Meditation/Lecture

It was a Sunday morning in November and my friend Chardin and I rode our bikes to the zen center located on the 3400 block of Grove Ave. It was my first time attending the meditation and lecture, and I was nervous to be a new face, but excited at the pretense of learning how to silence my body and focus only on my mind.

We arrived and Chardin helped me situate myself on a plump, black cushion in an unused corner of the room. Everyone was peaceful and quiet and sitting with straight backs and closed eyes. The first 30 minutes of the weekly event was silent meditation. We sat, surrounded by strangers and swirling incense and thought of nothing, but the sounds and what they meant. In order to meditate, you are supposed to disconnect your mind from your body, ignore the wants and needs of the vessel. Exterior sounds drifted in from the streets, but those were sounds that other people could concern themselves with, I had greater things to realize about myself. I have tried my hand at meditating before, but never so successfully as in this place of quiet, safety and rest. Before I knew it the 30 minutes had ended and people were gracefully standing to their feet. I awkwardly stood, with a completely dead leg. My body was unused to sitting still for 30 minutes and my leg had fallen completely asleep. Attempting grace, I tried to put weight on it and my body actually collapsed into the nearest wall. Embarrassed, I tried to pull it together and got into line with the others. The walking meditation was about to begin. Worried that I wouldn't be able to walk, I was grateful that the steps we were taking were so tiny it seemed as if we were hardly moving at all. There was a man in robes who began the chant and carried wafting incense in his hands. We walked this way, in a line that followed the walls of the room, with no person in the front or back, for 20 minutes. It was the perfect exercise for me to regain the feeling in my legs. Once the walking meditation had ended we relocated our cushions and sat again, facing a woman who was an unfamiliar face. Laminated cards were circling the room and they had the words of a Buddhist chant printed on the glossy surfaces. I took one and passed the rest along. Once everybody had a card, the chanting began. This experience, of vocal unity was uplifting. The oneness amongst us all was evident, even though we were strangers. The chanting prayer lasted about 15 minutes and then we settled back to listen to the secrets of life. The woman in brown robes spoke to us about her experience as a Buddhist priest. She was beautiful in her age, and she was so peaceful. She spoke to us about the world and our interactions with each other. Her words resonated with me in terms of letting little things slide away, like water over rocks. She said there were people who reacted with anger, and people who were greater than such base reactions. There is a way to live life in harmony with other beings. I would like to be the person who does not react negatively to daily holdups and mishaps. This experience was such an amazing, refreshing one. Once the hour long lecture ended, there was time for questions, but I was too lost in my own thoughts to have anything to say. I felt more refreshed and susceptible to creativity than I had in a long time. I left the center feeling clean, and relaxed. I felt like a pure vessel for creative thoughts and wholesome actions. The entire experience lasted about 2 and a half hours and I can honestly say that it was one of the most positive 2 and a half hours that I have ever spent in my lifetime.

A book I am reading currently: The Zen of Creativity: Cultivating your Artistic Life, written by John Daido Loori.

Artist Lecture. Diego Sanchez.

Diego Sanchez is a Colombian artist who was showing work alongside Mary Scurlock a the Page Bond Gallery on Main St. in Richmond.

Sanchez makes bold, colorful statements and he said about 7 coats of varnish on each of his paintings, because he wanted his viewers to be able to touch. Sanchez's dominating subject matter was architecture and chairs. He explained the chair paintings as part of a research project he was doing on chairs. He is curious about the political nature of a chair...the hierarchical aspects, whom is sitting higher than whom, for example.

Sanchez said that a great deal of the paintings he creates are solely intuitive. His color palettes are bold and bright and his subjects are strangely geometric. He paints the coliseum and famous architecture. He said that a lot of his friends and fans of his work will send him images of such places while they are traveling. I wonder if the rest of his images come from google image searches.

In some examples of his later work Sanchez takes some artistic liberties with the subject matter. He includes what he called "floaters." His inspiration for such was waking up early/standing up too quickly and having spots move across his vision. What the "floaters" actually look like are a combination of germs and the layered abstract circles that Chuck Close is famous for.

