Manifesto

ART, Products of what I have, do.

The dictionary definition of art: paintings, sculpture, and other pictures or objects which are created for people to look at and admire or think deeply about.

In my words: the all products of what I see, listen, think, and feel.

 I don’t want to denying the others idea of what is art. However, I don’t want to fit the meaning of art under the limited rule. I hope that all the creation of human beings can be considered as art. As a person who believe in art that should be considered as the most important medium of our society, I respect all the products or creatures what is beautiful or appealing which has their own philosophy, idea, beauty, emotion, etc. The art is all products of what I see, listen, think, and feel. Theses products should make others to see, listen, think and feel, or want to.

Manifesto

Manifesto- Art simplified:

Delicate

Elegant

Complicated

Detailed

People

Fish

Insects

Plants

Serenity & Complexity

Growth & Decay

Life & Death

Exposed & Concealed

This is my finished piece for the most recent mapping collage. In this piece I was thinking about ways to work with color and patterning more. I wanted to bring the color around the piece in a more intentional way than in the last piece I did. I cant decide if I'm done with this piece because there are some things that I don't really like about it. I think the top half is too busy. I like the way that the bottom half has a pattern that stays consistent. I also wanted to integrate the two halves more. I think I might redo this piece, or just start on another to further the ideas I have.

Obsession

This image has come out of my (possibly morbid) fascination with Victorian post mortem photography.

In my thesis paper I note an avid collector of medical and post-mortem photography who described his "fascination for 19th-century documentary photography, a large portion of which depicts dead children, infants and murder victims of all ages. He views them not as macabre images, but as indisputable reminders of how Americans grieve throughout history… in Victorian times, families commissioned photographs of their dead children lying in bed or in coffins in a home’s front parlor – often posed with a living sibling -- as keepsakes, and to send to far-flung relatives to announce a child’s death.” I was entranced by the photographs that I came across as I researched this obscure practice for my body of work entitled Memento Mori. The images were haunting, of course, but they were also strangely beautiful. I was fascinated most with the unsettling confusion that I feel when I looked at the photographs of living children posing next to their deceased siblings, who were often photographed with their eyes open. It is almost always impossible to tell which of the two are dead.

The thing that disturbed me the most was not the images themselves. I have seen so much of it that I have developed quite a strong stomach when it comes to the physical tangibility of death. No, what frightened me was the amount of time I would spend sifting through the images and reading the stories of the people depicted. I hesitate to call it obsession for fear of being seen as a highly disturbed individual. But I cannot deny the fact that death has always been so significant throughout my life. The desire to understand it, to find the intellectual aperture into the unknown, has indeed obsessed me.

This was my third attempt at creating a collage of these images and I found it difficult to create an image that I was satisfied with, aesthetically speaking. I do, however, intend to explore this further in the future.

Memory

This image is the result of my thoughts about memory.

The image is adapted from a photo taken when I was a very young child. My parents took my brother and I out one summer afternoon to feed the geese that lived on Alum Creek (one of our favorite pastimes before it became illegal). In the photo my mother is holding my little brother in her lap as I play in the sand on the banks. I choose to use that photograph as my inspiration for this piece for a few reasons. When I found this photograph I was struck by the fact that of the three figures in the image, none of our faces are entirely visible. We are all staring out at the water away from the viewer. A lot of the work that I have done over the past 2 years is in some way connected to the death of my mother.

The fact that I choose this image in particular was a decision made in recognition of the loss that occurs in memory over time. My mother was murdered only two short years ago by the man that she began dating just a few years after this photo was taken. I've always been so saddened by the fact that as soon as that man stormed into our lives I began to develop blind spots in my memory. To this day I still have very long memory blocks in the early years of my life and I'm almost positive that this is because of all the abuse that we suffered through because of him. The faceless portrait that I have created in this piece alludes to two specific ways in which my memory has deteriorated.

The first is the fact that I cannot actually remember this day. I was told the story and have filled in the gap with the memory of others, but without this image, it would have been lost to me completely. The second deterioration that I intend to address with this piece is a direct result of the loss of my mother. It has been two years since my mother died, and I have very slowly lost so much of her. I cannot remember her face without looking at a photograph of her. I can only remember her voice on the rare occasions that it comes out of my own mouth.

