#ui-intermediaconcepts

[asacroweintermedia-blog]

@ui-intermediaconcepts As far as I can tell, I’m finished with all my blog posts, my about page, and my works pages and all the links are working.  Thanks for a great class, everyone!!

[phantomintermedia-blog]

Hey @ui-intermediaconcepts! Looks like I’m finished with my about page, all the links on for my blog posts are working, and my works page is up and ready to be viewed! It’s been real and I can’t wait for next semester! Phantom out

[joeflez]

Amercia’s Most Wanted: Fame

[flezner]

(Untitled)

I thought this movie was super entertaining and took a fun stab at the elite art world. The moments that stick out to me the most were the scenes with Madeleine, Monroe, and Ray Barko and his team of workers.

I thought Madeleine was very witty and was smart. I didn’t see her really as “he bad guy” in the movie. It just seemed like she knew the art world well and knew how to run it. Watching her see the potential in artists and then play to their strengths was very impressive to me. 

I thought Monroe was annoying at first but then as he started talking about his work, I got more into it. By the end, I liked his work a great deal. My only issue with extremely minimalist art like that is that it’s very difficult to find substance behind it without the artist there explaining their work. If it needs to be explained to make someone feel something, is it successful art? I would like to believe I would get there without the artists help, but we will never know.

Lastly, I thought Ray Barko was an extremely interesting man. The way that he has pulled together a team to bring his vision to life is very inspiring to me. I thought this was a genius move. I have often thought of things I would love to create, but do not obtain the skill to implement it. If I had a diverse team of artists the way he did, I would be able to make more things and together we will become a better team of artists. However, I do not know how to do this or think that it would be easy to get people to make things with/for you and then slapping your name on it.

I will do more research!

[sarahshoemakerphoto-blog]

I clicked on the Yellow Door Gallery link simply out of curiosity because yellow is one of my favorite colors. When I got to their website I read the homepage and was instantly intrigued because it’s held in a private home. It seems so simple and I love that!  After exploring the website a little more, I learned that they put on salons. This is something I never heard of before and they explained it to be “as a place and forum that brings people together through shared experiences with visual, aural and performance art”. 

[monetcantbuymelove]

Anicka Yi

“Life is Cheap”

Winner of the 2016 Hugo Boss Prize

Guggenheim

The Hugo Boss Prize is awarded every other year to any artist of any age and nationality. Less than ten artists are nominated by curating judges from the Guggenheim, and only one is chosen to show their exhibition and receive 100,000 dollars.

Needless to say, this award undoubtably favors artist who work big. Not necessarily in scope, but in concept as well. I’d say Anicka Yi makes big work in both of those senses.

“Life is Cheap” is not just a giant, it’s an environment, one that Yi uses to challenge you. You don’t get to experience her work on your own terms, every part of you and your sensory experience is in her hands.

The air around you is filled with a foreign scent, one specifically designed by Yi working with molecular biologists. The scent is designed to be a cross between the natural oder of an Asian woman, and the pheromones of an ant. 

Speaking of ants, take a look at one of the room sized dioramas on one end of the hallway. It’s filled with millions of ants, milling about in what looks to be more of microchip than an ant farm. 

On the other end of the hallway, is another room. This one filled wall to floor with agar plates, spewing with colorful bacterial growth. Thankfully there is a pane of glass that separates you from it.

It’s a lot to process, are you shocked? Are you disgusted? Are you fascinated? I can say one thing, you are certainly not bored. Yi has succeeded in making a new world in this hallway, but more importantly she has succeed in making you forget about the world you came from. The mind works fast, and adapts quickly to new environments, but in the moment of adaption, it is vulnerable. 

Yi takes advantage of that vulnerability, because she has some things to say and a few things that she wants you to reconsider. Let’s say, for example, that you’re afraid. You’re looking into the germ room, and thinking that the black plague may very well be growing in there. Or your eyes inch toward the ants, imagining those groping incectoid feet crawling all over you, over taking you. Wow, what a gift. Yi has just given you fear, real fear. A genuine emotional reaction welling up inside you begging to be examined, unpacked, and reconsidered. Think, you are in the Guggenheim, you are safe. These creatures around you, they are extremely visible yes, but they are also extremely common, they exist with us. But we perpetuate the myth that our hands are free of bacteria after we wash them, and our potato salad has never had one ant crawling inside it. Fear is natural, but it is also irrational, in that it does not spur one to make exclusively rational choices. Yi may give you that reaction of fear and then also provide you with this safe space to better understand that fear, and what about it motivates you.

[eissimare]

Photo: seattleartmuseum.org

This was a cool photo I stumbled upon fairly quickly after poking around on the Seattle Art Museum website. It caught my eye due to the snowy environment, and the grounded woman in center. I have a story that I want to actualize one day in some sort of form—podcast, comic, or something else—and it deals with a woman who must explore a wintry landscape, oftentimes by herself. It immediately reminded me of my character, and although the image is grainy, I can see my character in this picture. The woman seems determined, undeterred by the snow.