Sanchez remarked on his joy of using representational and nonrepresentational elements together. This was evident in his piece where he painted a large checkerboard overtop of his painting of Richmond overpasses. Again, this art appears to have been made for a specific audience, by a specific audience. It is work that I have not made myself familiar with for years and I am glad that education has taken me in the direction of contemporary. The experience of the lecture was nice, to remind me to strive work hard on the conceptual aspects of my work, so as not to become stagnant and cliche.

Artist Lecture. Mary Scurlock.

This was an interesting lecture for me to attend. In my years in art school, I had forgotten that there are still working artists in the world who do not fall under the contemporary label. Mary Scurlock is one of those artists. She was also the kind of artist who assigns little to no meaning to her work. One cannot be certain if she paints for any purpose beside aesthetic.

Scurlock displayed work on wooden panels that were heavily gessoed. In places she scraped the gesso off the panel to create texture. Scurlock's only clear inspiration is the woods. I know this because the only imagery in her work is trees. Trees from below. The work was all created as if the artist was looking up the trunk of a tree. Some of the trees had leaves, some did not, however, in Scurlock's mind there was no real meaning behind this, just that she was initially afraid of painting leaves for fear of coming off as cliche. In more than one painting, Scurlock tried to create the illusion of words, not to add context or concept, but because she enjoyed the aesthetics of the scribbles. This essentially gives the effect that a bee from winnie the pooh has just flown across her painting and left it's trail behind it.

Her work was nice and shiny, very non confrontational, and of varying sizes. Scurlock employs subtle, pastel color changes that would compliment a wall in a variety of places, such as offices, public bathrooms or dentists waiting rooms.

Thursday post. 11.19.

After speaking to Jeff, I've got some ideas on my mind for my final.

feedback loops.
LCD in front of tv's or mirrors.
minerals. books on minerals. minerology.
how to make a fractal.
diptychs, triptychs.

making my own images/replacing the screen with my own hand:
shooting tinfoil
ice
broken glass
mirrors
cellophane -->material balloons are made of

Star filters for my lens...

INFINITY
FACETS
LCD when you point it at itself

ebay-broken video cameras/screens

FANTASIA-DISNEY
Disney World...the reproduction of other parts of the world, artificiality.
Synthetic world view..the idea that Disney can simulate and pre-package the rest of the world and present it in a theme park in order to make a profit.

Disney fantasty is always grounded in reality. The animations are always based loosely on real life with human beings as the lead roles. Fantasia strays from this...it's one of the more artistic Disney films, incredible imagery.

James Welling. Monday Post. 11.16.

James Welling is making photograms of plants, but they appear to be the negatives of photograms, instead of being white on black, his images are translucent and colorful and seem to radiate summer sun.

I just read that James Welling is the head of the photography department at UCLA. That's pretty rad. Welling's use of biological materials to make abstract work is relevant to my current thought processes and shooting methods.

"James Welling employs a wide variety of photographic tools and media. His abstract compositions are rendered as photograms, traditional gelatin silver prints, Polaroids, and digitally processed prints. In addition, Welling has used experimental shutterless cameras, digital, and vintage view cameras to create these images. His works challenge the technical and conceptual bounds of photography, but employ simple materials like crumpled aluminum foil, wrinkled fabric and pastry dough. In mid-seventies Welling worked with Polaroid and 4 × 5 cameras to create photograms and architectural views. He also worked on his Diary/Landscape series in which he paired abstracted Connecticut landscapes with pages of his great-great-grandparents’ diaries. This above work, from his 1986 series Degradés, is an abstract photogram made by exposing color photographic paper to various levels of light. In all of his works Welling filters the very tenets of photography, light, movement, and time, through his unique process, contributing to the continuous reevaluation of abstract photography." (http://www.mocp.org/collections/permanent/welling_james.php)

VMFA Submission. Friday. 11.13.

Shimon Attie Lecture. Wed. 11.11.

I really enjoyed the first works that Attie showed, the series from 1991 of the projections onto buildings. That work was effective in its emotional content. The layered messages of pre and post war and the changing government of Berlin at the time was all beautifully captured in these images.