The thing is though, that there are some things that I can remember so crisply that I doubt I will ever lose them. I don't have my mother's laugh. Mine is usually quiet and conservative, with a smile small and thin because of an irrational self-consciousness about my teeth. But I remember what hers sounded like perfectly with out even having to catch it within my own. Bright, high pitched and so unrestrained. But not obnoxious. It was a laugh that made you smile even if all you wanted to do was stay angry. I can't remember the days between her death and her funeral. But I can remember with perfect clarity the sight and the smell of her blood and that of her boyfriend's brains. I remember how it caked the floor of that disgusting off-white living room that I hated for so many years, adorned with furniture the color of vomit covered denim. Everyday I wish that I could forget what I know, and remember what I lost. I wish I could remember those precious few peaceful years before the apocalypse that our lives became. I would gladly give up the last eighteen years if I could have back the first insignificant five.

In creating this piece I have tried to capture the nature of memory by alluding to the blind spots and fading the ones that are seen. Memory is a whisper of the past, as is this work of very personal exploration.

memory montage

This is my personal project that I have slowly been working on over the course of the past month. I really enjoyed doing the image transfers and lately have also been kind of obsessive about looking through family photos. All these photos were taken at family gatherings at my grandparents farm as I have grown up. I have arranged them so that they are as the property is mapped out. I wanted this piece to be a collection of memories from this dear place as it is no longer inhabited as it once was. The transfers work well for this piece because they are not perfectly clear and do not reveal all the details, just like how our memory is.

This is the final result of my personal project. As I said when working through with this work this piece is about layer of grief. And the wire that hold the feathers in the front reference the Hope that hangs in front of people in times of grief that will lead them through.

I wasn't sure how this was going to turn out when working on it. It was a much different process working with fabric than working with paper. And up until this last week I really haven't liked the work. However, when I pushed it just a little bit further, past my insecurity of the work I found a place for it and really love how it has turned out.

Final Project

I have been recently experimenting with the hanging/dangling. I find things that hang interesting because I am inhabiting a space in a new way than normally inhabited. I have also been touching on a theme closer to heart and emotion by making statements with animal bones and images.

This is what i have been working on this week for my personal project. I am continuing on the mapping project, but I'm thinking more about patterning and color than I was with my last project. I am also trying to reference andalusian tile work in this piece.

personal project update.

Above is the personal project I have been working on. This piece started out with the thought of combining the black material with the paper I have been working with. But throughout the process of dealing with the black on black on black I have found that I really like where the dimensions stand when playing with one solid color and different textures. I have already incorporated wire that is stuck down into the "mohawk" of the head piece. The wire will spike up and then will curve forward and over the face of the piece. There will be feathers gathered at the end of the wire in front of the face. In the end it looks like a food treat in front of an animal so it will keep moving forward. And as I have been creating this piece I believe that that's exactly what this piece is about. I have come to think of this piece as being about grief. The black reminds me of some of the traditional garb that has been worn at funerals. When I places the wire with feathers in front of the face it made me think about how when one is in a moment of grief you that you have to place something in front of you in order to move though and out of it.

I am not using this piece to speak about where I am in my life right now, however I have been through times of grief and am pulling from that experience. I think after this monday class this piece will be complete.

Personal Project

My depiction of womanhood.  Sometimes the feeling of disfigurement vs beauty.  The pressure to be perfect but also the pressure to let go.  Woman are beautiful but usually sometimes in some women there is an image of perfection we compete with within ourselves to be more. 

Project Update

Above I have constructed shelf that has a loose lid top and will have glass that slides into the front to create a box/shelf piece. The objects that will go inside have been chosen but I have the idea to use a frosted texture glass as to distort the objects from view with only a hazy outline to suggest what the object is. Having the box made is a good feeling and gives me the sense I have something ready to show. A map will accompany this piece as the background for the back of the box. I have also decided to leave the box wood tone instead of painting it white. Although it is a plywood material I like the natural tone of the wood.

Seoul The Ghetto Series

 These watercolor paintings are my personal project. Since I learned watercolor first when I started painting, I’m very familiar with using watercolor. I wanted to paint some townscapes so I choose Seoul especially poor area of the city which is where I am from. Now, Seoul is one of the largest and metropolis cities in the world. It is also the main capital of Asian pop culture too. Most place of Seoul is very fancy but, in the reverse side of the fanciness, there are several poor places and some of them are extremely bad. I am from one of the poor place. I remember when I was very young; I and my family were living in small hillside village. I was too young to remember every single memories but I still can feel the atmosphere of the place and the smell of the air when I’m alone and think about it. After my whole family moved to Canada, I had not been there but, last summer, I went to Korea and visited that village. It changed pretty much but I felt very warm there. For sure, a lot of fancy and beautiful places of Seoul are cool too, however; I don’t think I can like there more than where I’m from. And I would enjoy to paint these place for a long time.    

