creative process of making, technically, one thing. Okay so I'm stretching the meaning of this one-a-day idea, but I'm an artist, I'm allowed right? So I'm making a doll (which I haven't done since I was 10) and creating a stop motion video of the process (which I have essentially never done- I did get stop motion in the brain because of a blog I read from a reverb link, so reverb did play it's part!). Every night I take 50 pictures of my little doll. She's set up in a box on my desk with my camera set up a few feet away. As you may have predicted (a fun creative idea leaves me blind to reality) this is turning out to be a lot of work. On top of the work itself, is the learning curve. 50 pictures equals about 9 seconds of actual video time. So an hour or twos work of little movements and improvements to the doll should seem like a lot has to transpire, but if I make too much happen in a nights work, it's lost in the blink of an eye in the actual video. Anyway, this is way too much detail. The point is I'm learning as I go, you can see it in the documentation. It's humbling. I'm a bit of a perfectionist, if I'm going to display something, I don't want to show my process or in other words, my mistakes. With this, there is no going back, once a change has been made and the picture taken I can't undo it! So, this is a sure way to whip myself into shape, learn something about creating stop motion, or at least creating my own little techniques. By the end of the month I'll have a four minute (give or take) documentation of my learning, my creative process, inspired and uninspired nights. Here I am at day nine, this is what I have so far. Something is wrong with the first couple seconds of this video, but you get the idea.
Dispossessed was an instillation that was organized around two plays, Parts of Parts & Stitches by Riti Sachdeva and The Circuz by Georgina Hernandez Escobar.. In Elizabeths Sandlin Dwyer, the art directors words "the two plays share a common ground in that they both present the audience with a city broken down by borders, violence and chaos. The people in these two plays find themselves in realms of dispossession, isolation and desperation." I'm really beginning to enjoy working with stage sets and short term installations. It has forced me to work outside of my usual realm of materials. The idea seems to keep coming back to light weight, cheep, and possibly the farthest departure to how I'm used to working; not absolutely durable. For the instillation I made a larger-than-life-size marionette. When I was first introduced to the project and heard that one of the plays was about the circus I immediately had ideas of a marionette. As it turns out the idea of a marionette lent itself to the second play Parts of Parts and Stitches, about the India/Pakistan independence. So much so that by the time the marionette was finished it resembled the iconography of that play possibly more than that of Circuz. The marionette itself was a great thing to work with and I plan on doing more work with this idea soon. You can see in the video on my Projects and Collaborations page, it wasn't as easy to use as a small handheld marionette is. But because of it's size, seeing it moving around in a room with people milling around was something I look forward to exploring more.   |
MeSculptor and jeweler, just trying to keep my head above water. That is, in the art world. Archives
February 2011
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