Get it In Your Mind #40: Locality

 In my Art and American Craft class, Professor Cooke spoke about the conceptual trio of PLACE-PERSON-PROCESS.  This notion has attached itself to my brain, as I think not only about the work I do, but my tenets of human citizenship.  This weekend my significant other seemed to be disappointed with my ignorance of the Syrian Conflict and my general unawareness of current events.  I plead guilty, as I often find myself drawn to the mundane maneuvers of Jay, Beyonce and Blue rather than staying abreast of the Syrian Uprising.  He posited that our American sensibilities prohibit a true understanding of the human condition and encourage petty self absorption.  My sense is that he is creating another identity that is quite distant from Americaness, in spite of fact that he's a natural born citizen and that he's resided in the US for most of his life.  What I find most intriguing about this exchange is that all Americans have this privilege to successfully renounce our citizenry.  No paperwork is necessary, but we can accomplish this by making local and global concerns mutually exclusive and denying the relativism of struggle.  This is a luxury not available to members of the 'third world'.  The conflicts of their locality are up close and personal, regardless if they get coverage on the world stage.  I believe this concept of locality is important.  This is not to say that the  conceptual nature of locale isn't planet sized, but I'm finding that addressing the concerns in your immediate physical space necessarily, contribute to a fuller understanding of what might be happening a half-world away.  

I did get a chance to watch a bit of CNN (online) and was struck by the stories of Syrian mothers and children.  This is a narrative I am interested in my present locality of New Haven.  I work at an elementary school so I have consistent interaction with individuals under 10 (and sometimes their mothers).  Despite the distance and the difference in language/culture- they sound a lot alike.  This is especially true as they also Dream of life without shooting.  I've tuned my radio to 90.5, the public radio station here, but I am sure I will still get my fill of pop culture confection.  What I won't do is allow the atrocities of the world to dull me to the concerns walking distance from my house.

http://wikileaks.org/ | http://www.npr.org/ | http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ | http://www.cnn.com/ | http://www.msnbc.msn.com/  | http://www.foxnews.com/ | http://www.reuters.com/ | http://www.ap.org/

On a side note:  I haven't seen "my kids" for a whole week (they had mid-winter break) and today I realized how much I missed them.  All of this reading business reminds me of my mom.  I was overwhelmed by emotion on the walk back to campus and simply had to pause for a moment and let the tears come.  I'm am usually unaccompanied by other pedestrians on this stretch of road, but today as I was weeping, and feeling very much alone, a perfect stranger comes up to me hands me a tissue and gives me a GENUINE hug.  She's says "I don't know what you're going through, but it's going to get better."  That is just what I needed to hear.  I told her on the street, but I want to say it again: THANK YOU <3

Congratulations to the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award Winners!

I am trying to step my contemporary-art-world-name-recognition-game up, so I've HYPERLINKED the winners of the 2011 Louis Comfort Tiffany Award.  I am familiar with the work of many of the artist featured here, but this exercise allowed me to connect a name to their brilliant efforts.  

Mequitta Ahuja

Mequitta received an MFA from UIC in 2003, mentored by Kerry James Marshall. Her work has been exhibited across the U.S as well as in Paris, Brussels, Berlin, India and Dubai. Mequitta has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s 12X12, Lawndale Art Center in Houston, TX, BravinLee Programs in New York and Nathalie Obadia Gallery in Paris, France.  MORE

Darren Bader

Darren Bader has been quietly and sublimely redefining the artist-as-curator archetype for almost a decade now with a flurry of challenging exhibitions in New York, L.A., London and Tokyo. With the new works in his latest show, "Chad Ochocinco," the upstart has matured delicately with a tour de force for the overeducated yet sadly passionless Facebook generation. Bader's curatorial flow is employed as both an antidote to the self-congratulatory big ideas of Conceptual art and an alternative to the snarky strategies of the early 2000s.  MORE

