This week I started working on this portrait of my parents for their Christmas present! I've worked really hard on it and I'm really excited about how its going so far. I've been focusing on getting the lines and details in their faces to make it look like them.
This week we're finishing up our projects. I'm not done yet, but this painting has been a little bit frustrating for me because I made the buildings with a little bit too tight of a stroke while the street is kind of looser and more abstract. The painting isn't as unified as I wanted it to be, but I still like it overall. Gina Beavers Hits Pause on the Everyday World of Oversharing
BY SCOTT INDRISEK | JULY 03, 2014 “I know it when I see it,” said Gina Beavers, accidentally quoting Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart from 1964, weighing in on how he instinctually identifies hard-core pornography. It’s an amusing coincidence considering that Beavers is talking about the gut feeling she gets when trawling Instagram photos hashtagged “foodporn,” hunting for compositionally appropriate source material for her paintings. A range of them were recently on view atRetrospective in Hudson, New York: sculpturally thick renderings of the original images, depicting things like pastries, bread loafs, and lobster claws. (Beavers also has a work in the current Zach Feuer group show, “Don’t Look Now,” and in another exhibition at Andrew Edlin Gallery.) In some cases the square images are singular; more recently, Beavers has been experimenting with reproducing the multi-faceted, gridded shots that Instagram users can create using third-party apps. (“They can’t get enough angles of the kimchi hot dogs!” Beavers said, referring to one painting based on an image in which the foodstuff in question is obsessively explored from all sides.) These paintings aren’t simple reproductions of the ubiquitous “this is what I ate today” images shared via social media. “If I paint something directly from a photo it looks like a copy,” she explained. Beavers constructs a base for the image, generally using thickened acrylic medium that she carves and moves with a simple plastic deli knife. Once the representative shapes are built, she paints on top of them; the finished works have a lumpy, physical quality, as if you could indeed scoop them off the wall and devour them. The artist mixes in various other agents in order to achieve specific effects, like the dappled skin on raw duck legs. Beaver’s topographic surfaces have a gnarly depth, flirting with intentional kitsch, a bit like the dimensional tableaux of Lynn Foulkes. “Building up [the work] interferes with my ability,” she said. “It looks a little more handmade. The painting is trying to mess with me, and I’m trying to calm and tame it.” For a September solo exhibition at Clifton Benevento in New York, Beavers is moving away from the restaurant table. She’s still primarily mining Instagram feeds for source material, though the selections are more eclectic: A shot of old carburetors; a gridded image of statue-genitalia snapped at the Getty Villa. She’s toying with some other possible photographs, including one of a pair of female hands holding dice, with nails painted to match the black-on-white patterning. One in-progress painting hanging in the studio is based on a “how-to” image describing how to apply make-up to create a “smoky eye” look, she said. That one “reminds me of what it feels like to make a painting,” she noted. “You’re using brushes, trying to make yourself look appealing. It’s evolutionary:Mate with my painting!” She’s still pondering how to sculpturally represent the eye’s lashes, perhaps using bits of cut rubber tire, or strips of colored acrylic. This built-up, hands-on process comes from what Beavers termed a “crafty impulse,” part of which she traces to her father — a retired hobbyist who builds mostly military-themed model installations out of simple materials. Her own practice is similarly obsessive and labor-intensive, albeit focused on what she admits is the transient, eternally in-flux world of social media. “There’s something perverse about poring over all these half-meaningless, never-ending photos, and putting all this work into it,” Beavers admitted of her practice, which might artfully memorialize a stranger’s ephemeral snapshot of a lobster dinner as a painting with real-world weight and permanence. Does she think that the Internet has changed our brains, the way we process the world around us, I wondered? Beavers, who studied anthropology before turning to art, answers with a maxim borrowed from that field: “Things are never getting better and they’re never getting worse,” she said. “They’re just what they are. We are test cases in this weird experiment — and what’s going to be the end result?” In the attention-deficit of digital oversharing via social media, Beaver’s strange, unwieldy paintings — her peculiar, delectable perversion — might simply be a way of hitting pause, of investing everyday images with humorous significance, one layer of acrylic medium at a time. http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/1042891/gina-beavers-hits-pause-on-the-everyday-world-of-oversharing When I first saw her paintings of meals, I liked them because of how close up and realistic they are. They were very aesthetically pleasing, and I thought they are unique because they're painted from above, and the food looks very appealing. However, I didn't know the significance to her work and her process and her connection to modern media, especially instagram, until I read the article from above. Do Ho Suh is a South Korean sculptor and installation artist who currently lives in New York City. I think his work is very interesting because of the transparent material he uses and the subject matter. He is really interested in houses, architectural settings, and abstract figures, and he highlights the boundary between public and private space. He also explores the notions of global identity, space, nomadism, memory, and displacement. All of these elements I find really apparent in his art, especially displacement. He put houses inside of houses, houses between houses, houses upside down, and random staircases leading up to the ceiling. Part of what I love about his art is that it makes me think and start imagining about what could be up that staircase to nothing. I wanted to fill in the gaps, and imagine what would go on in that house stuck in between those buildings. I've always been interested in houses and architecture in art, even though I do not explore it in my own art. I think his use of space and the thought behind is art is very inspirational.
I really enjoyed our trip to DC! The behind the scenes tour was an amazing experience, and I really loved the exhibit on the second floor of the National Gallery of Art. The landscapes were very inspirational. I focused on looking at the use of color, composition, subject matter, and mark. I have captions on a lot of the individual photographs of the paintings so I could focus in on them.
