Artist: Michael Swaney

I am really disappointed that Michael Swaney does not have a blog or any kind of statement on his website, because I want to know more about him. He is a Barcelona-based artist who works in collage, drawing, and sculpture. I am drawn to how childish and colorful the majority of his work looks, while still being complex and meaningful. I found the following brief article about him on Cool Hunting:

Michael Swaney collects "the relics of our consumerist society" and uses them to create bright and busy scenes that are delightfully absurd. The found scraps of paper that he uses are often painted and layered. This manipulation of the stained and discolored papers, not only allows the works to maintain their original aesthetic quality, but also transforms each picture into something fresh. I love that in the chaos of the little scenes, you can always find elements of his quirky sense of humor, often reflected in his unusual titles (i.e. "Polish Situation with Sticks").

Read more here. The images below are from his Performance and Museums collage series. I also highly recommend checking out his colorful sculptures which you can find on his website. Enjoy!

Research: Photoshop Technique #3

I think I might have messed up by not blogging on Thursday? It was Thanksgiving... Anyways, I briefly discussed the possibility of making panoramas in my last meeting with Tom. If I shot from the middle of my living room while turning around, I could get the full living room, dining room, and part of my kitchen, which I could then fill with a million of myself and Henry. We will see. I am not sure if I would make the panoramas by physically piecing them together (which would probably make more sense, given the nature of my project), or by putting them together in Photoshop. Just in case I decide to go with the latter, I looked up a tutorial in hopes of making up for the missed post. I'm sure Mathew Farris could tell me how to do this better, but YouTube will just have to do.

Artist: Ana Laura Perez

I found Ana Laura Perez's work this week. Her website wasn't working for me, but you can try it out here. From what I was able to find on her blog, I gathered that she is a fashion/design student in Argentina. Her work that interested me is posted below, and consists of drawing, painting, and collage. The three images below remind me so much of a mother and child that I just had to post about them. I was unable to find anywhere on her blog that she speaks of these images and their meaning, but to me they just feel like the beautiful side of motherhood, childhood, or both. I think they are very pretty, which is a trend I'm noticing among a lot of the work I am posting on my artist entries. I think that must be a response to the feeling that I have about my work and life lacking beauty right now. But anyway, a few of my favorites are posted below. Enjoy!

Artist Lecture: Francis Cape

I attended Francis Cape's lecture this afternoon, and I had mixed feelings about it. I was frustrated that he skipped around in time a lot - most of the artists that come to lecture go through their work chronologically so that we can see an evolution or progression, but Cape skipped from one work to the next and back again. Aside from being picky over the way he spoke, I did think that the lecture was interesting, as was some of his work.

Francis Cape stated that he used to make "art about art," but that has steadily changed for him since the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004. Since that time, he has become increasingly concerned with the world we live in. He also spoke of his particular concern with the transience of our culture and possessions - he said that artists are no longer making work that lasts, but transient objects to fit in with our society today.

I found his piece, "Waterline" to be the most moving/interesting. "Waterline" features photographs of the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. The images are installed in a gallery, framed and hung above wainscoting made from wood paneling taken from one of the flooded houses. The images (some of which are posted below) show the well defined line that marked the depth of the flood waters. In the installation, the wainscoting comes to the height of the interior waterline in the house it was taken from. Cape said that, in his exploration of the devastated neighborhoods of New Orleans, he was struck by the obvious realization that the tragedy did not just happen in the "bad" or poor neighborhoods, but rather to everyone that lived there. The installation of the wainscoting is important to the viewer's understanding of the overwhelming situation. You can see "Waterline" installed at the Anderson Gallery on Friday.

Research: History of Collage

I obviously know what a collage is; I have made them at various times throughout my life. However, as I was pasting a collage together today and thinking about the blog posts I needed to make tonight, it occurred to me that I do not know that much about the history of collage. If I am going to spend the rest of the academic year making collages, I feel that I should be well informed about the medium. I did some research, and my findings are below.

Definition: A collage is a work of formal art, primarily in the visual arts, made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole. The term is derived from the French word "coller" meaning glue. The term was coined by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso when collage became a distinctive part of modern art.

