Alright, lets get this party started!

Hello and welcome to my new blog!  This is going to be a space where I show the progression of my artwork in Graduate school.  I would love it if it also became a way for people to share their thoughts with me about the direction of the work etc. so please do leave comments.  Feedback is always awesome and it is fun to hear from people that are in my life but not in Madison!

There is nothing like a huge change to push you outside of your comfort zone and require you to rise to the occasion.  So far Grad school is everything that I hoped it would be.  I am already re-evaluating my work and being pushed to a greater potential.

For the first month and a half I found myself making work that was the same as what I have been doing the last 5 years and quickly became dissatisfied.  I realized that I was not engaging myself in the work at the level that I desired.  The work that I see myself going towards will require me to access a much more personal and deeper examination of my interests rather then looking at them from a broader perspective.  I will write more about that when I have some images to show.

I would like to kick it off with a collaborative piece that I did with two other 1st year grad students.  I have been wanting to do collaborations for a while so it is great to dive in and make it happen straight away.

The piece is titled:

INTERSTICE                                                                                                                                      Visions of War

INTERSTICE, Visions of War

J.E. Sandberg and Dale Kaminski are the two other artists on this piece.

It is difficult to show what it is really like with digital photography.  It is truly an experiential piece.  I will attempt to describe it to you…

When you come in it looks something like this:

view from the entrance

You can see a glowing grid and there is a base heavy sound that fills the room and gets into your bones.  It sort of lures you in and you are compelled to move closer.  As you get closer there is a projection on the floor that you couldn’t see from a distance.  The projection is a random loop of war images.  There are bombs going off, people in face masks, heavy machinery etc.  The projection on the wall is constantly shifting.  Dale took the same images that are on the floor and distorted them and put them in a program that layers them randomly in various sizes.  You can not tell at all what the images are on the wall but they relate by color etc. to the floor images.  There are 800 plaster squares that make up the pattern on the wall and floor.  The paper airplanes that the projection is going through cast shadows on the floor and wall and create an ominous feel.  The audio is of a helicoptor blade slowed down to about the speed of a heartbeat and there is also a sort of distant sounding higher pitched sound that is reminiscent of a war siren that fades in and out.  (Dale is also a musician…toured with the Violent Femmes as a back up guitar player…and has a theramin which he made the siren sounds with)  The pattern speaks of the underlying way that happenings such as war cycle through our societies and also has a sort of digital feel on the wall which speaks to the notion of how information is presented through the media.  The images on the floor are the reality of what is happening…

There are many layers to the way that we set this piece up…it has been cool to hear and witness peoples reactions to it.  All in all it has been very well recieved and was worth the many many hours of hard work that we all put into it.  It is definitely the most powerful piece that I have been involved with in a long time!  Making this piece has acted as sort of a catalyst to have a greater impact on the viewer in my solo work as well.  As I said earlier…more to come on that front…

Here are some shots from the making of the piece above…

I built a grid and cast the squares from plaster...90 at a time...

about 8oo squares total...phewwww I enjoyed staking them up. They had a nice feel to them...

The gallery pre-install. We had to black out all of the windows and light sources so that it would be dark enough.

I laid a grid onto the felt backdrop and then hung the pattern one square at a time...there are about 400 squares on the wall.

here it is almost finished...ready to see how it looks with the projection...

It looks cool!! Phew...we were relieved and excited that it looked how we wanted it to!

another shot from our trial run

When we took it all down I was marveling at all of the technical equipment we used!!

2 projectors, 2 dvd players, and speakers...plus everything that goes with them to hook it all up.

Advertisement