Trisha Baga*

(b. 1985, Venice, FL) is an artist living and working in New York, generating mainly video and performance work through a multi-disciplinary practice which engages the formal languages and concerns of sculpture, painting, cinema, music, photography, comedy, and fiction, using common things to guide phenomenological compositions about the acts of looking and recognizing, and the gap in between. MORE

Moyra Davey

New York Moyra Davey’s first show with Murray Guy was an engrossing demonstration of the camera’s ability to isolate detail, organize content and serve agendas both simple and complex. Since the early ’90s, the New York-based photographer has created photographs, videos and publications whose subject matter—including studio ephemera, domestic objects and books—may suggest more sympathy toward the page than the wall. Davey steadily documents segments of her own world and operates in that narrow gap between the novel and the cinema. She is something of an intimist, and her modestly scaled C-prints, none larger than 20 by 24 inches, feature the things we value and accumulate.  MORE

 Josh Faught

Josh Faught lives and works in San Francisco, California. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the California College of Arts in Oakland and San Francisco and has exhibited widely in the United States. MORE

LaToya Ruby Frazier

LaToya Ruby Frazier (b. 1982, Braddock, Pennsylvania, USA) lives and works in New Brunswick, New Jersey and New York, New York. She earned a BFA from Edinboro University (2004), an MFA from Syracuse University (2007), and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2007), Artist in the Marketplace at the The Bronx Museum of the Arts (2009), and the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program (2011). MORE

Mandy Greer*

Mandy Greer is a mixed-media installation artist with an MFA from the University of Washington, where she held a Jacob K. Javitz National Graduate Fellowship.   In the Northwest, she has shown at Henry Art Gallery, Bellevue Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, Frye Art Musuem, 4Culture Gallery, Soil Gallery, Consolidated Works, Ohge Ltd. and Center on Contemporary Art.  MORE

Shadi Haib Allah

The artist lives and works in Palestine. Shadi Habib Allah is an emerging artist based in Ramallah, Palestine. His practice incorporates installation, sculpture, video and animation. In his work Shadi investigates the human condition and plays on various themes that highlight man's deficiency in today's modern life. MORE

David Hartt

David Hartt’s project Stray Light inaugurates a new series of media-based exhibitions at the MCA called MCA Screen. Hartt, a Chicago-based Canadian artist, has been working with photographs for many years, attracted to the social, cultural, political, and economic complexities of the subjects he captures, rendering them with a cool, dispassionate eye. MORE

Maren Hassinger*

Maren Hassinger has been Director of the Rinehart School of Sculpture at Maryland Institute College of Art, one of the oldest programs of its type in America since 1997. The Rinehart School of Sculpture is at the center of innovation in this evolving medium, where students work in a wide range of mediums and approaches – from stone-carving and metals casting to installations and time-based art such as video and performance. MORE

Sergey Jivetin

Jivetin explores the concept of time, stiff interactions within work environments, and body organs. Drawing from diverse studies in engineering, fashion jewelry, illustration, and product design, he creates wildly innovative items fashioned from the most unconventional materials I have seen so far. MORE

Lauren Kelley

Employing a wry wit when commenting on matters of sexuality, race, and meditations on place, Lauren Kelley is a video artist best known for her series of short animated videos that combine clay-mation with her brown, plastic dolls. Stylistically evocative of children’s television programs of her youth, Kelley stages absurd, jittery, and sometimes endearing narratives.  MORE

Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt

Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt (born 1948) is an American artist who is also a veteran of the Stonewall riots. MORE

Miguel Luciano

Miguel Luciano received his MFA from the University of Florida. His work has been exhibited internationally at the Grande Halle de la Villette, Paris; The Ljubljana Biennial, Slovenia; The San Juan Triennial, Puerto Rico; and Zverev Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow, and nationally at The Smithsonian Institution, DC; The Brooklyn Museum, NY; El Museo del Barrio, NY; Bronx Museum of Art, NY; Exit Art, NY; Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, Inc., NY; The Chelsea Art Museum, NY; The Newark Museum, NJ; and the Jersey City Museum, NJ. MORE

J.J. McCracken*

Focusing on the Living Experience—making & consuming, loss, the passage of time—J.J. McCracken constructs immersive installations. McCracken’s landscapes are composed of earth materials and activated by sound, smell, taste, and living models that move through them, focused on tasks they’ve been assigned. MORE

Rodney McMillian*

Rodney McMillian (born 1969, Columbia, South Carolina) is an artist based in Los Angeles.

