Category Archive
The following is a list of all entries from the art category.
Another Monday…
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- In the studio
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- Study for Homage to the Square Joseph Albers
The sky is gray today and so are the clothes of many people…including me.
I’m taking a landscape painting class this semester and having some fun playing with watercolor again. This morning I went to a park nearby my apartment to paint and had the company of this old duck. This guy was fearless; he just kept staring at me and walking in circles around me for the hour I was at the park. He must of thought I had food and that if he waited me out long enough I would cave. Sorry duck…no food, just paint.
Today I read that Joseph Albers was an elementary school teacher for 12 years before he was the assistant director at the Bauhaus and a professor at Yale (and an artist with work in most of the significant museums in the world).
The cool fall breeze is settling in, and I whipped out the fleece hoody for the occasion. And let me tell you, fleece is hot in Michigan. Everyone rocks it.
Lenore Tawney
“I become timeless when I work with fiber. Each line, each knot is a prayer.”
I am quite fascinated with this artist right now. Seeing creative uses of materials is something I find quite inspirational. When I was at the MOMA this summer, there was an artist books exhibit going on and there was one tiny piece that caught my eye. It was called Seed Circle. Lenore Tawney had carefully placed tiny seeds in concentric circles on the cover of a weathered looking book. This spurred me to look up more of her work.
Summer 08 Work
In my work this summer, I have been using the history of undergarments as the springboard for my ideas. Fashion swings as a pendulum between times when it is controlled and times when it is loosened. This freedom or restraint often reflects the values of the times. In this work, I have interpreted undergarments from various time periods. It is not important that the viewer can identify each specific period; it is important the viewer feels a sense of history and they see that our freeing and manipulating of the body is not a new thing.
As I stitched together these garments, I thought of the message that each garment tells the wearer. This message is written repeatedly on the garment just as the wearer may repeat the message in her head.
It is important that I did not just create replicas of the original garment. Since these garments do not contain boning, elastic, wires and such, they are not functional. They are now able to act as symbols. It is my hope that they do not act only as symbols for the messages we tell ourselves about our bodies, but they also act as symbols for messages we tell ourselves about our identity. These undergarments speak about those things that we often see as unmentionable.
These pieces also speak to a frailty and vulnerability that exists within humans. In this way this work acts a mirror to my own feelings about making art: I always see showing other people my work as something incredibly vulnerable. At times it can feel about as awkward as someone looking through your underwear drawer.
The thin, nearly transparent pieces of flesh-like colored fabrics are hand stitched together and coming apart at the seams. This points to something that doesn’t quite fit, to that impossibility of ever fitting the ideal. This is quite similar to what happens when we make efforts to keep it together or fit an ideal: this is when our true frailty is often revealed.
