Art Sale and other things

The Spring Art Sale was a great success! Thanks to everyone who bought from me or helped me out in any way. Special thank you to Lauren (your collar sold!!) for sitting in for me and my table mate for being so funny and pleasant.

I experienced for a brief second, this wonderful post- Art Sale coma and then I realized I have an eight page paper due tomorrow that I haven't started and also a huge project due this Thursday that is still in it's planning stages. Yeep. I'm currently in bed and hating life but soon enough this paper will be done. Also, another post about things I love.

Collaboration between Dame Darcy and Jenny Hart.
www.Jennyhart.net

Bad Mood

I'm in an uncharacteristically bad mood because it's fucking snowing outside and it's a Sunday. I'm not looking forward to my mold making class tomorrow and I suppose after years of being exposed to Chicago Public schools, I've grown to loathe Sunday nights. That aside - I did manage to get a lot of work done on my cake pattern and I am looking forward to the Motor City Comicon next month!

Check out my friend's shop on ETSY!

http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=6835105

Also, I've been looking at her blog a lot lately

http://www.theblackapple.typepad.com/

I suppose that's it for now. I still can't believe it's fucking snowing!! I keep thinking about 90 degree weather, mountains, and my sewing machine to feel happy. I wish the sun would come out and play.

Roger Brown home and studio

I went to the Roger Brown home and studio for the second time and enjoyed it just as much as the first. I also brought a camera the second time (which they surprisingly allow) and I managed to take A LOT of photos.

A little bit about Roger Brown: He studied at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago briefly as an undergrad and then as a grad student. He was one of the core members of the Chicago Imagists artists and a collector. After he succumbed to aids in 1997 his home/studio was donated to the Art Institute where it remains, under their care. His home is pretty much untouched so a lot of his personal items are still lying around along with various handmade functional objects, toys, folk art, and decorative pieces. Really he considered anything art as long as it was interesting looking and well made.

Sculptures by William Dawson, a folk/outsider artist who influenced the Chicago Imagists especially Roger Brown.

Me in the bathroom of the Roger Brown studio. His toothbrush was still hanging on the wall!

An exploded pot still hanging out in his stove. It's probably been sitting there since before '97.

Please go to the Roger Brown studio. They have an original page from Henry Darger's book! Which reminds me, Intuit is also worth checking out since they have recreated Henry Darger's living quarters. I am incredibly attracted to outsider art. I think there's something to be said for artists that are able to operate outside of the institution. I wish I could be one of those people, but I can't really complain because the institution I'm currently in has provided me this culture that I am thriving off of.



Anyway, Other artists to check out:

Lee Godie

Ray Yoshida

Jesse Howard

It's supposed to be spring!!

Bad day at work. I'm in this weird stage where I feel like I'm losing interest in what I was initially very intrigued by and I'm struggling against it. Perhaps it was the grayness of today that made me feel so down. Or perhaps I am just being hard on myself but it really matters to me that people don't consider me lazy or ambivalent. I feel like I'm the wicked, duller stepsister.

Time at home makes me very excited. I'm happy with the few hours I get to spend in the privacy of my room making something or reading...it's what got me through this long, awful winter.

Other things that are currently making me feel happy:

Creepy narrative photos involving dolls.
More at http://turquoisechildren.online.fr

Cameo Necklaces with Couples in them.
I know, I know. Fuck you. But how can I resist the cheesy loveliness of this necklace??!! I almost bought one like this with a hand painted portrait of Joel and Clementine.

Obnoxious Ribbon
Yes!

I just learned about this band within the past month. I like the original version of this song but this video has somehow become a subject of intrigue for me. I can't seem to tell if the lead singer is super cute or creepy.

Caged Performance....I have lots of work to do.

I should actually be working on other things but I feel compelled to post, thanks to my lovely art history class.



Today we watched The Couple in the Cage, a video documentation of a collaborative performance involving Guillermo Gomez- Pena and Coco Fusco. It was an obvious satire in which Guillermo and Coco traveled around the globe, decked out in faux Amerindian costumes and posed as "savages" locked up in a cage.The cage was set up in the main lobby of various art and natural history museums, allowing the visitors to interact with the performers. If you payed fifty cents, Guillermo and Coco performed faux tribal traditions. Coco would do a "warrior dance" to a hip hop song while Guillermo told a story about his homeland in a made up tongue while holding a rubber snake. If you went up to their cage and enunciated the word, "P-H-O-T-O", they would even pose so you could take a picture with them.