McMillian holds a BA in Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia. He studied art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2002. MORE

Nicole Miller

Miller, fresh from the MFA program at USC, gives us this quirky, slightly cryptic episode and nothing more. But it’s enough, as a small-scale conceptual exercise in transforming the familiar into something alien and disturbing, and as an indicator of her own potential to snag both eye and mind. MORE

Dianna Molzon

Like many people, I spend a lot of time visiting art museums. I especially like to visit the big museums and explore the seemingly endless rows of vitrines that contain artisan objects and old bits of stuff from cultures long gone. I think that all of this perusing and my curiosity about these objects, which aren’t necessarily given much context in the galleries, have affected my approach to making paintings. MORE

Rashaad Newsome*

A FEW weeks before the opening of his first solo show, “Herald,” at the Marlborough Gallery in Chelsea, Rashaad Newsome rendered himself as a coat of arms. MORE

William J. O'Brien

Chicago artist William J. O’Brien (b.1975) works in multiple mediums, including ceramic, textiles, wood, and metal, along with works on paper. His corpus reflects a playful attention to the expected properties of each material, and a subsequent subversion of their ordinary uses. MORE

Karthik Pandian

Los Angeles-based artist Karthik Pandian uses 16mm film and architectural constructions to examine the relationship between ancient and modern cultures and the ways in which contemporary societies understand and treat the monuments of societies past. MORE

Michael Rakowitz **

Michael Rakowitz (b. 1973, New York) is an artist based in Chicago and New York City. In 1998 he initiated paraSite, an ongoing project in which the artist custom builds inflatable shelters for homeless people that attach to the exterior outtake vents of a building's heating, ventilation, or air conditioning system. MORE

Ivor Shearer

Shearer is a filmmaker/video artist living and working in New Orleans since 2003. In the last three years his work has been focused on the socio-political ramifications of Hurricane Katrina on the people of New Orleans. MORE

Erin Shirreff

There is a constant dialogue in Shirreff’s work between “the thing itself,” as Stevens would describe it, and photographic representations of the thing. Her silent videos about the moon, or the UN building in New York, or Arizona’s Roden Crater, are based on photographs, both her own and those found on the Internet and in books. MORE

Anna Shteynshleyger

Ms. Shteynshleyger’s life has been largely defined by her separateness: as an immigrant in America, a religious Jew in the art world, a single parent in the Orthodox Jewish community. She has adapted by becoming a keen observer — the quintessential voyeur, whose photographs, some of which are on display at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, reflect both a cool detachment and a quiet yearning. MORE

SLANGUAGE

Founded in 2002 by Karla Diaz and Mario Ybarra, Jr., Slanguage is an artist group headquartered in Wilmington, California, a harbor area of Los Angeles.  Currently, members make artwork, curate exhibitions, coordinate events, and lead art-education workshops.  A diverse group at various points in their careers, Slanguage includes teenagers, street artists, and established mid – to late career artists, the majority of whom live and work in the greater Los Angeles area, especially Wilmington. MORE

Zoe Strauss

 Born in Philadelphia, Strauss was given a camera for her 30th birthday and started taking pictures of life in the city’s marginal neighborhoods. She is a photo-based installation artist who uses Philadelphia as a primary setting and subject for her work. Out in the streets, Strauss typically photographs whatever strikes her interest, paying particular attention to the overlooked (or purposefully avoided) details of life.  MORE

