1st Thursday

My favorite gallery that I visited was 4 culture. The video's towards the back of the gallery were what really got me. The artist had 3 videos, one on a wall in which he walked backwards through a forest with the help of mirror that was attached to his torso and two other videos that were projected onto the same structure but on opposite sides so the viewer was able to see what was going on in the obstruction that he was wearing as well as an external view as he walked down a trail. The videos themselves weren't quite exciting (though the presentation of the two pieces was) but it was the concept that sparked my interest. In his artist statement he stated that his pieces were an exploration in self and how we view ourselves as well as others. The concept of self is a very reoccurring theme throughout the art world, and has been ever since the modern era has past, though it's always great to see a variety of approaches to the same concept; just like it was when we had the same prompts for our books.

My least favorite gallery was the punch gallery which had the pieces of the cracked landscapes. Although it was visually cool it just became too repetitive to me, I understand that cracked landscapes may be this artist's thing but I would have liked to see more coherence within each piece if they all had the same theme. If I were the person I would have made all the pieces part of a panaramic view of a landscape that would have been awesome! It was a good concept, visually appealing, but personally didn't grasp my attention to want to further my interest in each piece, it was more of a glance over each piece and then on to the next one to see what they had done different from the previous one.

Artist Lecture: Jonas Wood

Jonas Wood is prominently a painter on canvas. He starts off most of his pieces with either a collage, a photo, or a drawing of a photo or collage he has made. His subject matter varies from abstract paintings of plants to realistic portraits of people and their environment. One thing that is constant throughout his pieces is the fact that he focuses more on how color takes up space rather than an object taking up space, therefore he does not really portray shadows in his pieces making his pieces rather flat. The process in which he creates his work tends to be quite tedious though rewarding. From his presentation it seemed like he would usually start out with some sort of rough draft, or initial idea, and then work from that and move it onto a bigger format, which usually seemed to be canvas. Through his presentation I got a sense that his paintings were simply just paintings of observations in life he thought were amusing rather than portraying some crazy concept,. Jonas Wood portrays strong composition throughout his pieces and a variety of interesting shapes through his abstracted still life pieces though they lack that conceptual background that I personally crave for.

Annotated bibliography

Aguilar-Moreno, Manuel. Handbook to Life in the Aztec World. N.p.: Facts on File, 2006. Print.

            This is the book that interested me the most therefore spent the most time on. The ideologies of the Aztec people are quite astonishing, the fact that for their superior amount of knowledge about the stars and mathematics they lived every day for the Gods is crazy to me because these days I see people using this kind of knowledge for selfish reasons rather than for a higher power. Which in my mind is a crazy concept because the Aztec’s were a very advanced civilization and it’s hard to imagine that they would just make up their beliefs, which is what most modern people would say. The Aztecs touched on a very important concept of creation theories, destruction between one stage of human existence and the creation of another one afterwards which is why at least 4-5 of my prompts involve their creation theory which involved human existence under 5 different suns, the fifth being the present. This also touched on their thoughts on after life which lead to another prompt which is somewhat a contour drawing with wire of a soul leaving a body in the fetal position.

Brooks, Max. The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead. New

York: Three Rivers, 2003. Print.

As humans our most important instinct is survival there’s no arguing that. I was lead to this concept of zombies after having read about how in many creation theories there have been creations followed by destruction of the creation then again followed by another, better, creation. It lead me to make a sewn prompt in which there are 3 white napkins being ‘attacked’ by brown napkins to symbolize the spread of the disease that supposedly spreads from zombies.

Daniken, Erich Von. Chariot of the Gods? N.p.: Berkley, 1980. Print.

            I started with this book and lead off to find “Creation Myths.” This book talks about a variety of theories which surround themselves with the notion that early civilizations were visited by extraterrestrial beings that helped them start their civilizations. Having said that it seems like a farfetched idea at first but the book backs up this theory with facts from around the world that lead to this theory being a logical conclusion.

Franz, Marie-Louise Von. Creation Myths Revised Edition. N.p.: Shambhala, 1972. Print.

            After reading about the possibility that human kind was visited by aliens in the beginning to give us somewhat of a head start I wondered how early civilizations believed we came into existence so I checked this book out and read all sorts of different creation theories from around the world. Afterwards I went on to read more in depth about other culture’s creation theories.

McKenna, Terrence K. Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge. New

York, NY: Bantam, 1992. Print.