The series of faces projected from underwater was very effective as well. Attie spoke a great deal about the fluidity of memory and the paradox between fluid vs. substantial. The way in which the water warped the portraits was very telling in the way people were changed by the times, by the war and by the horrors they experienced. The means of travel and escape over the water was extremely relevant to jews fleeing the country and immigration in general.

Viewing Attie's later works, the films, with their slow movement, gave me the feeling of being on tour in a natural history museum. The way the subjects were raised on platforms and slowly spinning was very much putting them on display, but it was not cold, or scientific the way we were allowed to view them; it was a tender experience. It's amazing that Attie was able to create that amount of emotion from such a studio influenced shoot, all the while not visibly tampering with the people or the situation beyond posing.

All of Attie's work is heavily steeped in the emotional and political climate of when it was made. The poetry that he displayed before showing the work from Aberfan and the Archaeology of the Racetrack was moving and complemented the work. The words he used to describe his work were telling of what he was communicating. Ethereal, visual, phenomenology, memory, layers, aging. All of these adjectives could easily be extracted from any one of the pieces he displayed. Even his method of showing his work, on a slide projector complemented the conceptual aspects of the pieces.

I love that he also used the word Glacial. You can view the image, and get something out of it and you can also investigate the image, there is so much beneath the surface.

Thursday Post. 11.12.

Tim Head. Monday Post. 11.9.

Tim Head is a British artist, born in 1946. He has done a great deal of experimentation in the art field, working with drawing, printing with ink, video installations, and experiments with UV paint and black lights.

Tim Head has worked in a variety of mediums over the years. Some of his later work, started in the early 2000’s “explores the physical ingredients of digital space.”

And another quote, “The work is motivated by the search for a kind of pictorial and spatial reality which is intrinsic to the computer, and a desire to expose the 'treacherous' nature of the digital space. Head is fascinated by the supposed perfection of the computerised image and the fact that much effort is devoted to creating ever more refined images which eliminate any evidence of the pixel. However, Head is not opposed to such technology per se. Treacherous Light is not about subverting the computer. Rather, in common with so much of his work of the past thirty years, it is about taking a medium (or an idea) and 'laying it bare, making it transparent, showing it for what it is'. [6] It is a part of an ongoing project: a probing but non-judgemental questioning of the world we live in and the technology we surround ourselves with.”

Thursday post. 11.5.

I popped into Paul's office a few days ago, before my presentation because I hadn't met with him since my first meeting and he hadn't seen any of my recent work. We spoke about the images I showed in my midterm critique and to my relief he said he liked the concept and images better than my original idea! This was a huge relief! Paul had some great ideas with what I could do to further the concept, this included making my own images to show alongside the screen shots of LCDs and Planet Earth. This was a great idea, because it allows me to get more innovative with my shots and even create some sets, which I love doing! Anselm Reyle really comes to mind while I'm thinking about making this work because of his use of foil. The pvc foil he uses looks insanely crystalline when photographed from certain angles. Paul suggested continuing the illusions and photographing through something, such as a glass window. I think it's important for the work I set up and shoot to maintain dialogue with the other images I'm going to be showing...I want it to appear as if it could have been a shot from Planet Earth. These illusions are important to my work and the conceptual conversations I want my pieces to have with each other.

Andres Serrano. Monday Post. 11.2.

Andres Serrano is best known for his controversial images of Jesus on the Cross and Madonna with Child, both submerged in his urine. Serrano’s use of abstraction and organic compounds is the part of his work that I enjoy. He takes a biological look at what the human body produces. His more controversial work employs piss, blood, semen, and now feces; these are the pieces I have been studying. Serrano has been throwing this brand of social commentary at the art world for years now. His recent work, photographs of his own shit photographed against bright neon backgrounds are meant to show the complexities of human waste.

Serrano says, “Even though I consider myself a conceptual artist, I am a traditionalist when it comes to photography. I like to use film and shoot straight. No technical gimmicks or special effects. What you see is what I saw when I looked though the camera. If I've dazzled you with lights and colors, it's because I've dazzled you with lights and colors. Ideas are more important than effects. And effects are always better when they're real.”