Matthew Szösz

Born in Rhode Island, Matthew Szosz has received a BFA, a BID (Industrial Design), and a MFA (Glass) from Rhode Island School of Design. He has worked professionally in art and art related fields in Rhode Island, New Mexico and California for the last ten years. Recently he has received the Pilchuck Scholarship, a Stein Fund Grant and the Award of Excellence in Graduate Studies from RISD. He was an Artist in Residence at Pilchuck in 2007, and a Wheaton Fellow in 2008.  MORE

Wu Tsang*

WU TSANG is an artist, performer, and filmmaker in Los Angeles. His projects have been presented at X-Initative (New York), Sala de Art Publico Siqueiros (Mexico City), Oberhausen Film Festival (Germany), REDCAT (Los Angeles), the California Biennial. MORE

Anicka Yi*

In recent group shows, the young New York artist Anicka Yi has presented the following works: a light box covered with potato chips and Cheetos dust; an aluminum pot filled with powdered milk, palm tree essence and antidepressants; and a floor made of bread dough (a collaboration with artist Ajay Kurian), which was later baked into fresh loaves. MORE

Get It In Your Mind #39: Black Tea

"Black tea is a type of tea that is more oxidized than the oolong, green, and white teas. All four types are made from leaves of the shrub (or small tree) Camellia sinensis. Black tea is generally stronger in flavor than the less oxidized teas." MORE

 

Recently I've been a participant in a variety of discussions about "implications" and the responsibility the artist has towards them (for them?).  As you can tell, I'm confused.  I want to investigate further, so I'm offering a spot of tea in exchange for individual perspectives.  English Breakfast, Earl Grey, Lady Grey and Irish Breakfast are on the menu- hopefully the "T" will be too.

4pm, THURSDAYS | New Haven, CT

Get It In Your Mind #38: Spring Semester

MUSI 107b, Exploring the Nature of Genius Craig Wright

TTh 11.35-12.50 STOECK 106

The changing meanings of the term “genius” in Western culture; discussion as to whether genius is a reality. Focus on the special talents needed to respond to and shape the world in a defining fashion, and the quirky patterns of thought exemplified by great minds, principally Leonardo da Vinci, Newton, Mozart, Woolf, Beethoven, van Gogh, Picasso, Joyce, and Hitler. Recent developments in neurobiology that suggest future lines of research into the minds of exceptional individuals.

WGSS 425b, Graphic Memoir Laura Wexler

W 1.30-3.20 WALL81 101

The graphic memoir examined from literary, visual, historical, critical, and creative perspectives. History of the genre, theory of comics and popular culture, theory of memoir, and cultural and media studies. Works by Art Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi, Joe Saco, Alison Bechdel, Phoebe Gloeckner, and Alissa Torres.

WGSS 451b, Photography and Memory: Public and Private Lives Laura Wexler

Th 1.30-3.20 HGS 217B

Photographs as a source for the creation of public and private memory in the United States from 1839 to the present.

SOCY 352b, Material Culture and Iconic Consciousness Jeffrey Alexander

T 9.25-11.15 CO493 208

Exploration of how and why modern and postmodern societies have continued to sustain material symbolism and iconic consciousness. Theoretical approaches to debates about icons and symbols in philosophy, sociology, linguistics, pyschoanalysis, and semiotics. Iconography in advertisements and branding, food and bodies, nature, fashion, celebrities,

popular culture, art, architecture, and politics.

PHIL 273b, Space and Time Raul Saucedo

MW 11.35-12.25 WLH 2071 HTBA

An introduction to philosophical issues about space and time. Topics include the ontological status of space and time, the reality of past and future, the passage and direction of time, the paradoxes of motion, and time travel.

HSHM 422b, Cartography, Territory, and Identity William Rankin

T 1.30-3.20 WLH 205

Exploration of how maps shape assumptions about territory, land, sovereignty, and identity. The relationship between scientific cartography and conquest, the geography of History of Science, History of Medicine statecraft, religious cartographies, encounters between Western and non-Western cultures, and reactions to cartographic objectivity. Students make their own maps. No previous experience in cartography or graphic design required.

