Lecture: Paola Antonelli

I am so happy that I went to the Paola Antonelli lecture. After a long day of portfolio review and transporting work to and from school, I was tempted to just go home. However, I forced myself to attend the lecture and I loved it.

Paola Antonelli is an incredibly smart and interesting speaker. Her lecture was informative, entertaining, and inspiring. She began her lecture by giving a brief background describing how she came to her job as senior curator of architecture and design at MoMA. After majoring in economics for two years and discovering that it was not for her, Antonelli studied architecture at the Politecnico di Milano. She worked as an architect for a couple of years, before abandoning it for writing. Anotonelli then moved to Los Angeles and taught at UCLA until she applied for and received her position at MoMA. Of all of this career-shifting, she simply says "The path found itself."

Antonelli has found design to be her true passion, and her mission as a curator is to ensure that design is recognized as part of natural human creativity. At MoMA, she strives to make her exhibitions "sexy" to keep the audience captivated - most visitors to MoMA are not there for design, and Antonelli seeks to change that.

During the lecture, she showed images from several of her past exhibitions that were amazing. I'm posting one of my favorite images below, from the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition, which combined art and science, resulting in amazing and beautiful work. You can learn more about Paola Antonelli here, and visit the MoMA website here.

Extra Post: Image Update

New collages. Check it out!

Lecture: Richard Roth

I attended the Richard Roth lecture at Reynolds Gallery last night. Quite honestly, I was not interested in the paintings. However, I found his lecture to be interesting, and even amusing at times. Rather than having a grand and pretentious concept behind his work, he merely said that he found them intriguing, and enjoyed the process of making them. He seemed genuinely happy with his work, and eager to get back to his studio to begin creating again.

Formerly an installation artist, Roth is now working in a new way. He has begun creating paintings on birch blocks, roughly shoebox size. Each block is painted on the front, top, bottom, and sides. They are all completely symmetrical, and primarily consist of black, white, and one other color. Due to their size and the fact that they are painted all the way around, they become almost sculptural and at times create optical illusions.

The biography from Roth's website reads: "Richard Roth is an artist and designer whose work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. In 1991 he was the recipient of a Visual Artists Fellowship in Painting from the National Endowment for the Arts. He received an MFA from the Tyler School of Art and a BFA from The Cooper Union. His work has been exhibited at Rocket Gallery, London; Penine Hart Gallery, Bess Cutler Gallery, Trans Hudson Gallery, New York; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and Reynolds Gallery, Richmond; Shillam + Smith, London; UCR/California Museum of Photography; the Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, Japan; Feigen, Inc., Chicago; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He is the co-editor of the book, Beauty is Nowhere: Ethical Issues in Art and Design and co-author of Color Basics. He was the Director of Solvent Space in Richmond, Virginia, 2005 – 2009. He is currently a faculty member in the Painting and Printmaking Department at Virginia Commonwealth University."

For more of Roth's work and other information, please see his website.

Richard Roth, Cowboy Magic
Flashe on birch plywood, 11 3/8 x 8 x 4 inches, 2006

Richard Roth, Angelina
Flashe on birch plywood, 11 3/8 x 8 x 4 inches, 2007

Richard Roth, Happy Hour
Flashe on birch plywood, 11 3/8 x 8 x 4 inches, 2008

Lecture: Christopher Winton-Stahle and Allen Jones for ASMP

Tonight, I attended a presentation on the ASMP (American Society of Media Photographers) given by Christopher Winton-Stahle and Allen Jones. The information that they gave was very interesting and thought provoking. Chris attributes his success (and he is immensely successful, especially considering how young he is) to his membership with the ASMP and all of the networking opportunities that the meetings provide him with.

After the presentation, I am considering joining ASMP. If I were to sign up before graduating, I could get the student rate of only $60/year, which would provide me with all kinds of benefits, including discounts on photo equipment and the opportunity to list myself as an available assistant on the ASMP website. I am all for anything that leads to employment these days ...

At the end of the presentation, we looked at some of Chris' work. I had actually seen some of this last semester, and I still think it's interesting. I'm posting a couple of my favorites from his "Folk of the Blue Ridge" series below.

Christopher Winton-Stahle, The Lowe Family

Christopher Winton-Stahle, The Davis Family

To learn more about the ASMP, see their website. For more of Christopher Winton-Stahle's work, check out his site.

Research: Color Profiles

Next week, I will be spending a lot of time in the 215 lab, printing my images. In preparation, I decided that I need a refresher on color management/profiles. See the video below.

Artist: Brandi Strickland

Brandi Strickland is a collage and mixed media artist working from Charlotte, North Carolina. Strickland graduated with a BA from Queens University of Charlotte in 2007, and has exhibited and published her work extensively in a small amount of time. She has also taught classes and workshops, and is affiliated with the WAFA artist collective.

Strickland's collages are beautiful, colorful, and somewhat fantastical. I thoroughly enjoyed looking through her portfolio of series on her website. Not only does her work relate to mine through medium and technique, but she has the sense of unreality that I have been looking to bring to my work this semester. I admire her use of color, and the fact that I can sense her enjoyment of her own work through each piece. Please see a few of my favorites below.

Brandi Strickland, 16x16, mixed media on board, 2010

Brandi Strickland, Wonder, 12x12, mixed media on board, 2008

Brandi Strickland, Universe Kite, 12x12, mixed media on board, 2009

Brandi Strickland, Intertidal, 12x12, mixed media on board, 2009

One more thing: officially giving her super-cool status, Brandi also runs an online store with her significant other, Robert, and she has an Etsy store. Check those out here and here.

Research: Cubism

More specifically, how my work has recently been influenced by Cubism, and the definition of Synthetic Cubism.

In recent collages, I have been fragmenting the background to demonstrate some sort of dissolve between fantasy and reality. This new form that my work has been taking immediately struck me as a derivative of Cubism, which led me to this post. Whenever I begin using a term in relation to my work, I like to define it here on the blog (see earlier posts about the definition of collage, escapism, et cetera.)

Definition, per Wikipedia: "Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music and literature. The first branch of cubism, known as Analytic Cubism, was both radical and influential as a short but highly significant art movement between 1907 and 1911 in France. In its second phase, Synthetic Cubism, the movement spread and remained vital until around 1919, when the Surrealist movement gained popularity."

My personal definition, through observation, would be that Cubism depicts a scene without the standard use of one-point perspective. The artist seeks to show the subject from multiple angles at once, resulting in the above mentioned fragmentation. For me, it is less about depicting physical perspective than mental perception of a situation (hope that makes sense!)

In reading about Cubism, I stumbled upon the term Synthetic Cubism, which is particularly exciting to me because its definition includes collage. "Synthetic cubism is characterized by the introduction of different textures, surfaces, collage elements, papier collé and a large variety of merged subject matter. It was the beginning of collage materials being introduced as an important ingredient of fine art work." (See Wiki article here.)

I'm posting a well-known cubist piece below, as well as one of my collages that inspired this post.

Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 1910