I think Serrano is great because how often do we really contemplate what our bodies produce? Everything that we naturally make as living beings has been stigmatized by society and the media. It is not only socially acceptable, but we are expected to cover and mask our human odors, flush our waste, and as women, hide our menstruation as shameful weakness, not to mention the stereotypes attached to body hair. Serrano's brand of controversy may be more of a "f*** you" to the contemporary art world, but regardless, he is using his body to make art and I have a great respect for the work he creates.

Thursday Post. 10.29.

I am interested in the way that staring into a screen gives people a sense of accomplishment and productivity. Specifically, the documentary Planet Earth, because it gives a viewer the illusion that they can travel around the globe without ever leaving home. Setting foot outside the door is no longer necessary, because the wilds of the world are now unfolding on your television screen. I have been playing the Planet Earth documentary on my computer and shooting it so that there are visible pixels and warped lines from the screen. The subtle additions that these elements add to the already abstracted images is my current aesthetic. These images are to read as commentary on human interaction with the image and the screen. We regard the screen as it's own entity more often than an object of our own creation.
The ways in which humans imitate and try to duplicate processes of the natural world also feed into my imagery. Specifically, in terms of crystalline structures. Crystals are fascinating because their molecular structures are so unique, but for years scientists have known how to create crystals and gemstones in labs around the world. Human beings are working to create alternatives to all living things. It's as if we are turning a cheek to the natural, because we can make it better. Nature left us a map, and we follow the roads, but we are constantly looking for short cuts.
For example, China has the worlds leading weather manipulation technology and scientists are currently working to create a resolution clearer than even the human eye.

Walead Beshty. Monday Post. 10.26.

Walead Beshty is a very intelligent man. His work is based on political and social movements and the process through which he makes his art is very thoughtful.

Excerpt from an "about the artist" statement, "Walead Beshty has long used photography as a tool to explore the social and political conditions of our material culture. More recently, the material conditions of photography itself have spurred his continuing investigations of the gap between the physical world and the image world, and the way this rupture is instrumentalized by ideologies that seek to infiltrate the processes through which we produce meaning."

Beshty also makes large scale, abstract, color photograms. He combines elements of early photography, and then puts a modern spin on it by using large-scale digital printers, and color processing. Another innovative piece Beshty created is a set of shatter proof glass boxes that he ships from gallery to gallery in fed ex boxes. As the pieces move, they develop cracks and shatters from the wear and tear of the travel. This speaks to the movement, the physical tracing of the pieces as they move from show to show. At each location, the boxes take on a new visual element, from the shipping. This work speaks similarly to the photographs Beshty shoots of abandoned Iraqi government buildings in former East Berlin. He had been shooting the gradual decay of the buildings, when on a later trip, his film made it's way through the airport x-ray machines. Rather than dispose of the film, Beshty began shooting with it to make commentary on the travel and the change that had taken place within the space.

Thursday Post. 10.22.

Day after mid term crit.
In my critique, I showed 25 different 4"x6" images. The images were split about 50/50 between Planet Earth stills and broken LCD screens. I love that I have been able to keep abstraction as a main focus in my project. This is also a way for me to explore color without being vibrant without a purpose. I plan on developing this project further by focusing on fractals and where they exist in nature as well as the way in which they are produced digitally. Crystals have been a big inspiration because they are so complex and yet scientists have been making them in labs for years. Another inspiration in making this work is the developing Weather Technology being produced in China. This technology is wild, men were literally shooting rockets of silver iodide into the clouds to prevent rain from interfering with the 2008 Olympics. (http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-06-29-china-rain_x.htm)

The way in which humans are duplicating nature is mind boggling. There is very little that human beings actually need to survive. Food, Water, Shelter. Greed and capitalism have pushed human beings to drive mother nature farther back. As a species we have lost touch with how things are made. Look around your living room, could you duplicate any of the objects in it? We exist in a world of digital communication, email, blogging, the majority of us have no respect for our planet.

I know I'm throwing out a lot of blanket statements that can't possibly apply to everyone on the earth, but in my work I am looking to explore the appeal of the show Planet Earth and why it makes it's viewers feel so much closer to nature, when in fact we never set foot outside of the living room.