GMST 294b, Confidence Games: Fakes, Frauds, and Counterfeits Kirk Wetters

Th 3.30-5.20 WHC B-03

The tradition of the con artist in literature and film, from eighteenth-century German texts of Goethe and Schiller to Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder. Works by Orson Welles, Clifford Irving, Melville, Thomas Mann, André Gide, and Dostoevsky. Questions of authenticity,authorship, and authority.

FILM 439b, Detection and the City in Film Noir and Fiction Alan Trachtenberg

W 7.00-9.00p Th 3.30-5.20 HGS 217B

Study of the themes of crime, detection, and the city in postwar American film noir and fiction. Focus on American films and related novels of the 1940s and 1950s in which cities, crime, and detective work figure prominently.

DRAM 158b, Introduction to Sound Design David Budries

F 10.00-12.00 PK205 STUDIO-A

In this class students develop an understanding about how sound and music can be used effectively as a tool to enhance meaning in a play. Students analyze scripts, develop critical listening skills, and learn the fundamentals of sound delivery systems as well as terms used to describe the perception and presentation of sound and music in a theatrical setting. This course is required for first-year lighting and sound designers and stage managers as well as second-year costume

and set designers. Two hours a week. Open to nondepartmental students. Limited enrollment.

DRAM 124b, Introduction to Lighting Design Stephen Strawbridge

M 9.00-12.00 PK205 101

An introduction for all non-lighting design students to the aesthetics and the process of lighting design through weekly critique and discussion of theoretical and practical assignments. Emphasis is given to the examination of the action of the play in relation to lighting, the formulation of design ideas, the place of lighting in the overall production, and collaboration with directors, set, costume, and sound designers. Open to nondepartmental students.

DRAM 89b, Costume Construction Sharon Hirsch

T 12.00-2.00 YK149 122

A course in costume construction for designers and technicians with hands-on practice in both machine and hand sewing as well as various forms of patterning (draping, flat drafting, etc.). Advanced students may elect to undertake

patterning and construction projects using Yale School of Drama’s antique costume collection. Two hours a week.

Open to nondepartmental students with permission of the instructor.

DEVN 194b African American Arts Today Elizabeth Alexander

TTh 4.00-5.15 SSS 114

The renaissance in African American culture from 1980 to the present. Great works of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, drama, film, music, dance, painting, photography, and hip-hop by living African American artists. Critical vocabularies and approaches with which to think about questions of genre; writing knowledgeably and persuasively about art across multiple genres and in historical context. Artists include Anna Deavere Smith, Suzan-Lori Parks, Toni Morrison, Edwidge Danticat, Colson Whitehead, Hilton Als, Rita

Dove, Terrance Hayes, Bill T. Jones, Kerry James Marshall, Lorna Simpson, Jason Moran, and Jay-Z. Lectures feature public conversations with several of the artists studied.

AFAM 423b, American Artists and the African American Book Robert Stepto

W 1.30-3.20 WALL81 201

The visual art in African American books since 1900. Artists include Winold Reiss, Aaron Douglas, E. S. Campbell, Tom Feelings, and the FSA photographers of the 1940s. Topics include Harlem Renaissance book art, photography and literature, and children’s books. Research in collections of the Beinecke Library and the Yale Art Gallery is encouraged.

MONDAY NIGHT_Performance Documentation (Reloaded)

NEXT TO godliness

The tenets of my personal livity come from a variety of sources: fortune cookies, the Bible, Hinduism, individuals experiencing dementia etc.  A large portion of these proverbs is also derived from the package copy of consumer cleaning products.  Formula 409®, Comet Cleanser®, Lysol® and a host of other housekeeping materials inspire the statements featured in my most recent installation.  Mildly reminiscent of Buddhist prayer flags, Next To Godliness seeks to inspire a contemplation of the mundane.

NEXT TO godliness | Yale School of Art | 1156 Chapel Street

Material Obsession #1

My travels to The Bronx reintroduced me to corrugated fiberglass... I'm sure that it's somehow cliche, but I can't help but be intrigued by the possibilites.  

Deep Thoughts...