Currency the Ever Watchful Eye

Currency the Ever Watchful Eye is an artists' book that utilizes the flag book style to blend the images together. The book is created using thick white paper as the cover with 1x6 inch strips of printed images of 100 dollar bills as well as prints of a distorted american flag. The images of the american flag were distorted in Photoshop under many different layers of heightened exposure, hue and saturation. The image of 100 dollar bills were edited and placed so the eyes of Ben Franklin are peeking above the other bills on the page. All pieces of paper have been measured and cut to specific size and shape. The prints of the images have been tipped to the cover using book adhesive. I distorted the image of the Flag to represent the corruption of the United States government from the local level to the national level. The bills have been edited to show the watchful eye of the government. I've created this piece in reaction to the current position our nation is in with the recent deaths under the responsibility of local law enforcement officials throughout the nation. As pure as the intention behind our government the greed of money and power has the power to bring it down and through this piece I wanted to push the issue a bit further.

Time Clock Piece: Tehching Hsieh

Before I had seen the gallery of Time Clock Piece, I thought the title to be a bit revealing as I had a preconceived idea that the exhibition would be purely based around a matter of time or the idea of time. When I arrived to see exactly what it was, I wasn’t right nor wrong, but rather found that I took the title of the gallery for face value. Time Clock Piece is one of Hsieh’s throughly documented year-long projects that happened between April 11, 1980 to April 11, 1981. In the gallery hung many photographs, film and other factual pieces that documented the time between April 11, 1980 and April 11, 1981. These images and works are to be observed by the audience in a “story-book” like fashion moving from one image to another. But what the audience doesn’t know immediately is that the photos were taken one, every hour for the entire year as marked by the punch cards above the photos. As an audience member, this was really shocking to me and I put myself in Hsieh’s shoes. I questioned what it must have been like to have to wake up through the night every hour, on the hour to take a photo just to be woken up again in 60 more minutes. Personally, I thought Time Clock Piece was genius and I look forward to seeing more of Hsieh’s work.

Nick van Woert: Pink Elephants on Parade

When I first encountered this gallery, it truly struck a chord inside of me when I read the title. “Pink Elephants on Parade” brought me back to my childhood when I’d watch Dumbo and other classic Disney movies countless times, over and over. But when I actually arrived at the opening event for the gallery, I was intrigued to find that Nick van Woert had no intention of lining the space with my favorite scenes from classic Disney movies that I watched as a child, but instead with carpeted floors, and many untitled works that at first glance had no relation to Disney at all. Understandably, the child in me was crushed but the artist wanted to know so much more. van Woert’s sculptures are all untitled with special attention to “traditions, rules, and conventions of landscape painting.” This allowed van Woert to truly bring attention to the different materials he uses rather than what the materials have become. My favorite piece in the gallery was a copper work that much resembled a giant gold nugget. Not because of how it looked, but purely because in my mind, it had no greater purpose than to just lay on the floor as it was. Although my hopes for the gallery were a bit unfilled, I took from it more than I had planned. I learned that the materials in a piece are often just as important if not more than the piece itself and that they are constantly in conversation with each other no matter how hard one can try to distance their relationship and I feel this lesson is especially prevalent in book arts where there is such a strong relationship to the materials used.

Playtime

For this project, I wanted to play with the idea of projecting myself as a child, and blurring the lines between pretend and real life. I wanted to use stop motion to better animate the toys that were used to give them more "life" without straying too far from the fact that the child was still playing. The idea of the project was sparked from the movie Big Hero 6, from which I pulled and created stop motion of the appropriated footage. The footage is able to give a sense of exactly what the child is seeing and why he is reacting to his pretend reality. Although I understand that it may not have come off as efficiently as I had hoped, but this project was created with the intention to push the boundaries of pretend and reality, and to give a sense of fluidity between the two worlds. In the future, I'd like to better animate the figures and possibly better map out the scenes of the project.