Reflection: Public Art Display

Yik Yaks Exposed: Public Art Project 


Jewel and I both decided to create a public art display in the hallway leading up to the Great Room. This project was very time intensive seeing that we had to cut out everything that was hung up on the wall: the speech bubbles, the yin yak symbols, the quote, and the interactive aspect. Jewel contacted multiple people to send her screenshots of these yik yaks and we both typed them out. I went back and made some of the words bold and italicized to draw the reader in to the speech bubble.

This was not by any means an easy project for me to complete because reading these racist yik yaks and then typing them out was not an easy thing to do. It made me more and more upset as I went along but Jewel and I kept pushing through the emotion. This project was taken down by Kelly Shroeder the morning after Jewel and I put it up. This was very upsetting because we wanted people to see it, to be shocked and surprised, sometimes even see what words came directly from their mouths to paper. I do not think that this project would have the same impact if there was just an interactive element (being part of the solution) so I thank Jewel for collaborated with me.

I have taken several pictures of this project and I can email those to you Professor Friebele. This project has made me want to produce more public art projects. Maybe not always politically charged, but at least putting art in an environment gives it more context.

Project 4: Public Art Proposal

On Sunday, December 14th, Jewel and I plan to collaborate on a public art piece featuring posts from  the Yik Yak app directly from smcm students. We plan to blow these yik yak posts up in photoshop all around the campus where there is high foot traffic. Jewel and I want to make a huge political, social and cultural statement through this project and shed light on racist bigotry. I also plan to create an interactive aspect to this project by placing a large, wooden box in the Campus Center and asking people to right down their experiences with injustices (specifically in the context of racism and racial profiling.) We want to emphasize that racism is a human problem, not just a problem that only minorities should deal with. White privilege needs to be recognized and ignorance needs to be eliminated.

Studio Response: In Progress

STUDIO RESPONSE: IN PROGRESS

For my studio repsonse project, I plan to create a series of 6 drawings, all using chalk pastel as a medium in order to show my interpretation of a self portrait. I want to complete multiple drawings because the artist I am responding to happens to be Frida Kahlo, who was always struggling with her own identity as a person and her relatioships with society, the world and her time period. Kahlo's works are mostly oil paintings, whether it be on sheet metal or canvas. I chose to use pastels because the medium seems more fitting to my style as well as the subject matter that I intend to depict.

Mid Semester Reflection - 3 Artists

Mid Semester Reflection

I love your class Professor Friebele. The projects and assignments thus far have been challenging but not constricting. I know that I have not been that consistent with doing blog posts on time and in an orderly manner, but that is going to change from here on out.  One of my problems on an organizational level is procrastination and I need to make sure that I am reading articles ahead of time so I can formulate a cohesive blog post. I enjoy creating blog posts and I feel like it is a very creative outlet for academic college students. 

Lucien Freud is my favorite painter of all time and any other German Expressionist/ Surrealist Painters like Frieda Kahlo, Salvador Dali or Amadeo de Souza Cardoso would be marvelous. I am very interested in the 1920s and 30s surrealist movements as well as German Expressionism. 

Filipovic ~ Groom ~ Batchen ~ Borges: Past, Present, and Future

    I have always loved photography and with a camera in front of my face from time to time, it has occurred to me more than a few times that the present moment will continuously escape you if you are constantly trying to freeze it. As Geoffery Batchen put it in his article "Life and Death" (2010), photography is a "temporal movement back and forth between past and future."Looking back through photos that I take on a particularly beautiful location, it occurs to me that the time I spent composing, analyzing, tweaking the angles--the more I felt as though time evaporated. Maybe I didn't appreciate the present moment and the people who were around because I was so obsessed with getting the perfect photo.
The beautiful thing about photographs though is that they are, in themselves, timeless. Elena Filipovic argues fervently that time strictly a linear progression, claiming that  "there is no way to escape time." Films are in themselves, timeless because they are not bound by the laws of a linear progression of time. Flashbacks and flash forwards are quite clear, and in reality, these types of things exist too. When people are in a state of deep meditation, your mind is almost in a true state of euphoria. Its not that you aren't bound by time, rather that time is quite lucid and less structured. Dreams in the REM cycle of the brain are also quite similar. The person dreaming isn't living within the bounds of the 24 hour cycle. I have found through my own dreams that activities within the dream become quite stretched out and hard to decipher.  Really, as I read and reread and reread these articles again and again, it frustrates me that I cannot get a firm grasp around what time is!

What is Art? Can Art change the World? Saltz Reading

       Being a cat person and all, naturally, I enjoyed Eric Fischl's comparison of Art to the relationship a person has with his/her own cat. When you call the cat over, it will most likely walk in your direction, rub its face on a chair or coffee table and then look at you from afar. You can not expect art to just give you some sort of instant gratification, you have to wrestle with it, play with it, experiment with it. As Saltz clearly states in his article, "The Whole Ball of Wax", 'The moment you think you understand a work of art its dead to you.' As both a creator and a viewer of art, I understand that the ideas, process and the final product goes through an evolution process. Even an artist themselves has to be open to change because nothing goes exactly as planned. Art is like nature, always changing but never out of place or out of the ordinary.