My Art

Teaching the Non-Traditional Canon Work.

Assignment #1

Postcards and Change

Change is everywhere. My plan with these postcards was to show the different ways you can view change in the world around you, even if all of the images come from one room. In these postcards I show change by using repetition, transformation or fantasy, and text. When viewed by themselves they convey change in one specific way. However, when viewed all at the same time the message is strengthened.

The first postcard I made deals with change through repetition. For this postcard I have a line of pool cues all in a row. In Photoshop, I cut and pasted different sections of the image. Once I pasted the cut section I would flip it horizontally so it would line up perfectly with where I had just cut it. I repeated this action of cutting, pasting, and flipping over and over again until I got to a point where I felt the image was visually stimulating. Then, in the mist of all of the traditional, wooden pool cues there is one that is a bright orange cue. The abrupt change in the images repetitions causes the viewer to stop for a moment. In that moment, the viewer has to deal with the change I am presenting to them. How they process the change will be different for everyone and it could be a positive or negative reaction depending on the person.

In my second post card I deal with fantasy through transformation. Here I took an image of the pool tables and transformed the surrounding area and tabletops. Inside the pool hall there is a red glow to the place. This red light comes from the light reflecting off of the red wall and the light shades. This red glow is a little bit like the red glow you can get from a sunset. Therefore, I decided to change the red wall of the pool hall to a beautiful sunset. I then used the table light to cover up the sun in the image to make it look like the sunset was coming from the table light. The change between the natural light and the artificial light can cause someone to view the space in a different way. Also, I changed the tabletops from the green felt to an image of the wooden floors at the pool hall. My hope was to make the viewer relate them to a boardwalk you might walk on while viewing a sunset. The wooden tabletops can also cause the viewer to think about how a wooden tabletop would change the way you would have to play pool, or how impossible it would be to play on a wooden tabletop.

Lastly, in my third postcard I deal with how text can change an image or change the way you think about the image. In my postcard I interlaced the words “what we meet along the way changes us forever” in the felt on the pool table. In this image I also have the cue ball lined up to hit the racked balls at the end of the table. That first hit by the cue ball starts the game and depending on how it hits controls the rest of the game. Through the words in my image, I am trying to relate the way the ball’s direction will change when it encounters another ball to the way humans can change when they encounter other people in their lives.

Whether we are experiencing change, creating change, or reacting to change, change is everywhere. What is really important is what we do with the change we find along our lives. Change is not always good but if one really tries they can use the change to produce good. 

Postcard 1-Repetition

Postcard #2-Transformation

Postcard #3-Concealment/Revealing

Assignment #2

Uncontrollable Change

Uncontrollable Change (click to download video)
Uncontrollable Change (click to view video)

Through life there are many ways your life will change. Some of these changes you control. Like, when and who you marry, if you are going to have kids, what college you go to, and many more.  There are also many changes you do not get to control.  Like, when you are born or when you die, what the weather is going to be like, how someone else might be acting from one day to the next, and others.  It is the changes we cannot control that enticed me to create this short animation.

In this short animation I look at how the weather changes over and over again no matter what. To show this change I took one scene (a tree in a field) and never changed it. I never changed the tree and field to show that even if we stand still change happens. Even if it is just the weather, change is a constant. For the animation, I started off with leaves on the tree changing from green to red, showing the fall season. After the leaves all fall off the tree I have the grass turn to white and snow start to fall from the sky, showing the winter season. Once all the snow has fallen I turn the grass back to green and buds form on the tree. To show the last season of summer I wanted to have the buds fade into leaves but I could not figure out how to do that. Therefore, at the end of spring the buds just immediately become leaves.  Lastly, I repeated all of the four seasons over again to show the repetition of the seasons.