I checked out what the photographer, Yeondoo Jung, was up to currently. After some research, it appears he’s testing out virtual reality with images of New York City surrounding a viewer, where a viewer can direct attention at certain neighborhoods and begin listening to a story from someone who’s from that neighborhood. Some info on that project can be found here.

There’s this beautiful video of this project, Six Points, right here as well. The voices are diverse, and as I’m listening to it now, I find it absolutely stunning. 

This is work I admire greatly—I’m a fan of storytelling, and an advocate for making space for voices that may not always be heard. Looking at this video now, I’m wishing I could have seen the whole thing. It’s immersive and intimate, and capturing everything in one still moment really adds to the stories of the individuals Jung features.

[shangxiaban]

For the SALEM ART WORKS program that I think is really interesting especially salem2salme, a lot of different artists come everywhere, stay together, share the ideas and work together that will really helpful.

[sha-zap]

Taken from Documenta14.de, from an article titled, “Memory, Image: On Rosa Luxemburg’s Prison Letters and Gender Violence” By Sean O’Toole

This article from Documenta caught my eye with Ana Mendieta’s image of a silhouette in the snow, covered in a red pigment. The article, written by Sean O’Toole, talks about the deaths of numerous women, many artists or activists.

Upon reading a little into the article, I’ve found myself intrigued by Mendieta’s work. After arriving from Cuba as a political orphan, Mendieta spent the rest of her childhood in my college town, Iowa City, where she’d later study fine art at the University of Iowa. Learning that she made her work 40 years ago in the same place I stood was fascinating, especially since her work deals with intimate social issues and ideas around depicting these issues.

O’Toole goes into this thought of depiction (especially by photography) and reflects the sheer amount of photos and images we as a planet are producing—possibly 1.3 trillion photos will have been taken by the end of this year. Documentation has changed drastically in the last two to three decades, and it has allowed us to expose parts of our culture and society that was once easy to disguise. 

I admired a quote from John Berger in the article: “What served in place of the photograph; before the camera’s invention?” asks Berger. “The expected answer is the engraving, the drawing, the painting. The more revealing answer might be: memory. What photographs do out there in space was previously done within reflection.”10

Going back to Mendieta’s work, a connection lies between this documentation and the work itself. The second picture is a still from a film Mendieta made in college, where she created nearly one hundred of these “ebodied encounters.”

‘Mendieta explained her decision to absent herself from her performative encounters in simple terms. “I don’t particularly like performance art,” she told art historian Joan M. Marter in a 1985 interview. The immediacy rankled. “If you have a body right there—a woman, naked—it’s pretty much that and it’s really a confrontation. So I just decided that the next best thing would be to have just my silhouette. So that’s why there’s a mark because that’s the work. I wasn’t really there.”18′

Another instillation of hers dealt with the rape and murder of a University of Iowa student, Sarah Ann Ottens. Mendieta followed crime reports of the murder and posed herself, bloodied, over a table. She had invited the public to view this work, where she stayed still for about an hour.

Mendieta died after falling from the 34th floor of her New York apartment in 1985. The cause of her death, be it accidental or intentional, is still contested, as her partner, Carl Andre, was in the apartment with her at the time. The more I read up on this artist, the more I wonder what more she had planned to do. Her work dealt with such personal and intimate ideas, as well as violence.

More about Mendieta can be read here. The original article from Documenta can be read here.

[iowa-keanureeves-blog]

The Homepage for the Guggenheim museum has a hanging art piece at the top that almost looks like it is displayed in Iowa’s Visual Arts Building- which is really strange but cool! I clicked on the picture and learned all about art in and around 1989. What stood out to me the most was an exhibition by Huang Yong Ping named Theater of the World. This piece used live animals as art. In a cage-like structure, there were reptiles and insects put together and it showed their life cycle. It basically showed nature, not in actual nature- but in an art piece. It kind of disturbs me because I love animals and have always wondered if they can tell when they are in zoos or in places that aren’t what their natural homes are. Are they suffering even if they are surviving? I also wanted to write about what I found on The Art Institute of Chicago’s website. I was drawn to this website because I used to live (where my parents still live) right by downtown Chicago and I have also been there multiple times. I have always enjoyed my times there but I never actually explored their website. I decided to click on the “exhibitions” tab which led me to “Holiday Thorne Rooms.” These are basically tiny dollhouse-like rooms that have now been given Christmas decorations. Apparently the most elaborate is the English Drawing Room of the Victorian Period which is also the only room that has a Christmas tree. Another room shows a wooden staircase with garland twisted through its railing and a picture of an important looking man on the wall. There is also a tiny mistletoe hung from the candle chandelier on the ceiling. All the rooms look very realistic- excluding their size of course.