History: Collage techniques have been used since the invention of paper in China, around 200 BC. It became more widespread in the 10th century when Japanese calligraphers used glued paper when writing their poems. Collage appeared in medieval Europe in the 13th century to ornament religious icons and images with gold leaf and gemstones. In the 19th century, collage began to be used among hobbyists for such objects as photo albums.

Regardless of the early appearance of collage techniques, some argue that collage in its proper sense did not arrive on the scene until the early 1900s, when it appeared in conjunction with early modernism. In several art texts, it is stated that collage was first used as an artist's technique in the early 20th ccentury.

Collage in the modernist sense began with painters Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. It has been extensively used by surrealist artists, and evolved into other forms such as wood collage, canvas collage, photomontage, decoupage, and most recently, digital collage.

Early Examples:

Kurt Schwitters, Das Undbild, 1919

Hannah Hoch, Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, 1919

The history of collage is very interesting and extensive. To learn more, read here.

Artist: Amy Ross

Amy Ross uses a combination of painting and collage to create her beautiful work that is both sophisticated and whimsical. The pieces that she creates depict animals morphing into flowers, people morphing into mushrooms, gorgeous she-wolves, and so on. I admit it is a stretch to relate our work (we are connected through the use of collage only), but her creations are so pretty I wanted to post them anyway. To learn more about Amy Ross, read her blog.

Artist Lecture: Shimon Attie

I absolutely loved Shimon Attie's lecture this afternoon. He was a funny and entertaining speaker, and his work was very interesting and inspiring.

Attie's work seems to commonly deal with themes of past and present, memory and reality, and frequently focuses on the history of various cultures. In his early 1990s project, The Writing on the Wall, Attie projected images of pre-WWII Jewish street life onto the facades of buildings in present day Berlin, Germany. He said he wanted it to be "as if time were burning through the facade of today."

More recently, Attie's work "hovers between photography and the moving image." I was particularly moved by his video installation, The Attraction of Onlookers: Aberfan, an Anatomy of a Welsh Village, in which he sought to help the village of Aberfan move on from its tragic past. I was disappointed that there is no way to access the video online, but I am posting stills and a brief look at the making of the project below. Attie documented the "standard" components of a Welsh village (mayor, singer, bartender, police officer, et cetera) in a way that granted them the anonymity they needed in order to lose their connection to a tragedy they so desperately wanted to forget. Village people were depicted as being able to live in any town free of disaster, yet they were frozen in time, just as Aberfan seemed to be since the avalanche that killed nearly all the town's children in one day (you can read about Aberfan here.) The video plays out very serenely, with the various characters standing in static poses, rotating on a moving set for a minute or so. It is set to very somber music, and I found it to be very powerful. As the figures rotate, perfectly still and expressionless, they almost look fake. However, if you watch closely you will be gently reminded of their humanity by an occasional blink or muscle twitch.

I really wish that I could post the video from The Attraction of Onlookers here, but as I mentioned before I can't find it online. Please see some of my favorite stills and photographs below.

From The Attraction of Onlookers:

From The Writing on the Wall:

Video clip from the making of The Attraction of Onlookers:

Research: Where to Print

I've been putting a lot of thought into how I am going to put my new collages together. The ones I made before were small, and I actually enlarged them when I printed them as photographs. Now that I have gotten enough feedback to know that the photograph route is not the way to go, I want to make my collages bigger. I think they will have a stronger presence and you will be able to see the edges and rawness of them better.

When I was making small collages, I printed them on standard 8.5x11" paper using my own printer. Going larger raises the issue of where to have them printed. I want to print them large (at least poster size) and on regular paper. In researching my options for this, I think I have decided to go with Staples. They can print on a standard weight paper up to 3x100' in full color, and they can do it very quickly. I think that Staples will be a cost- and time-effective choice, however if anyone else has suggestions, I am open to them...

Artist: Javier Piragauta

I came across Javier Piragauta, a Colombia-based artist, this week. He appears to make a lot of commercial collage/photomontage. Unfortunately, I can't understand his writing, so I don't know a lot about him. His work is very polished in comparison to mine, but it's inspiring and beautiful. See his Flickr here.

Research: Are Fathers Really Necessary?