Deer Hunting Trophy/Decorative Wall Piece

This is a finished piece in the new series I am working on. I have been constructing my own version of big game trophies. They are mostly two-dimensional works with some three-dimensional qualities to them. I want them to appear mostly as two-dimensional forms of art because the animals themselves are three-dimensional and I want to represent them not necessarily recreate or make a reproduction of them. However, I want the scale of these works to be fairly close to the actual size of the animals I am portraying. I think that it is important to show the size of the animals because in hunting for example the larger the deer the better the souvenir.

These artworks are silhouettes of commonly hunted animals wrapped in fabrics with decorative patterning on the fabric. The fabrics are important to the piece. I feel that hunting and the big game trophies are mostly a male idea and interest. I know this is not always the case, but overall this is the common stereotype that we associate men with the act of hunting. The fabrics can be considered the female part to these works. It is my way of combining the two ideas of the manly hunting trophy and the home decoration aspect of them. I enjoy the clash of these two actions, and together they contrast and compliment each other.

I have been working the past weeks on getting some photo's taken of the work I have done for class. So I wanted to post some of them this week and talk about each piece individually. As a collection the work has over all feelings about things in our lives that overwhelm, but individually the work has specific meanings.

The piece above signifies topics of my own identity. The two strongest elements in my childhood are the bible and music. This work is built in form reference to the high starched collars of the fifteen and sixteen hundreds. I chose this reference because of my feelings for religion/church and classical music being a stuffy and suffocating collar in my life. There is a sense of class and elegance, but the feelings of claustrophobia and stiffness are the key elements for this piece.

I thought this explanation was interesting when thinking about the religious and musical topics that's what I'm adding it here. It is not a definition for the work, just an interesting view point I think.

Elizabethan collar

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For the article of human clothing, see Ruff (clothing).

An Elizabethan collar or space collar (many people call it a cone) is a protective medical device worn by an animal, usually a cat or dog. Shaped like a truncated cone, its purpose is to prevent the animal from biting or licking at its body or scratching at its head or neck while wounds or injuries heal.^[1]

The device is generally attached to the pet's usual collar with strings or tabs passed through holes punched in the sides of the plastic. The neck of the collar should be short enough to let the animal eat and drink. Although most pets adjust to them quite well, others won't eat or drink with the collar in place and the collar is temporarily removed for meals.^[2]

While purpose-made collars can be purchased from veterinarians or pet stores, they can also be made from plastic and cardboard or by using plastic flowerpots, wastebaskets, buckets or lampshades. Modern collars might involve soft fabric trim along the edges to increase comfort and velcro surfaces for ease of attachment removal.

The collars are named from the ruffs worn in Elizabethan times.

Personal Project

For my personal project I am choosing to make a multimedia piece that is mostly collage. I want this piece to have two-dimensional and three-dimensional qualities. I wanted to make an artwork that would be almost like an installation piece and would grow all over a wall. I was thinking of things people use to decorate their homes and a mounted deer head came to mind. I was thinking about something from the natural world. A deer is something that we hunt and manipulate the remains to create something to use as decoration. I'm still working out how I want to approach making this piece.

Personal Project

I am really inspired by motherhood right now and I know that I want my final piece to be about motherhood.  I am not sure what I want to use just yet but I am starting to lean towards doing a collage.  I have explored other ideas, but I think that this is the part of my life that completely consumes me and inspires me.  I don't think this piece will be a portrait I would like for it to be a general portrayal of the beauty of motherhood, but moreso the expression of love.  It is important to me that the emotion is communicated. 

Final Personal Project

During this class I have developed a project that will slowly develop into my senior thesis exhibition. My idea involves taking my father, who is a "collector"/hoarder and using the objects he collects to create a show. At my family home we have a three car garage, green house, and basement which are completely filled with objects my father collects. I have been unable to narrow it down beyond this generalization and know I will be creating a small scale version of this for the final project in this class. The image above is shelving in my house that house a few of the objects my father has collected and given to me over the years. There is a stipulation that everything loaned to me must be returned when I move/die/etc.