[slimedawgmillionaires]

I found a lot of very interesting art with my foray into the collection at Marciano Art Foundation. Much of this collection consists of contemporary art, which for me is a genre that is very hit-or-miss. As is typical of much contemporary art, many of the works featured here are conceptual in nature. This doesn’t mean that these works can’t stand alone as pieces of visual art, but rather that the concept behind these works serves to add more depth to the art.

[asacroweintermedia-blog]

[phantomintermedia-blog]

Photo 1 - Installation at MoMA PS1 NYC - Cathy Wilkes

Photo 2 - Installation at MoMA PS1 NYC - Cathy Wilkes

The museum that I kept going back to was this. The Museum of Modern Art in NYC, it has so many interesting exhibitions going on. This art piqued my interest because of its use of mannequins. Since I did my project with the mannequin, I’ve kind of fallen in love with them. There’s just something so inherently creepy about life size dolls. Even the first photo, where the mannequins look truly like giant dolls, the basic form of a human body is present. 

I really enjoyed browsing through other works by Cathy Wilkes, and will probably add her to my list of “artists who do creepy things that I enjoy”

[sarahshoemakerphoto-blog]

I decided to click on the Walker Art Center link because after I graduate in May, I’m moving to Minneapolis, MN. When I got to the site I went straight to their current exhibitions. Based on the colorful thumbnail, I was instantly attracted to Allen Ruppersberg: Intellectual Property 1968–2018. After reading the short introduction of him and his work, I Googled him because I wanted to know more. One work that I found to be visually appealing is, The Never Ending Book Part 2/Art and Therefore Ourselves, which is an installation of thousands of photocopied pages from the artist’s collection of books. He installed this in a theatrical environment of props and posters; the pages were stacked in boxes and free for viewers to take home and create their own unique “books”

[monetcantbuymelove]

Sonia Gomes

Tantas Estórias, 2015 thread, fabric and rope

Rubell Family Collection

Right off the bat, I know what you’re thinking. “Wait I don’t speak Spanish, what does that title mean?” Ok well it’s actually in Portuguese, so shame on you for assuming that just because there’s an accent it’s Spanish. But if you must know, the title translates to “Many Stories”

I love a good title, and this one takes the cake. It’s a weighty title, with cultural significance. It sets the tone well for the piece, which is itself not one story necessarily, but many. 

This piece has an obvious focal point, so that seems like a good place to start. It’s the two eyes near the middle, and the only part of Gomes’ piece that indulges in color. If we were to interpret this work as that of a face, then these eyes would be weighty, and watching. And how does it make you feel, to be watched by a story? It makes me feel a touch uneasy to be honest. Like the piece expects me to show it something, like I’m supposed to be the art being interpreted.

That was a bit of a tangent, more to the point, I think Gomes wants us to see a face, but I also think she wants us to see roads, and cracks in a well-floured slab of bread dough, and all sorts of things. That’s what’s wonderful about operating in the realm of abstraction that Gomes does, it invites our brain to have a field day trying to interpret the abstract entity as a concrete shape. It’s much more interesting than just making a portrait.

I don’t have much else to say in terms of interpretation, I get the feeling that Gomes’ process was one of feeling and expression rather than blatant conceptualism. I will say though, that I heavily jive with her choice of medium. She works almost exclusively with found or gifted threads, fabrics, and cloths. So it’s a guarantee that each piece of material comes with a story. Comes is like a painter, working with precious dyes, each blessed by a priest, it’s almost impossible not for her to make something enchanting with all that magic. Furthermore, while her chosen media certainly offers coherency, each rope and string is bound to be different and offer a new flavor to the piece, like the imperfect skin mosaic of the human face.

[eissimare]

MEOW WOLF

After snooping around on their site and watching their mini documentary, I’m absolutely stunned at the scale and the immersiveness of this collective. Meow Wolf began as a small art space showcasing murals by two dudes, and transitioned between another space, a literal boat installation, a traveling show, to what is now their permanent space in an old bowling alley.

Watching this video, an old sense of wonder returned to me. I was excited, and immediately entranced. When I was a kid, I would easily get imaginative after watching a movie or reading a book—worlds that didn’t exist were so easy to enter, and were so much more exciting to think about while I sat in a desk at school. The work at Meow Wolf does justice to that longing for a type of experience that is out of this world.

I admire their willingness to be weird, their eccentricity. They didn’t have a space for what they wanted to create, so they ended up making it themselves. What they do is so inspiring, as ultimately I realize it’s what I want to do. I want to take people on an adventure, be able to leave this world, just for a little bit, and I want it to be as weird and as fantastic as possible.

I looked to see if they were offering any internships, but it doesn’t seem like that’s so. I still might email them or something, given this is the work I’d most like to do. I don’t know how I could attain that career, but I suppose I just need to make my own career, like they did.