The performance was very effective in that it had a very sophisticated way of being satirical and that was primarily due to the passive attitudes of the performers...which I totally commended because if someone tried to feed me a banana through a cage, I'd probably spit on them.


The video documentation was interspersed with images of native people being shipped off to Europe and America to be showcased in the circus like freaks. At first, I was irritated with the very didactic comparison but there was a moment when I kind of lost it and got a little emotional. What REALLY effected me was that there were still some people who didn't seem to understand that it was a social commentary. I distinctly remember a sailor from Chicago asking, "Who shaved her legs for her?".

ttp://www.vdb.org/smackn.acgi$misc?clips/COUPLEINTH.mov
(A small excerpt from the video)

Fun with the drill press and stop motion animation

Worked in Blair's studio today. He was gone most of the time, tending to his sick dogs at home. It felt like me and the other intern were two little girls lost in a forest out of some fairy tale. There were wild masks and props all over and I was having so much sick twisted fun constantly drilling holes using the drill press. I mean, it was fun until I somehow managed to rub one of my knuckles raw and then proceeded to bleed on one of Blair's books. Thankfully, he wasn't mad. He actually thought it was amusing. It was nice to hear him laugh.

I talked to the other intern about various stop motion artists including Christiane Cegavske. She created this wonderful stop motion animation called Blood, Tea, and Red String over the course of 13 years!!! She has since created a creepy live action follow up called The Doll Maker and is working on a related stop motion movie. Some of her work:

Slice and Stitch

I actually saw a similar version of this painting which was actually used in the movie and I liked it better because instead of sewing her vagina shut, they were delicately painting a thin red line down the middle. The fact that they're cutting off her breasts, though does bother me. At first I thought they were just measuring them.

Little Red

I like this one because of it's blatant sexuality and that ALWAYS came to mind when reading about Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf. I also recently finished The Book of Lost Things and in it there was this story in which Red Riding Hood seduced the Wolf and that is how Werewolves came to be. Freaky.

There is no time

I haven't been able to decide if she's sadly repairing herself or just making herself a costume. None the less, I love visible stitches. I used to work with this woman who had stitches tattooed along her body and I adored them. Maybe I'll get some tattooed some place discreet.

After watching this, and a lot of Svankmajer, I made this miniature scene based on Alice in Wonderland that has since been destroyed. Too bad I never got to finish it, but a few pictures still remain.

Can't see it too well but it's made out of an old wicker basket, there are hands coming up out of the ground holding a gold key and on the table are three playing cards (from the suit of hearts) and a glass of milk next to a sign that says drink me. Beyond the huge keyhole is a table with a tea set on top of it. I plan to rebuild it someday and add more things...including rabbit tracks. But, I think I'm going to make a pair of earrings first.

This business of Art (History)

I love my Art History class. Alternative Art History 1980-Present with Keller. Take it. I read this article today called "Clash of 85", it's an art critic analyzing her work and how she's changed over the years after she's been fired from her job. Very insightful. She made some interesting points about culture and art.

"Culture, in the full sense, not just the other arts, but the whole fabric, including how we eat and dress and work and make love as well as make art- a general culture in which we are all collaborators, which does not exclude so much as embrace the so-called avant-garde along with many other manifestations." (Lippard, 2)

This quote made me think of Post-Modernist ideals as I learned them in my previous Art History class. I used to be very bothered by the idea that nothing is original, that everything is derivative or a reference to what came before. Now, I don't necessarily think it's a negative concept. Our culture informs us, as we inform each other and that filters down through our work. So it's impossible to seperate your work from the zeigeist of our times, even if you are not making any direct socio-political/cultural statements.

We talked a little bit this situation in which our teacher was speaking to this woman who said she didn't want to be known as a "woman artist but rather an artist that just so happens to be a woman..." I can relate to this because I have similar fears about being pigeonheld as a black artist, woman artist, etc.. On the other hand, these are very importat aspects of my identity and ofcourse, impact how I relate to the world and the work that I produce. Furthermore, I would never want to deny aspects of my "personhood" just so that my work could be seen as something more accessible. Catch 22.

/www.artnet.com/magazine_pre2000/features/saltz/saltz11-24-98.asp

An article on a Kara Walker exhibit that I found interesting. She's someone I often debate about with myslef. I thought it was weird though that Betye Saar had such a huge issue with her.