The theme of natural versus man made has really interested me because I can implement a variety of mediums and concepts that will fall into that category. The idea of collecting and cataloguing is the medium to which I am attracted to the most right now. In my near future I do not see myself working directly with making art. I don't like the idea of stating the "community" as having a reaction to my artwork unless you're talking about the community of artists that surround us. The percentage of the community that is in Columbus Ohio and will view my project is a very small percentage. I do not have a concise idea on what I want my viewers to walk away with. It is a very personal project right now and I have not taken it past the steps of visualization. Welp, that's all I got for now.

mapping

This is a piece that I finished recently. I found this beautiful book of maps and bought it with the full intention of saving it forever and using it as just something to look at and enjoy. I was convinced otherwise, and instead of photocopying the pages and using them in this piece, I used the actual pages. I think the great thing about this is that the rich colors and textures that I loved so much about the book stayed intact in this piece. I wanted the piece to still look like a map but be different enough that it would call for a closer investigation of the piece.

For my personal project I want to keep working on this same idea of mapping. I'm very interested in maps, I think because of the patterns that happen in them. I liked the technique that I used for this piece and I want to continue on with it. It's basically collage and stacking of layers in a grid-like manner. I want to try combining different kinds of maps in the same piece. I definitely need to think more about the concepts behind these pieces. I want them to be about more than just patterns and maps. I need to think more about organization and how to push the familiar into something unfamiliar.

slabs or paint

This is a piece that I have been working that past few weeks in my painting class. I think I am almost finished with it, I think. the entire point of this painting is to break away from my comfort zone with paint, to stretch my thinking and abilities, and to loosen the heck up. I normally work very tight and smooth and this is helping break colors up for me and paint faster in my regular technique as well as learn a new technique. I just wanted to see what you all thought. This piece is more about style and technique than subject matter.

melted fruits series

These are my recent works that i am still working on. I call them 'Melted Fruits'

In the beginning, when I recalled the melted fruits first time, I was thinking the Grobal Warming.

It was a very hot day. I felt like my body was melting. It was April. It was too early to be hot. It was the moment I sensed Global Warming once again. Some people say global warming is like a fairy tale, but I know it is for real and a fact. I imagined that everything I like was melting. Suddenly, the picture of a melted watermelon came to mind. Watermelon is my favorite thing in summer. I can’t even live hot days without it. Global Warming reminds me Image of melted watermelon, and a melted watermelon realizes me the seriousness of the Global Warming. Actually, at first, I made 3D work using sculpey, but I was unfamiliar with sculpey and the final work was not so good. After the summer, suddenly I dicided to paint them on canvas and it was much better than previous one. I still working on this series.   

Icons

  This is a sketch of the iconic piece I am working on to express the awkwardness and disfigurement of pregnancy.  I really want to show how pregnancy is being expressed as a false glamour by the media but really is really the exact opposite for most women.  I found this beautiful gold furtility statue that inspired to paint the figure in gold because of how pregnant women seem to be idolized right now.  So I guess I am trying to portray this ugly/ beautiful sense of the female figure during this uncomfortable time of her life. 

The Evolution Of My Work

These works are still in progress and I hope to create more to have a larger series. They are the evolution of the series of works I did earlier of the six female portraits with no faces. I started off with painting portraits with water color and then sewing them onto leaves. From there I became interested in letting the piece grow by adding other papers, fabric, and lace. I started covering the features of the women, but with materials that still allowed the viewer to see through or underneath in order to show the original painting. The content of these are based on female identity and the revealing and concealing aspect of identity. I want to continue making art that has both two dimensional and three dimensional qualities.

Overwhelming Form

This piece is about being engulfed or overwhelmed by something. Sometimes things in our lives take a hold of us, or surround us so much that we lose ourselves. There has been some debate on the formal elements of this piece, that there is possibly too much of it, but it turned out exactly as I envisioned it. I am obsessed with obsessions. And sometimes our obsessions cover up who we are. Whether it’s the house being clean, or making sure you always have a plan, or never having a plan. At times these things can add to who we are and be a part of our personality. But there are times when we become “overwhelmed” and lose the balance of our personality, obsession, identity or whatever form you want to put it into. More or less this piece is a reflection of my own feelings of being overwhelmed and trying to find the balance in the form. The piece is made form the folded pages of an entire dictionary.

The Senses and Memory.

The idea for the altered book that I am working on stems from my curiosity of how and why we remember things as we do, as a great deal of my work is somewhat memory related. I have started with the 5 senses and how they work, and will continue on how the information they perceive travels to the brain and how it is stored, and retrieved. I wanted to explore this in a book because it is partially an informative piece so it seemed appropriate. So far I have used only pen, but will work with image and text transfers as well as watercolor.

