I think I'll do a recap when I have a chance. Which will probably fall around April17th. I will be back in Calgary on one of the days between the 30th of April and 2nd of May, and I would like to have a Small Birthday Get Together with whomever is in town. Sound OK?
Title: Clouds
Screenshot:
( Instructions behind the cut )
So I've finished up my design portfolio to send out to people as I look for a co-op term in Calgary for the summer. PLEASE give me feedback! I need it, and I want to get a job being a DESIGN STAH so I need the trickedest-outest design in freakin evar.
Job hunting on your own is so scary. But I think I'm better at it than I was before co-op. And if I get a good job this time i may never have to do it again because I have gotten several web design opportunities just from UBC after doing the co-op site.
Here is the small version:
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Larger version after the cut
( Read more... )If anyone knows of any good communities I could post this to for crits please let me know.
It's the end of the semester so that's always the root of my nerves. I think I may need to stay up late and just post this; it's different from how i usually feel at the end of the semester because I'm a little bit surer of what I'm doing, but of course there's a whole lot of self-doubt that's creeping creeping.
At the end of October I entered an art contest for Arts Instructional Services and Information Technology (Arts ISIT) -- we were supposed to make a 'image' sort of thing that answers "What is Technology". Anyway I did my thing in like an evening and I couldn't think of anything interesting to do (I haven't really illustrated in a LONG TIME because we are illustrative work is Highly Discouraged in my classes). Well maybe I could have, but it probably would have been a digital project. Anyway I won a white spot gift card, and the guy who won the grand prize is in painting with me. I would show you the subs but mine is terribly embarassing, but I thought whatevs, and I guess that was the correct thing to think because I did win the gift card *shrug*.
Today, December 1st, my show at the AMS gallery opens. I am really really glad that Phil* came by on the very first day because now I don't have to be nervous about when he will come by to talk to me. I wish he had actually really tried to talk to us one on one during the course of the course though. I might have made some more changes. I did try to talk to him but he's sort of hard to read so .... yeah. Anyway what he said was really useful and gives me a good starting place for next semester, but it leaves me totally not sure what grade I've gotten in the course, and I basically need an 80 or above because I'm doing honours. So I'm worried. But as he left he said grades are never set in stone and they can always go back and be changed -- I said I would remember that. So I know I have a path of recourse if worst comes to worst. I'm not sure it will, I'm not sure what I'll get, and I knew what he was talking about and it was a pitfall I knew I was risking but I felt like i needed it anyway and I think I did learn a lot -- got what I wanted to get out of it, so we'll see. We'll see. But it did sound like Phil expected me to continue making art and that if I went forward more with what I was doing I could make things that are good, and he said I have good ideas and he liked my sound pieces (one of which is definitely failing in execution right now).
* Phil is my painting professor. He's got a really weird sense of humour; he's hard to read and I don't have any real idea how I'm doing in his course. He's also very theoretically rigorous -- the guy who won the Arts ISIT thing is probably not doing very well in the painting class because he's not very into theory or conceptualism.
Photos from some of what's at the show after the cut ...
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| From VISA490 images |
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| From VISA490 images |
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| From VISA490 images |
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| From VISA490 images |
For the past three years, my most common approach to art has been to be presented with a question, think of some angle of it that I find interesting, and then try to think of some way to address that in a visual mode. Of course this is because I'm a student, and normally I'm trying to fulfill a project. Now that I'm in fourth year -- and a few times in second and third year -- I have the opportunity to come up with some art ideas completely on my own, and how I approached that was to think about what I'm interested in and the themes I have gravitated towards around the projects. A lot of the work I did, even when presented with a project to fulfill in the last three years, had to do with thought and cognition. So now I'm trying to work with these ideas in more depth so that I understand why I gravitated to them so consistently. What I have discovered in this process is that I'm really interested in the “space” just beyond what I understand. I can't speak about that “space” specifically -- these are ideas that I think must exist, or spaces on the outside of ideas I've read about, or ideas insinuated by poems or fiction, but that I can't completely wrap my mind around them yet. Because I can't wrap my mind around them, I can't talk about them, and I've found that most of my reading on these subjects doesn't satisfy me; I am left feeling like there's something in the space that I still don't completely understand that is important.
I had this feeling very strongly last week while I read about Ludwig Wittgenstein's ideas about sense and nonsense. I have been fascinated by “nonsense” for a long time, and it's probably connected to my fascination with things I can't quite understand, and part of it, I'm sure, has come from reading books like Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Outside, Over There, Where the Wild Things Are, and Edward Lear's The Owl and the Pussycat as illustrated by Hillary Knight, as well as by T.S. Eliot's poetry and Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club, Invisible Monsters, Haunted). Anyway, what I was reading about Wittgenstein is that speech about things that can't be “represented” -- which includes logic, which doesn't “picture” anything itself, and a whole host of ideas that might not “picture” the world – which means that many ideas, including most of philosophy, that make “sense” in general, at least in my understanding of sense, which is roughly ideas or thoughts that can be adequately explained in words. It seems simplistic, or exclusionary to me to put so many ideas that make functional “sense” in the realm of “nonsense”, when for me, the “nonsense” should be the space for those "things" that can't be completely spoken because they can't be completely understood. I don't agree that there isn't any point in speaking about them, if that's how one wishes to work them out -- because I've gotten this feeling of a glittering, full nonsense in many talks where I just didn't have all of the background to understand everything as it was being said. The talk earlier this year on the Somnatic Sublime was one of these experiences, and to a much lesser extent, the Thing Theory talk had elements of it. Talking about them fills them out a bit, and for me, filling out the parts that you can talk about makes the part you can't somehow more tantalizing because you feel you are getting closer. I do this sort of exploration in my head in words, but I also find it fruitful to make art about or within these spaces -- I don't need to fully chart or explain the spaces before I try to work within them, and the unfixed quality that art retains where philosophy or an "ology", in the attempt to be understandable, must relinquish to a certain extent gives me comfort that I don't need to completely chart that space, that it is still important and interesting anyway, and also gives me hope that maybe someone else will understand the art differently and be able to tell me something about the space I didn't know (and make it that much more interesting). I am, as you can see, quite torn (but in a pleasurable or interesting way) between wanting to understand and finding things I don't understand interesting, at least partly because I don't understand them.
That's basically how I approach artmaking – I like to explore ideas, to play with them, and if they are ideas that I don't understand myself that's when I feel like I'm pushing myself the most. I normally don't feel safe making work based on ideas I don't fully understand, especially because I'm so used to critiques where I need to speak specifically about all aspects of a work, and I don't feel like there's room for me not to know things, but I hope that I can move past that. At school I think I have to understand the art I'm doing, or the ideas the art is based on, but I'll learn more about those spaces I don't understand if I do let go of that control and try to charge out into the unknown. I don't really want to fill them in and elucidate them, but I want to feel the spaces and see what I can make out of them, leaving them -- not empty, but full of air that might melt into solids.
I think that this is why I like to read fiction and poetry more than I like to read philosophy. In philosophy, the goal is usually to fill in those spaces, and often I am left with the spaces I thought I would read about still glinting at the edges of my thoughts. But fiction and poetry are doing what I like to do too – feeling around in the spaces for glimmers that resonate.
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