Saturday, August 30, 2008
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Adam Jeppesen
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Monday, August 25, 2008
Back to School
Students are back and syllabi are finished...
I really enjoyed my summer and feel that I was able to take advantage of the time off and PRODUCE. Hopefully I will be able to maintain the momentum into the new school year.
I am teaching an Intro to Photography course to bright eyed Freshman (with View Cameras)
and a Digital Photography class to returning Sophomores and declared majors. Excited to get the conversations going again! (check in with me at Midterms...)
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Pixlr....
Pixlr is a great way to work with an image if you are in a bind and do not have access to photoshop... ie. my husband's computer!
Friday, August 22, 2008
as the Olympics come to a close...
Be sure to read Rebecca Solnit's article "Looking Away from Beauty: What remains hidden behind the nationalism of the Olympic Games" from Orion Magazine's July/August Issue.
Sports bring us the human body as a manifestation of nature—not just the elegant forms of athletes, but their animal ability to move through air and water. At the Olympics, these bodies are co-opted by a political culture that wants to be seen as natural, legitimate, stirring, beautiful. Beautiful bodies are just one kind of nature that nations like to claim. After all, this country invented the idea of “national” parks and claims the sublimity of the Grand Canyon (which preceded it by hundreds of millions of years) and all those purple mountains’ majesty as part of its identity. Corporations too like pristine landscapes, particularly for advertisements in which an SUV perches on some remote ledge, or a high-performance car zips along a winding road through landscape splendor. Few car commercials portray gridlock or even traffic—that your car is just a car among cars—let alone the vehicle’s impact on those pristine environments. Of course most of us have become pretty well versed in critiquing advertisements as such—we assume they are coverups if not outright lies. But the Olympics have not been subjected to the same level of critique.
On August 8, the Beijing Olympic Games will begin, and television will bring us weeks of the human body at the height of health, beauty, discipline, power, and grace. It will be a thousand-hour advertisement, in some sense, for the participating nations as represented by athletes with amazing abilities. In reality, the athletes will be something of a mask for what each nation really stands for, and this year the Olympics as a whole will be as much a coverup as, say, the Mexico City Olympics of 1968, which came hot on the heels of the Tlaltelolco Plaza massacre of students, or the 1936 Berlin Olympics, which gave the Nazis legitimacy as they turned Germany into an efficient totalitarian death factory. Ironically, the 2008 summer Olympics begin on the twentieth anniversary of the 8888 (for 8/8/1988) Burma uprising against the brutal military dictatorship that has controlled that country, with crucial backing from China, for more than four decades now. The Chinese government is also busy terrorizing Tibetans protesting for religious freedom and liberation of their colonized country; it is also the main protector of the Sudanese government carrying out a holocaust in Darfur.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
MIAD Faculty show...
I am showing lacuna in the MIAD Faculty Exhibition (part 1), running August 18 - September 6. The show is in the Layton Gallery on the River Level of the school (downstairs). Other great faculty that I am happy to be showing along side... Jason Yi, kate e martin, Brandon Bauer, Mike Rebholz, Rina Yoon
Installed within the work are pads of prints for peeling off and the taking... if you are around Mil-town please stop by and take a piece with you.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
a day at the museum
Mel and I revisited the Unmasked and Anonymous Exhibition at MAM yesterday. It was wonderful to spend time with the work in a quiet gallery. The show was mobbed with people last week Thursday at the opening, with little room to move let alone see work.
This is one of my favorite pieces by Shimon & Lindemann, Jennie 2002 - a large tintype. The room was beautifully lit with soft spots on the ambryotypes, tintypes and dauguerrotypes. Next to this glowing portrait of Jennie is a large ambrotype of my fellow SFAI grad Tim Sullivan.Other favorites from the show...
Larry Clark's Tulsa(side note - Larry Clark graduated from the Layton School of Art the predecessor of the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design)
Milwaukee's own Frank Ford's Portrait of his mother
Jen Davis(Jen Davis will be in Milwaukee to give an artist talk on Thursday, October 30, 6:15 p.m.
at the Milwaukee Art Museum, Reception to follow: 7–8 p.m. )
Monday, August 18, 2008
Andrew Phelps - Buffet
Thank you to Andrew for posting about my Surface box set on his new blog Buffet. Every project on the buffet is stunning. I would add many of them to my collection, if only I got paid in euros!
