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When I started looking at Louise Lawler's work, my first thought was that it was fancy plagiarism. What's special about taking photographs of someone else's work? Why call that art? However, the more I read about Lawler's work, the more I realized I had taken the bait, as Leah Pires said for Art News. It's the same trap I imagine critics viewing Marcel Duchamp's urinal fell into. Why call it art, you ask? To find out what happens, that's why. Enough said. The artist. I found I related more to Lawler than I thought I would. I, too, am interested in how to reach viewers outside of the gallery context, and I too want to know what happens if you remove art from the white cube. It turns out that photographing a Warhol is way more subversive than I expected. I didn't get a chance to talk about this in my presentation, but I thought that her ideas of editioning and re-presenting her works were both very interesting. In my own work as a printmaker, I reflect oft

I have less to say than I hoped I would about this project update. Unfortunately, a nefarious and time-consuming agent known as Capstone has eaten much of my attention since the beginning of this term. However, I am close to fighting my final battle with Capstone, and I have been thinking many thoughts about my project for this class in the meantime. Total amount of concrete progress amounts to a page and a half of notes, but my brain has been busy! I decided to combine some elements from both videos I showed in my first presentation about this project: collaboration, perception, and collaboration will all be major elements. I kept the idea of filtering reality through a limited number of senses, and I decided to use people's online presences or personas as the visual and auditory basis for the project. I will be conducting short, casual interviews with my peers on the subject of their online projection of their selves and their perception of that projection. I will be distorting t

I was slightly overwhelmed by Robin Jebavy's paintings, but their intricacy drew me in at the same time. Seeing the journey from her undergraduate work, which relied more heavily on realism, to her current works which are very abstracted and almost psychedelic was a switch-up I was unprepared for. I can and can't imagine sticking with one theme for decades at a time. On the one hand, the endless varieties of glassware forms I'm sure provide multitudes of material upon which to draw. On the other, the world is too full of interesting things for me to ever stop learning and thinking about it all. I think I might feel stifled just focusing on one basic idea for my entire career, no matter how many layers of paint I added to the canvas. One of Jebavy's works that I found compelling: Set Table (Red).  Source. I was very interested in Jebavy's concept of the glass vessel as analog to the human figure. I didn't quite understand that part of the presentation, or how she

I was very inspired by Eric García's intentional use of materials in his art. That's something I always try to think about in my work, and it brings me back to Marshall McLuhan: the medium is the message. Perhaps it's my disposition towards intensely detailed work that makes me love the research that goes into those choices. I just think it can add so many layers to a work, and it can also deepen the artist's experience of their own work as well. I was particularly drawn to García's prickly pear ink illustrations; the color and the backstory were both lovely to me. I appreciated his humor in acknowledging that indigenous Mexicans didn't use prickly pears for ink for a very specific reason: the bug that lives on the plant gives a much richer and more colorfast ink. Source. Another part of his talk that I found engaging and encouraging was the way he talked about the successive phases of his process. (See what I did there?) I liked learning that so many of his wor

I'm very interested in Baudrillard's choice to begin Simulations with the story of a map. What's in a map? A route to somewhere, a border to cross, a claim to discovery and of being "first?" All right, but how does a map have "the discrete charm of second-order simulacra" and why are the simulacra of today no longer comparable to maps? (Baudrillard 1, 2) I'm reflecting on this partially because I'm drawn to maps and I find their use as a metaphor in this text engaging. However, I'm also trying to think of my artistic process as if it were a map, and wondering how deep that gets me down the list of successive phases of the image. The idea generation stage of making something usually references something in real life, unless it's a concept I've made up or synthesized from multiple sources, in which case it seems to me to be masking the absence of a basic reality. On the other hand, doesn't the fact that it exists make it a real thin

I have only the vaguest idea of what my final project is going to look like right now, but I'm fairly certain it's going to be a video. I first started making video projects in Intro New Media (which are on this blog if you care to view them), and I had so much fun I kept making them for other classes. Video is not a medium I'm very familiar with, obviously, but through this class I'd like to explore the capabilities of the medium more, and Adobe Premiere specifically. Previous videos have included collaborations with friends,  a focus on audio, and a focus on (re)interpretation of memory. I think the lens of simulacra and altered/reinterpreted reality could very easily be applied to these projects, and I want to take what I learned from them and push it further. I don't really know what I want this project to look like yet, but I'm imagining a lot of experimentation in the various stages of the editing process. I anticipate that being the most time-consuming p