This book introduces the notion that human kind’s state of mind was initially sprouted from the introduction of a mind altering substance in our ancestor’s diet. It goes on to talk about shamans and how they are tied to the spiritual world because of the use of mind altering substances. This lead me to think about how in this day and age we see people who use mind altering substances as absurd and crazy and how the general public is mostly strayed away from this kind of thing. But looking back on it I think that as a society people of that day were more as a whole than any other time rather than being selfish as the general public has come to be today. Leading me to a prompt about how the human mind thinks more about money than the spiritual aspect of life.

Nicholson, Irene. Mexican and Central American Mythology. N.p.: Paul Hamlyn, 1967. Print.

            This book talks about Mexican and Central American Mythology, including their creation theories and stories about their Gods and how they went about their days. The crazy think about that region of the world is that they had similar creation theories and Gods as well. Which lead me to think, what if they actually saw what they believed in? Seeing is believing in some people’s eyes after all.

Noss, David S. A History of the World's Religions. N.p.: Pearson Education, 2003. Print.

            I was lead to this in search of a variety of different creation theories, but it was more of a dictionary of religions so I chose to skim through but didn’t really get much out of it.

Owen, Ted, Denise Dickson, Walter Patrick. Medeiros, and John A. Platt. High Art: A History of

the Psychedelic Poster. London: Sanctuary Pub., 1999. Print.

I was lead to this book after “Food of the Gods,” I wanted to see the most recent visual aspects of evolving minds, because of the fact that during the time when these posters where made the general youth was infatuated with mind altering substances.

Sayers, Dorothy L. Dante The Divine Comedy 1: Hell. N.p.: Penguin Group, 1949. Print.

            Skimming through the book I noticed an illustration of the levels of Hell and that lead me to recreate it as one of my prompts but not as an illustration more like an abstraction.

Taylor, Charles H., and Patricia Finley. Images of the Journey in Dante's Divine Comedy. N.p.:

Yale University, 1997. Print.

I got this and the book above at the same time to get a visual with what I was reading but the books themselves didn’t really go together because it wasn’t as chronological as I thought it would be. So it was more of a visual reference for ideas more than conceptual.

Thompson, J. Eric S. Maya History & Religion. N.p.: University of Oklahoma, 1990. Print.

            The Mayan people were tied with the concept of time which lead me to create a prompt made of times cut out of receipts surrounded by bus transfers in the form of a clock to symbolize how the concept of time is still important.

World Bible Publishing St, comp. The New American Bible. N.p.: Catholic World/World Bible,

2011. Print.

The creation theory that usually comes to mind comes from the bible which is why I picked this book out. This was one of the books I came to later on, definitely after “Creation Myths”, and the comparison between how the bible says we came into existence and how other cultures say we did isn’t far off. I read of many stories in which humans were molded in one way or another out of the dirt or clay. The fact of the matter is that there are a lot of theories that are very similar to one another and that lead me to believe that this is no coincidence.

Rob Rhee

He moved across a variety of mediums by letting the materials speak for themselves therefore allowing him to follow a unique process in order to create a piece with each individual material. He would also take the viewers' statements about his art into consideration as he did another piece because that would spark new concepts and ideas for him which also had a factor on his material choice. I did the opposite throughout my ventures through different mediums, my vision as an artist is somewhat focused visually so everything I make whether it's 2 dimensional or 3 dimensional looks similar to my other pieces so you can tell it's made by me.

Copper plate!

Final for sculpture!

Performance/Presentation Ideas

1. One thing that my piece could relate to somewhat at the Henry was the black and white film playing in one of the rooms next to the tv's on the ground. It gave me a chance to see how a person of that time would walk around in a suit, their posture was up right, confident walk, and hand shakes are a given! One of the ideas that I have for my performance is to go around, shake people's hands, and hand out fliers pertaining to the audio that would be playing at the time. 
2. I also checked out the "lelavision" link on the blog and thought about becoming one with the piece i'm making as the person did on the link under performances. This brought up the idea of being a stationary piece because of the fact that I'd be wearing a television as a head, so it'd make sense no?
3. My third option would be to stay in a certain area for the whole time and pace around after being connected to the wall through an outlet for a while and I would hand out fliers like that. I thought of this after watching Joseph Beuys' video of him with a coyote.
4. If not these separately I was thinking of combining the third idea with the first and begin by sitting down connected to an outlet with static playing as the audio and once it comes to be my turn i'll stand up and continue to go around and shake people's hands/hand out fliers and once my turn ends i'll go back to the outlet (or a different outlet) and connect myself again, or have someone else connect me I haven't figured that out quite yet.