Before reading, “How the Art of Social Practice is Changing the World, One Row House at a Time,” I had never heard of the concept of Social Practice Art. Tom Finkelpearl, author of What We Made: Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation, and director of the Queens Museum in New York, defines social practice as “art that’s socially engaged, where the social interaction is at some level the art” (3). I think that social practice artists have good intentions, and definitely some good outcomes, but I also think that some obscurities surround the whole idea.
Social practice art was described in the article positively, as “a stream of participatory art that tends to display a strong sociological and political bent, often in an effort to draw attention to social ills and conditions. Sometimes, these projects are meant to incite empowerment or change in a community” (3). The effects that social practice art can have on a community, and the message it intends to give to the public can be truly uplifting. These artists are trying to pull people together and involve people, for example, artist Mel Chin’s “Operation Paydirt/Fundred Dollar Bill Project,” which brings together groups of children and scientists to the issue of lead contaminated soil. Miranda Lash, curator of modern and contemporary art at NOMA, where the show remains on view through May 25, said, “the esthetic component is key, but the involvement of children is a vital part of the piece as well. Children are the most affected by lead contamination, so he wanted children to be part of the solution” (3). While many types of artists bring attention to present political or environmental issues in their art, social practice art actually allows the people who are most effected by these problems to become involved, and spreads awareness to an entire community or demographic. Social practice has made headway at the museum level as well. “Public Engagement,” an initiative launched at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles four years ago, has gotten artists and other thinkers to connect with visitors in unusual ways, for example, putting someone in a coat closet with an opera singer for a private concert. As well as engaging people, it can have amazing affects on communities, for example, in Braddock, Pennsylvania, the artist Swoon initiated a revitalization effort of an abandoned church. Ceramic-tile makers provided a new colorful roof for the building. This project, in my opinion, is a great example of how community service and art can mix together for the greater good. That project not only brought attention to the problem but also actively fixed it through art. I also see social practice art as being somewhat of a reaction to the way art is taught in many schools, and to what type of art is expected by the public. Artists are exploring how to differentiate themselves, but also how to connect themselves. Finkelpearl thinks that the popularity of social practice today reflects a pendulum swing away from the art market. He says, “It’s a reaction against the excesses of individualism” (4). Nato Thompson, curator of “Creative Time,” thinks that this form of art is a reaction to modern technological dependence. “I mean, doesn’t any kind of human interaction that isn’t on the Internet just feel very special?”(4) he asks. Artist Pablo Helguera, who initiated the program for MoMA’s education department and wrote the book Education for Socially Engaged Art, shares his opinion: “We spend years in art school, where we are taught to explore ourselves, but social practice is completely about the opposite thing. It’s about how to listen. It’s remaining engaged with the world in an active way” (7). Instead of starting with the way a project should turn out, social practice artists first think of their intent, and open the project up to the public. Jen Delos, assistant professor in social practice at Portland State, and founder of the Open Engagement conference, an annual art an social-practice gathering launched in 2007, says, “Typically, when applying for a residency, an artist pitches a project in advance, but in this case, no one should be coming to us with fully formed projects—that should be determined by the context. So instead, we shifted the focus to have artists share their approach and their intent” (7). The piece, therefore, allows the community to help shape the direction of the work. While reading the article and exploring social practice art further online, I noticed some that questions arose and there were some blurry areas when regarding the true reasons and outcomes of this type of art. There are many tensions involved in social practice art, especially in sectors where art and activism overlap. The article explains that, “as agents of change, social-practice projects can seem wanting: the scale is often small, the works are temporary, and success may depend on the charisma of a single artist. On an esthetic level, they can also be befuddling, perceived as too much like community organizing to feel truly like art” (8). I had this feeling when reading about Suzanne Lacy’s “Between the Door and the Street,” in which 400 mostly female participants wore lemon-yellow scarves took over a brownstone-lined block in Brooklyn to discuss issues of gender, race, and class with people passing by. This seems like a great event because it was a way to spread awareness and interact with everyday passerby, but I’m not sure exactly how it could be considered art. The same goes for Caroline Woolards’ “Exchange Café,” where patrons could barter conversation for a cup of tea. Helguera said, “it established a real dialogue,” (6) but is a dialogue really art? In the article “A critique of social practice art,” by Ben Davis, he quoted a New York Times article which said about social practice, “Its practitioners freely blur the lines among object making, performance, political activism, community organizing, environmentalism and investigative journalism, creating a deeply participatory art that often flourishes outside the gallery and museum system. And in so doing, they push an old question—‘Why is it art?’ as close to the breaking point as contemporary art ever has.” Some social practice art is much more obviously art, but may not do as much for the community. This leads to the issue of how social-practice works are critiqued, and whether they should be evaluated for the social changes they produce, for the elements of performance they incorporate, or for the esthetic qualities of the environments in which they take place. As Thompson said, “It’s not easy to talk about this work. You have to synthesize so many different things—the social aspects, what it does politically, as well as the cultural elements” (9). Thompson also said that social practice art involves “really about thinking about process: Who does it connect? And how does it connect them? And what makes this a unique experience for those involved?” (9). Overall, social practice artists usually have the good intentions of uniting people around a certain significant political or environmental issue, and getting people involved. They aim to apply their art for the benefit of society, while creating some type of aesthetic. Some artists manage to successfully combine all the aspects of a social practice art, but the questions and critiques come in when artists get so wrapped up in the aesthetics that they do not seem to benefit a community in anyway, or they get to involved in bringing attention to or solving the issue that they forget to regard the beauty of their piece and its significance as a work of art. |
AuthorMy Name is Willa King, I am a sophomore at Maggie Walker Governor's school, and I am an Art 3 Student. Archives
June 2016
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