Planet Earth is the only documentary that I have seen about the Earth without obvious human involvement. Typically the format is a rugged looking man jumping from rock to rock and teaching you how to safely drink urine if trapped out in the elements. Planet Earth shows the untouched parts of the planet in a way that makes the viewer feel as if they are personally communing with the scenery. In addition to my screen shots, I would like to show images that I shoot on my own...equally abstract and somewhat indistinguishable from the other images, except lacking pixels. Paul's idea was to shoot through window glass, with water drops on the surface. This comparison between real life and life that exists on the screen compared to moments that never truly existed, such as the broken LCD is what I've been thinking about. It's really overwhelming to dissect all of these elements at once, it's easier on my brain to think about it in pieces.

Stephen Knapp. Monday Post. 10.19.

Stephen Knapp is known for his light paintings. Knapp uses light and the way light shines through glass to creature sculptural elements on walls that resemble paintings. The three dimensional pieces, also work flawlessly in 2D and look amazing when photographed; I'd love to shoot his work. There are so many potential angles to shoot the pieces from. Every direction offers new angles, new color combinations and more geometry. Knapp's work varies in scale from the size of a mantle, in his commissioned work, to taking up the side of a building, ex: 23'x40'x1'. His range is incredible. In one piece, there is only one light source illuminating the work and the result does not look any more minimal than the others. The minimalist aspect of this is great, Knapp uses only 3 materials..glass, steel and light. And truly, this is the purest color source possible, it is pure color and light.

Observing the way Knapp can literally paint with light and color is truly inspiring. I have tried my hand at painting on several occasions and always seem to fall short of the effect I strive for. Stephen Knapp has accomplished painterly shapes using only light, glass and stainless steel. It's absolutely amazing. The wording of his statement clearly shows the imagination of the artist that has been involved in this process.

Excerpt from Knapp's Artist Statement on the subject of his "lightpaintings:"

"Out of these processes and materials have come lightpaintings, in which I separate white light into pure color and paint with light. Each piece has a presence that far exceeds its physical dimensions. Stainless steel grounds the surface and its reflections ground the planes of light.

Glass allows me to manipulate and explore light and illusion, creating pure colors. I revel in their purity, their breathtaking richness – yet I am most drawn to the edges and the soft shadows that overlay a whisper of color and the borders that define space. It is here that mystery and depth and wonder can be found.

Dreams and imagination command much of our lives when we are young, yet time and society move us into structures that leave little time for them. In lightpaintings I strive to create destinations, small pieces of wonder, places for introspection and meditation where hopes, dreams and aspirations are possible

Entering a lightpainting or any work of art invokes a conditional promise to do so with open eyes, to be aware of possibilities. Perception and interaction lead to an act of mutual discovery, a universal bond of our existence. There is no right answer hidden within each piece, only a shared journey."

Thursday Post. 10.15.

I have been in Chicago, Illinois for the past 5 days and trying to think about my work has been difficult. This was a poorly timed trip, because so much work is due when i get back but it's hard to find my focus.

At this point, after talking with Jeff, I have been instructed to shoot more and move away from building for a moment. I was watching the popular television series Planet Earth, not expecting a concept to come to mind, but the beauty of what I saw on screen made me pause the show and just stare at what was on the screen. I was thinking to myself that I needed to have a still image of the moment. It was too beautiful to let it go, so I started shooting the documentary in all of the places I was compelled to pause it. This got me thinking about how taken I was by an image on a computer screen. I wasn't accomplishing anything at my computer, in fact I was probably procrastinating from my blog, but suddenly I felt productive and enlightened. The way I was shooting the show, still spoke to my abstract aesthetic and to the origin of the Earth. I felt almost guilty taking images from the documentary, but

It was at this time when my friend Ben, broke the LCD screen on his computer. The color display on the computer was amazing, because the screen broke into a series of vertical stripes and crystalline shapes. I asked him to let me shoot it before he took it in to get fixed. He obliged me and so I now had two separate series, one of the Earth through an LCD and one of a broken LCD. Strangely, the two sets seemed to complement each other. The vertical lines found through both repeated in the natural state as well as on the LCD. Also, I had images of crystals found far below the earth in caves and the crystalline looking structures in the LCD we're eerily similar. I was beginning to think that I was onto something.