Symbols & Iconography

Symbols and icons are a language all on their own. Although each individual viewer can interpret them based on their own experience, the overall narrative of the symbol is the same. I have created individual allegories worn on the body. These totems, enhanced by textures and rhythms, possess energy that ceremonialize life and natural beauty: each composition is a distinct and tangible poem. When worn, the jewelry allows the individual to make an independent statement without physically saying anything at all.

Iconic Imagery

When I think of Iconic imagery in art, the first thing that comes to mind is Salvador Dali's use of ants. The use of ants comes from a childhood experience of finding a dead bat being consumed by them. This became an icon symbolic of death and decay in his works. When I first learned the meaning behind these symbols I was fascinated by it because at the time I had previously experienced something similar. I have found that a personal icon of mine is dead birds. More specifically the image of a dead bird fetus. On many occasions during the summers of my adolescence, I have found these pitiful looking corpses ripped from their eggs and carried away (I assume by stray cats, as I have never seen them near shell remnants). Soon after these discoveries, I experienced devastatingly traumatic events. These include nervous breakdowns, an hallucinatory episode at the age of 14 (that I now attribute to the extensive stress that I was under) which caused me to doubt my sanity for a matter of weeks, the death of my brother, and a few years later, the death of my mother. The irony of it is that my mother often brought home injured animals and we cared for them together for months. When I was in high school I came home one day to find that she had brought home a baby bird that had fallen out of it's nest determined to get it well enough to fly away. In doing this we learned that it was much more complicated than keeping it in a box and feeding it the occasional worm. Every four hours we took turns mixing up batches of bird formula at specific temperatures and fought with the animal for another half an hour to eat it all. Eventually we set it loose in the living room and found that it was finally able to fly, but when we took it outside and tried to release it the bird refused to go away. It would fly a few feet and then hop back towards us on the ground. So naturally it became our pet. A few days before my mother was murdered I found three of the bird fetuses outside of our apartment. Sometime in the following weeks I found a small bird with an injured wing. I tried to save it as we had done before. I went shopping and found the right formula, got up up twice in the middle of the night every night to feed it, and I carried it around with me in a shoe box everywhere that I went. I must have done something wrong because one day I woke up and to my devastation, found that it was dead. As my thesis has been focused upon death for sometime now, it may seem odd that I have not included this imagery in my art work thus far. I have yet to include this personal icon in my artwork for a number of reasons. The first is that in doing a Memento Mori thesis, my main goal is to express this subject matter effectively while avoiding the typical cliches ripe with the macabre. The second reason is simply because the icon terrifies me. I get a terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach when ever I come across a dead bird. At the discovery of a dead bird fetus I am terrified for weeks that something horrible is soon to happen. I call family members constantly afraid of car accidents, muggings, heart attacks and all the countless possibilities of sudden death. Such is the intensity of my superstition that I avoid dead birds at all costs and I doubt I will ever take in an injured animal ever again. One day I may include this icon in my work because it is a very significant one for me. Perhaps one day this icon will be my version of Dali's ants. But certainly not until I find some way to utilize the image in a manner befitting it's significance to me (Sans cliche) and not until I am emotionally ready to examine the image critically without falling into the painful sadness that I feel even as I write this now.

Iconography and Archetypes

Iconography and Archetypes:Warwick Goble
Red Riding Hood, 1912

Kiki Smith
Rapture, 2001James Jean
Fables Cover Collection Cover Sketch, 2008

A strong image that comes to mind when I think of iconic imagery is that of little red riding hood. It sounds silly but it is an image and idea that I grew up with. For the most part everyone has grown up with the story of little red ridding hood. It is one of the oldest documented fairy tales, and it comes up in art and especially illustration. What is interesting to me is how this image and idea is showing up in contemporary art. I choose the first image of Warwick Goble's version of the tale because it was for the most part a very traditional approach to the idea. Looking at Kiki Smith's version of the story it becomes more personal. The figure has really overcome an obstacle here. It is a great example of this iconic story. Another example I choose is a sketch of James Jean. In this image the figure does not seem to be threatened and the wolf acts more like a protector than the monster.
My point I am trying to make is that a story that our grandparents told our parents who told us is a pretty powerful thing in our human existence. It has the power of connecting us all, and it is a story we will keep telling generations to come. Which to me makes this idea iconic to me.