Gabriel Orozco

For Gabriel Orozco, the camera equals awareness. His focus is walking down the busy city streets, always aware of what is going on, and using his camera to capture the most minute details. He is unusual in that he doesn't have a studio that he goes and works in. He does not want to isolate himself from reality. To me, this kind of sets him apart from other artists. He also works with spaces a lot, altering them, and altering the amount of space between objects, like crunching the car together or put a pond in the middle of a ping pong table. He also likes to be a novice or hobbyist. He wants the art itself to be down to earth, to be something everyone can do.

James Turrell

I could easily figure out that James Turrell focuses his energy on working with light in an artistic way. It is kind of a combination of physics and astronomy with art. I liked the idea of certain rooms in his crater channeling light from distant stars. He called this "old light" because it came from stars so far away that it may have taken hundreds of years for the photons to meet our eyes. That's a pretty awesome concept. In his Quaker meeting house, he designed the roof so that "the sky is brought down to you." It illustrates his concept of what his grandmother may have meant when she said they were going inside to greet the light. He works it into the physical sense by making the sky-light, but also demonstrates the spiritual sense by the location. A house of worship is a place to meet the Lord, who many call the Light.

Mel Chin

I wasn't quite sure what to think of Mel Chin. He was supposed to take an old abandoned house in Detroit and make it so it would pivot over the basement. He would grow nightcrawlers in the basement to sell to fishermen. Did he ever complete this project? Was it even real? He also made the videogame KNOWMAD using patterns from carpets made in the Middle East. The "revival field" was one thing I could understand and did like. It's a creative way to perform bioremediation. He says that he's not much into politics or anything, but his projects seem to have humanitarian roots.

Sally Mann

Sally Mann is a photographer, but not one who takes photographs for news stories or the average family portrait. Her work has a greater level of depth to it. Her favorite element to incorporate into her pictures is ambiguity. Sometimes it's hard to tell what your looking at in one of her photographs, and it could turn out to just be a dog bone. She takes pictures of a lot of everyday objects, and she does collections of them. For example, she did a series on the dogbones, using different bones and techniques to develop the photographs. In regard to her art, she is pretty down to earth. She says she just does it for fun, even though critics will try to dig deeper than she intends. To me, her pictures look like antiques. Her portraits of her children look like they came out of a fantasy.

Obzok

Singlecell.org is a website that hosts a collection of digital creations by various artists. I stumbled upon Golan Levin's 2001 creation while clicking around looking for material to cover in my blogs. The website now is linked to its new version, Double Cell.

This creation, Obzok, responds to the movements and clicks of your mouse. It changes color each time you refresh it. It's a cute funny little thing that offers a neat distraction and elicits a few giggles.

From the Beach - Seagull Wing

Location: Beach

This could be the second installment of my "dead creature on the beach" series. It's a seagull wing. It's not art itself, but it does remind me of it. It's like a piece that has a mystery about it. What happened to the seagull and why is it separated from it's wing? Where's the rest of it? Did a shark get it? Of course, I didn't get close enough to thoroughly investigate. The wing is similar to a piece you go up to in a museum. It makes you wonder what the artist was trying to convey, what story they were trying to tell.

From the Beach - Man of War

Location: Beach

I found a lot of these critters washed up on a beach in Florida. They are beautiful to see sailing over the water, but quite painful to bump in to. The Man of War has a pretty blue color made by nature. It's not art because basically it's just a dead organism washed ashore by a storm. However, as will be seen in later posts, we are drawn to strange things that show up on the beach. We stand there are gawk and poke and prod at them like they were some kind of art. I stood there for a good while studying the jellyfish because it was strange to see it out of its element. It's like artifacts from other cultures that have been taken and placed in a museum out of their intended context.

Pictionary Reflection

The Pictionary project was a great oppurtunity for me to explore Photoshop a little more. I put a lot of thought into the many different ways I could convey my word through images. I also really enjoyed the discussions we had about everybody's projects. It was fun to try to guess the words, and then to hear different students' interpretations of the pieces. It really did teach me how to look more into the art I see.

