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.

Art343 Exhibition Review/Artist Talk

Day of the Dude - Exhibition Review

On the first floor of the Church of Fine Arts building there was the Day of the Dude art show. There were multiple artists that collaborated on this exhibition. All of the pieces are themed day of the dead. Each artwork has some sort of skull on it. The pieces are a combination of sculpture and paintings. The biggest piece that stood out to me was a quite large painting by Michael Sarich. I watched him create this piece in my painting class. He used a stencil to put his signature skull on his brightly colored background. It seemed like he was playing with the innocent girl devil in the background and the giant skull meaning death.

            The other piece that stood out to me was the twelve baby skulls hanging on the wall. There were six on top and six on bottom. They were hung in perfect alignment. Each skull was slightly different. It’s unusual that you see baby skulls because adult sugar skulls are so popular. Each one has some sort of heart etched into the heads and some have an inverted cross. Inverted crosses used to be known for Christianity but lately it has taken on the meaning of anti-Christianity. I am not sure what the artist was trying to get across with these. There were also boxes attached to the walls, which almost looked like a shrine to the dead. There were many pictures hanging from the work and little religious symbols on the top of the boxes. The colors were very bright and looked like a celebration to the dead.

The Yes Men - Artist Talk

The Yes Men are to guys that have become an activist duo throughout the world. They target social issues in their work. These two men have a lot of different websites that they have created to look like big companies websites but they have spoofed them. They started to get recognition to have interviews and be on television to speak about what they were doing. In the movie, they impersonated individuals that they disliked in big corporations. They want to get to the bottom of why the world gives more power to the market system instead of giving it to something else that could have more importance. The Yes Men get away with a lot for posing as people that would be big in the industry. It is so interesting to me that these people that are at these conventions don’t even really listen to the speaker. They would have been found out much quicker if people paid more attention to the speeches that these people are giving. One of the movements that stood out to me was the Survivaball. People dressed up in this inflatable ball costume to hit corporations that where threatening the climate. The claimed that it was “a self-contained living system for surviving disasters caused by global warming.” This got shut down immediately. They have used these Survivaball outfits in multiple places that they took action on. I think that the world needs more people like these Yes Men. Big corporations have control over everything which isn’t always what the world needs, and in most cases it’s what the world never needs.

Art 343 Final

For this final project I got inspiration from In Defense of the Poor Image by Hito Steyerl . I find it very interesting how she uses the poor image to her advantage. “The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution.” Throughout the paper, Steyerl is defending the poor image. She wants it to be recognized as something that people don’t really pay attention to. I watched some of her other videos and got inspiration from those as well. She uses some dry humor in some. I wanted to incorporate all of these things as well as putting my own twist to it. I chose to make a short video uses appropriated images from popular advertisements. I chose each ad from Googling popular advertisements throughout the last ten years. I chose to put the Old Spice man as the main voice behind the project. The commercial is about how if you use this old spice cologne everyone will love you and you will be the best man around. I decided to end the video with the McDonald’s theme slogan, “I’m lovin’ it.” I made the voices lower than they were originally. I wanted everything I put into this video to be different than what I originally grabbed from the Internet. Each picture I chose, I edited it some different way. I almost randomly put different filters and edits on each picture. On some ads I made have movement in them. I tried to use some humor in the video as well. I put the chocolate man at the very end with no sound because I wanted him to look scary and like he was put of place.

Steyerl talks about how a poor image is passed around, edited, given to someone else, and changed. I wanted my video to be like that. I wanted to change the pixilation of them, the colors, and just change them to give them a different look. When photos and other media are passed around like this, the piece is given a different meaning and most likely less of a meaning. Popular advertisements are all over the Internet. You cannot get away from them. Whatever website that a person goes on, it is likely that there is an ad somewhere on the page. This is a problem in today’s society. Seeing bill boards or different posters everywhere give the product or what they are selling a different meaning. In today’s society photographs are also perceived differently than they use to be. Pictures were taken with a digital camera or a disposable camera and you had them printed. My parents have boxes and boxes of photographs where as I only have digital files that I have taken with my phone mostly.

All together I think that my video could be more expanded. There were some good suggestions brought up when doing a critique. I could make the video longer and keep repeating the short video over and over but making more edits. I think that would have given the piece more of a meaning. Also I would have used more commercial voices instead of just the two that I used. I needed to layer more and more. When looking at my video if you were an outside viewer, I think that it would be difficult to pick up a meaning from it. I definitely want to expand more on this to prove my point that I am trying to get across.

Steyerl, Hito. "In Defense of the Poor Image." (n.d.): n. pag. E-flux. E-flux, Nov. 2009. Web. 10 Dec. 2014.

Curated Show - ART 343

For ART 343 we had to curate a show. When thinking about what the show was going to be and where it was going to be it was hectic. No one could make a decision and come down to a solid idea. When the show ended up being in the little gallery I think that it turned out well. Even though the theme of the show went out the window and not very many people came, it was slightly successful. The food was the best part. The show turned into a plus one show. I could not come up with anyone to be in the show as well. I asked a couple people and some of them were already in a show at the same time or they couldn't come up with anything in time. If I had more time to find someone instead of a week before the show I could have found someone.  I created a blue piece for the show because it was supposed to be monochrome. I used watercolor and used ink to paint flowers on top of it. When all the pieces were hung up the show came together well. But I think that it wasn't fully curated by us. The show was just sort of planned and it came together. We didn't get very many outside artists. Next time I would say we would have to reach out to different artists instead of waiting for them to join in themselves. We needed to have more time when we actually figured out what was going to happen. We only figured out what to do at the very end when we had pretty much the entire semester to get it ready.