Mel Trittin was the key to this cross Atlantic connection for me. Thanks for thinking of me Mel.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Monday, August 11, 2008
Just Released...
Art and UpheavalCitizen artists successfully rebuild the social infrastructure in six communities devastated by war, repression and dislocation.
Author William Cleveland tells remarkable stories from Northern Ireland, Cambodia, South Africa, United States (Watts, Los Angeles), aboriginal Australia, and Serbia, about artists who resolve conflict, heal unspeakable trauma, give voice to the forgotten and disappeared, and restitch the cultural fabric of their communities.
Art can be a powerful agent of personal, institutional and community change. The stories in this book have valuable implications for artists, academics, educators, human service providers, philanthropists, and community leaders throughout the world. The artists documented in the book have generated new technologies for advocacy, organizing, peacemaking, healing trauma and the rebuilding of community. Creativity is our most powerful capacity, and it can mitigate and heal our most destructive tendencies.
William Cleveland, director of the Center for the Study of Art & Community, is an activist, teacher, facilitator, lecturer and writer, and the author of Art in Other Places, which explores the emerging community arts movement in the United States.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés is an American poet, cantadora, psychoanalyst and post-trauma specialist. She has written more than six books on the life of the soul, most notably, Women Who Run with the Wolves.
Saturday, August 09, 2008
9 year old hero...
Zhang said his directing team wanted to include a reminder in the opening ceremony of the solidarity Chinese people showed in the aftermath of magnitude 7.9 quake. He said he chose Lin "because he was very small and cute."
"We think having this little boy with a tall Yao Ming symbolizes a giant leading our future generation. I think it's meaningful," he said. source
I am not sure how I feel about using this little boy as propaganda but I was moved by his story.
Friday, August 08, 2008
Shimon & Lindemann at MAM
Unmasked and Anonymous: Shimon & Lindemann Consider Portraiture
AUG 14–NOV 30, 2008
Milwaukee Art Museum
Explore nearly 100 photographs, from images by Wisconsin photographers John Shimon and Julie Lindemann to early daguerreotypes to portraits by Alfred Stieglitz, Diane Arbus, Sally Mann, and Larry Clark, among others.
THURS, AUG 14, 6 PM
Gallery Talk: 6 PM
Reception with Book Signing: 6:30–8 PM
Meet artists Shimon & Lindemann at this opening event.
Wednesday, August 06, 2008
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
Coco Wang
Tales of heroism and survival following the Sichuan earthquake last May inspired graphic artist Coco Wang to illustrate the stories in a comic book. Wang says that the images and the stories helped people outside of China understand more about the humanity of the Chinese people...
rough contacts...
it has begun, a lot to think about... some fun, some BAD, some full of possibilities
Monday, August 04, 2008
Stephen Shore on NPR
Interview with Stephen Shore about his book, A Road Trip Journal.
Read what 5B4 wrote about the book here.
Scout Tufankjian
Thanks to 2point8 for pointing me to Scout Tufankjian 's stunning images of the Obamacampaign. Her images are front row tickets to his long journey thus far. I watched the slide show a few times!
Sunday, August 03, 2008
pouring down tv
"Daniel Liss transforms his urban existence into a sort of visual poetry, full of thoughtful observations, wry wit, and seductive imagery." - Wired Magazine, May 2006
I have been following pouringdown since March 2006, you should too.
Saturday, August 02, 2008
Friday, August 01, 2008
you are changing. the paintings are not
Yet at the Guggenheim, at least, the story has a sublime ending. Just off the main exhibition Ms. Stringari has installed a group of “Black Paintings” in apparently pristine condition in a plain room with a big bench, and with the low lighting Reinhardt stipulated. They don’t feel either particularly heavy or light, joyous or somber, perfect or imperfect.
You let your eyes rest on them, and what you see changes, constantly: blacks change shades; reds and blues appear and fade. One minute you think you are looking at a grid or a cruciform; the next at a cloudy sky or a Monet landscape, dark like the negative of a photograph. Your vision is changing things; you are changing. The paintings are not. But they are, perhaps, leaving their trace on your psyche and memory. The mark may be permanent, whatever permanent means.