Quark

Quark, by Mark Napier is an interactive program that can be found on The Alternative Art Museum website. You can watch a unique piece created before your eyes. A black screen will come up and you can click anywhere in that screen, setting off an infinite series of lines and waves of color that represent the fundamental particle, the quark. Quarks are composed of three electrical charges, each represented by either red, green, or blue which together are said to make up white light. Computers also use these three fundamental colors to make up the myriad of colors constantly shown on your screen. This is called RGB. This project ties the concept of the quark into the RGB color model to create each picture. The result is a vivid series of colors complexly wound around each other. I highly recommend trying it out.

Shower

Location: My house

This is a photograph of my shower. It is not art because it is a plain standard design. However, it does have a sculpted look to it. Also, it is a very important aspect of my daily life.

This shower isn't particularly exciting because it's not one of those massive tiled walk-ins that you see in $3 million homes. Now that has to be some kind of art.

Beta Fish

Location: My house

This is my beta fish, Sangre. He is not art because he is a living creature. I'm going to take a stand right now and say pets are not art. The same goes for that lady that was trying to sell "gothic kittens" on eBay.

He is very pretty though, with a bright red body and shiny blue and silver scales. And, he lives in a very pretty fish bowl with glass sea creatures that could be considered art, but they are not the focus of this entry. I wish to change the saying to "Fish are friends, not art!" That's not to say that paintings of fish can't be art.

I like to argue that nature is not art because our perception of nature can be skewed by art, especially if we have not seen much of the natural world for ourselves. Some people go hiking and expect to see waterfalls that look like they do in paintings, but it should be the opposite way. We should expect the paintings to look like the real thing. Our perception of art is generally shaped by our culture, so why is this often not the case when nature is the theme of the piece?

Graphs of Functions

Location: Schaefer Hall


This is a graph of a piece-wise function from a calculus test. It is an image but not art. Especially to me because I am not very fond of math. However, someone who doesn't know math and doesn't know art might be confused about its identity. They might think its some kind of abstract drawing. It certainly looks strange enough.

More Pictionary Versions

Pictionary Project (continued)

The completed version 1 (right) and a second attempt I am currently working on (top). I haven't figured out what I will keep or add to it, and I'm still looking for ideas for the third attempt. I may try to make a drawing.

Eclipse

Created by EcoArtTech, a digital environmental art platform, Eclipse represents air quality in national parks from data obtained from nearby cities. In a process known as data-scraping, Eclipse searches for images tagged with the park's name from an image sharing database and then pulls real-time AQI (Air Quality Index) data from airnow.gov for the designated region. Eclipse then corrupts the photograph based on the levels of particulate matter observed by the website. The more air pollution, the more corrupt the new image will be.

This is the kind of New Media art that captures my attention the most. I love learning about anything to do with the environment and raising awareness to protect it. I am also fascinated by how artists can hijack data to make a statement about our high-tech lives. This is a perfect fusion of the two concepts.

Rock

Location: Parking Lot near the ARC

I found this rock on my way to class near the parking lot that is located beside the ARC. I was trying to think of ideas for this blog and I remembered something I had seen in the Art21 documentary. The first artist we viewed, Vija Celmins, had pieces that were photographs of arrangements of rocks and their cast duplicates. She had made this natural thing into art. However, in my opinion the rock alone is not art. Art has to be something that has been man made or at least modified by a human. Since the rock shown here is just something I picked up, it's still just a rock. The fact that I took a picture of it is only for demonstrative purposes. I didn't pose it with other objects or change the colors or lighting. It's just an example of an every day, often overlooked natural object.

The Mole

The moles have invaded Nana's House!

The picture on the left was actually taken at the location, but it did not turn out well, so I borrowed another picture from the web.

I don't know of anyone who would consider the work of these little pests to be art. However, they certainly capture our attention when they ruin our lawns. Personally, I delight in walking on top of them and feeling them squish down underneath my feet.

Another thing that caught my interest as I was thinking about these tunnels is how they kind of resemble the mounds that certain Native American tribes made hundreds of years ago. These artifacts are still around today, and can be conidered art because they are man made symbols.