I finally read that article I mentioned earlier in the semester: Are Fathers Really Necessary? from Taking Sides: Clashing Views in Childhood and Society. The article addressed whether or not fathers were necessary in providing children the stability and support they need to grow up "normal" and well-adjusted. Three authors (professors of psychology/sociology) argued that responsible and dependable fathers were in fact necessary, while two other authors (also professors of psychology and sociology) argued that children could receive everything they need from a single parent or "surrogate fathers" in the form of family members and friends.

In reading the two essays from the article, my personal conclusion was that responsible and caring fathers are beneficial, but a child does not necessarily need a parent from each sex to be well adjusted. This makes me feel better about the way I am depicting our situation through my work. I had worried before that people would only see my single-parenthood as a negative, but it doesn't have to be that way. I can be everything for Henry and still expect him to grow up happy and normal, and that is a huge relief to me.

I think the most interesting part of the article for me was the definition of a responsible and reliable father, and what it takes to make one. Ironically, the authors that argued for the need of fathers made it seem almost impossible for a man to be a good father, especially outside of marriage. According to them, it is largely the responsibility of the mother to make sure the father can do his job. At one point in their essay, they say that "in American culture, a woman is a mother all of her life, but a man is a father if he has a wife" (p. 130). I find this claim to be offensive and upsetting. Why is it that fathers are so easily excused from their role, yet mothers are expected to be strong and be there for their children all of their lives? I would personally never think of abandoning my child, but if I did, I know I would be judged much more harshly than any father that did the same.

I found it much easier to agree with the authors that argued against the necessity of fathers. I didn't agree with them because I think that children are better off without fathers (I wish more than anything that Henry could have both parents positively involved), but rather because they did not place ridiculous expectations on mothers. The authors of the "no" side of this article argued that the other authors' "model disproportionately placed responsibility for fathers' involvement with their children on women" (p 147). Instead of doing the same, they ask what responsibility men have for being responsible fathers. I cannot fathom how I am supposed to be a mother to my child while also constantly having to mother his father in order to let them have a relationship. My inability to take care of both of them is one of the many reasons why Henry's father is now absent. There have been times when I have felt guilt over this, but why should I? I do not believe that I should have to be responsible for making someone else responsible.

Anyway, I feel like this is a rambling post, but I am saying all of this to say that I have been reinforced in feeling like I am actually depicting something that can be viewed as a positive in my work. I have made the decision to focus on my child, and I am trying my best to be everything for him. I think that shows in my collages, and I hope everyone agrees. The end.

Extra Post: Midterm Critique Response

Just for my own reference, I am posting my response to midterm critique here as well. It occurred to me that it won't be long before it will be buried under a bunch of other posts on the class blog, and I don't want to have to dig around to find it.

Marion Glass: Midterm Critique

I thought that my midterm critique went much better than I expected it to yesterday. I read a brief statement explaining the evolution of my work so far (you can find that statement here), and everyone seemed to respond to it pretty well. I was given a lot of useful advice, and Christina even offered up a word that I knew but had not yet thought of in terms of my work - facets. She said I appeared to be "fracturing" myself into multiple facets, and none of them were whole. I think that is an extremely effective explanation for how I feel at times - thanks Christina!

The most useful advice came from several people, and that was to present my collages as collage, and not as photographs. Up to this point I have been photographing my collages as I finish them, in the hope that it would make them more cohesive. It seems like everyone thinks that is completely unnecessary and would prefer to see the rough edges, which is actually a relief to me. I think I will enjoy the freedom of leaving my work open-ended and available for alteration at any time. Tom said that it was ridiculous for me to only allow myself a certain period of time before a piece is "finished" because I am a mom and that is almost impossible (which is so true). He suggested that I keep pasting more and more layers, tear stuff off and replace it with something new, and make the work more raw and real in general. He said that it needs to be me - my feelings - on the wall, and I couldn't agree more.

So, that's all. Thanks everyone for all of your helpful comments!!!

Entry: MyArtSpace Scholarship Competition

I was a finalist in the MyArtSpace Scholarship Competition last year as well, so I decided to enter that one again, too. I submitted my gallery, "Subconscious" which contains timed exposures of people interacting with (or ignoring) their ghost. Submission proof below.