For the sound I recorded myself reciting the poem “Life” by Sir Walter Raleigh, “What is our life? A play of passion, 
Our mirth the music of division, 
Our mother's wombs the tiring-houses be, 
Where we are dressed for this short comedy. 
Heaven the judicious sharp spectator is, 
That sits and marks still who doth act amiss. 
Our graves that hide us from the setting sun 
Are like drawn curtains when the play is done. 
Thus march we, playing, to our latest rest, 
Only we die in earnest, that's no jest.” I felt like this was a nice poem about life and death and brings a feeling of uncertainty about death into closer view. I recorded the sound in a field to get the sound of nature, mainly wind, into the recording as well. I also recorded the sound in my bathroom where I would have better acoustics and no background noise. I went with the recording from my bathroom and edited it in Soundtrack Pro.

Through the big idea of change, I think it is equally important to look at what changes you have control over and those uncontrollable changes. Many times in life we just focus on the changes we can control, we do not always like to think about not having control. This animation brings together two elements in life that we have no control over. 

iMovie Artist Statement

Discrimination is everywhere and especially in schools. Every year students commit suicide due to bullying. Actually, suicide is the third leading cause of death among young people. Also, NBC News stated, about 160,000 kids stay home from school every day because of fear of bullying. There are both physical and emotional forms of bully. Both forms of bullying are armful to the victim. 
Now with the Internet, students don’t even have to be at school for bullying to happen. Students, or anyone, can find bullying on Facebook, Twitter, and other online sites. It can seem to some that there is nowhere safe to go. 


We decided to draw attention to this very serious issue in a more comical way. Although red heads might not really find the bullying they receive for being a ginger too much to bare, no one can know what one person can handle before it gets to be too much. The anonymous ginger in our newscast states that she really didn’t have a hard time in school, but she may not be the norm. Whether bullying is happening to some one too fat, too skinny, gay, or because the color or their skin or hair, bullying is not okay. 
We wanted to make a video that related to the students lives.

Like stated above, bullying is a constant issue among students and we wanted to draw attention to the fact that it is a bad thing. On top of it being hurtful, it makes the bully look like a fool more than the bullied. The strategies in which we tried to accomplish our goal and deliver the right messages include: making the short video a comedy. The humor allows the students to enjoy the video while still discussing a difficult subject. Overacting in our newscast allowed us to demonstrate the ridiculous behavior of the bully.

Making it a newscast makes the information seem more important because information on the news is important and should be taken as such. 
We used iMovie with it newscast setting to make our newscast. We didn’t want to be associated with any real news group so we made up our own, WXYZ News. Through using iMovie’s editing film and sound clips we were able to make the whole film move smoothly. 


To make our film clip seem more realistic we watched other newscasts and PSAs. We also watch some Daily Show with John Stuart and Anchorman to see how to best make our new clip comical and yet stay in the newscast genera.

In the perfect world at a perfect time, bullying would not exist, but it does. Our only hope is that we could draw attention to this serious issue and stop it. Raising awareness is the first step; the next is to take action. Our video is intended to spark something within the viewer to get them thinking about bullying and all the things they can do to stop it. Hopefully they will be inspired to take action.

  

Here are some examples of my 3 dimensional art work. 

These are images of a balsa wood assignment in my first year of art classes at GVSU. We had to make five different sculptures that could be compelling on their own but also fit together in a group. Each sculpture needed a different requirement. One needed to have a found object. One needed to focus on mass. One needed to have simplicity. One needed to have a balance of inside/outside space. One needed to have a directional force. 

                                                             Found object

                                                     Simplicity 

                                            Mass

                                                        Inside/Outside

                                                      Directional Force

For this assignment we were given one 1"x 4"x 4' piece of pine. We were then asked to find a way to expand that piece of wood. I chose to expand my piece of wood by cutting my wood down and carving the wood into different little humans. Than I walked in a line dropping one wooden human with each step. My goal was to show how we leave a little bit of us behind in the past.

For this assignment we were asked to find a place in the building to build up an object around showing the negative space of that area and a piece of your body.

For this assignment we needed to think of a man made object and create it into a neckpiece or a hat. The art created needed to be sewn and also needed to use bits of material from a stuffed animal. I chose a hanger and to create a neck piece. 

Here are some of my Drawings.

These next 2 drawings are based the artist Kettering. He shows the progression of time through drawing and erasing and then drawing over the erased marks.