Art345 Artist Talk/Exhibition Review

Artist Talk - Scott Tsichitani

Scott Tsichitani first introduced himself with his family greeting card of his fake family with his face on all of his children and wife. This was the perfect family that he was expected to have in his life but never had. He was subverting the cultural norms. His theme of his art practice was stereotypes in his culture. His theme was “undoing the other through anti-anti-Asian art”. The first work that he showed was about the Geisha show in San Francisco at the Asian Art Museum. He noticed that the Museum was taking stereotypical Japanese culture and using it for their exhibits. He took the advertisement for the exhibit and replaced his face with the Geisha’s face. He changed the words on the ad and printed them out and put them in the front of the Asian Art Museum. It took people a little while to discover that those were not the originals. When people started to notice, he got a lot of emails and caused a little stir up. He said that he was crossing boundaries but people needed something to make them realize that this was stereotyping the Japanese culture. He wanted it to be effective political art. The next exhibit that he caused a stir with was Lords of Samurai. This was another idealized and romanticized exhibit at the Asian Art Museum. He took the ad for the exhibit and messed around with it again and made an almost identical website as the Asian Art Museums. It was a parody satire to the pop culture. It created a destiny that could produce reactions. People claimed that this was not art and made him take down all of his work. He did a great job of showing the public of all of this stereotyping the Japanese culture. He made an impact.

Maya Lin

What is missing is a piece about habitat loss and the species that are going extinct. It is a sculptural work with a website that goes along with it. `These pieces are a memorial to the parts of the world that are disappearing. One is Disappearing Bodies of Water: Artic Ice. It is made out of marble and has a granite base. It is white in color and shows the cartography of the waters that are disappearing in the world. The piece is quite beautiful to look at. It is quite large and eye catching. The piece has layers on layers of the marble. When looking at her pieces, you begin to question what is happening with the world and why you don’t really know what is going on. There are so many species and parts of land that are disappearing all due to humans. This work is important for people to look at. Raising awareness for this problem that the world is facing needs to be heard. The website has points of interest that you can click on to see what species has been going extinct in that area of the world.

Dada Exhibition

In the Jot Travis building of University of Nevada, Reno, a dada exhibition was put up. When walking in, there was a lot to notice. There were a lot of papers on the wall and collage type pieces to look at. The use of collage was very interesting because I went in right after my Art 343 class had an assignment about doing collage.  The use of collage pushed the artists boundaries of how dada doesn’t really mean anything. It was a very unconventional way of art in that time period. This exhibit had many artists from different parts of the school system. There was student art and art done by professors. There were sculptures, collages, paintings, and video art to complete this exhibit. A part of the exhibit that stood out to me was the donkey head hanging from the ceiling. It had a video that accompanied it with people wearing different animal heads in different places. It was quite interesting because when looking at it, it was almost creepy to look at. Also there was a book taken apart on the wall. Every word was replaced by an e. It made the book not have any meaning, which is in the spirit of Dada. Every thing about dada is so different from traditional art that is done in school.

Late Harvest - NMA

At the Nevada Museum of Art, there is an exhibition called Late Harvest. The exhibition is mixing the use of painting and taxidermy. The paintings are historically significant in some way. The two different art styles put together gives the viewer a chance to question why that certain animal was placed in a certain scene. In this exhibition there are many artists that contributed. One piece that stood out to me was a deer with a human face. The piece is called Licking the Plate by Kate Clark, 2014. She used a wide variety of different mediums to create the sculpture and painting. Over all I did not like this show. It was very creepy to see all of these taxidermy pieces with human faces or different things added on to the animals. But I did like how they used the paintings to emphasize the sculptures. It made them stand out more than just using the sculptures.