potluck - final crit

jaclyn
red velvet cupcakes
homemade guac

eliot
box of coffee

anna
milk/cereal

rashayla
macNcheese!!!

mickleburgh
salad

caputo
vegan food

soo
oranges

ayesha
pizza

tyler
cheese/crackers

david
surprise :(

chrisP
rice n beans

lazarus
hummus/pita

hayden?
brianK?

Haydens Statement

Suffocating behind steel bars in a cold cell, my images lay stagnant, trapped in the static energy that exists between tragedy and comedy. While life wanes, the final whimpers are heard as veiled tears, or was it muffled laughter? As breath awkwardly leaks into the distance, so does the ability to laugh or cry. Unworthily plummeting into a lethargic coma, one last attempt is made to reach beyond the cell, only to discover what lies beyond the bars is nothing more than a brick wall, snuggled up against the steel cage. Life and hope simultaneously vanish and the bowels release a surge of shit, allowing for a final attempt at a shameful laugh.

great blog by Randall Szott

touches on some of the things we've been discussing in class recently:
http://randallszott.org/

Statement

ayesha saeed : 2013

artist’s statement:

Possibilities are what I see around me and in the photographs I take. The repetition and the monotony around us have special moments and when I happen to stumble upon on any one of those moments then that space becomes a possibility for a photograph that I make.

It all started with epiphany I had at the Art Institute of Chicago with Dutch Modernist Theo Van Doesburg’spainting Counter Composition VIII.

The experience was so quiet, and so satisfying. I can only describe it as if I was suddenly liberated from some vast decimal system; a sense was granted that there’s more to what we see around us. I moved through space and deconstructed my habitual vision.

I realized, that a square is a very important to me One of the reasons because it’s not biased. It gives each side of it an equal importance and contains a space that is secure, sacred and feels very much my own. It’s like that I can create anything in that square and it will be safe. It is like a window for me to the space of that possibility that Idiscover. Like a stage where I can analyze, perform and experiment.

Visually, I have tended to be more of a micro- than a macro- person. I often get so immersed in a subject and magnify it so much that it becomes hard for me to look at it from a distance.

The possibility I find in a photograph is worked up to a level through various methods like collage, digital manipulation and video until I find it abstracted enough where it’s taking me somewhere.

The writings of Agnes Martin, introduced to me by a professor, really helped me to trust these strange-seemingintuitions, moments and to explore them.

I’ve come to understand my work as a process of actually refining awareness. It is about the quietness of the repetitive patterns of our daily lives. It has its unique rhythm which I hear everywhere around me. I see strange systems of chaos and order around me; the beauty of monotony, yet the complexity of it at the same time. The pieces seem to allow me to focus, but then again push me back again so I can see from a distance: the tension of micro and the macro.

Revised Artist Statement

My current artistic practice primarily consists of photographs that illustrate disconnections, displacement, (un)familiarity and distortions that personally relate to me, relationships and past experiences.

My work is an exploration and study of subconscious emotional triggers that are evoked when I re-experience specific objects or settings that I can firmly recall. These psychological occurrences consequently allow me to more closely examine what emotions drive me to such an extreme sense of dislocation.

I’m interested in the observation of the past, present, and the discovery of what has transpired in between. In this sense, my photographs function as tangible documentation of scenes that have prompted my response or mental reaction.

haydens short statement

Again, this statement is a roughish one, but i do feel like im beginning to get at something, something that i think ive had a hard time describing or understanding myself.


Right now it is difficult for me to come up with a statement I am satisfied with, if satisfaction with a statement is even possible. My work exists within a constant state of flux, in between the bounds of tragedy, and comedy, yet those words are maybe a little too dramatic for my liking. Rather, my photographs exist in a world of static energy, yet the energy is neither positive nor negative. Lately I don't know whether to laugh or cry. At everything, yet at nothing. Both are short lived. They are just the continual climax that will soon plummet. Plummet into what they are when combined: nothingness. A canceling out of any sort of semblance.

My work is about the canceling out. It is nothing, yet it is everything.

It is the release of shit after death.

Artist Statement

My work is fundamentally a study into the correlation of the individual agent and organizational systems. The question of what substantiates being has long been a philosophical inquiry but the proliferation of a digitally networked culture now demands significant reappraisal of the metaphysical subject. Participating in communication (electronic or otherwise) decentralizes interiority as language has the tendency to rearrange cognition, shaping sensation and knowledge into the exterior mechanics of semiotics. This condition is only intensified within contemporary media landscapes, these vast immersive environments of information, signals, channels, and noise.

As a form of response to this paradigm, my work revolves around the dialectical relationship of self and system and how these two entities synthesize with or repel one another. This is a foray into true experience and its mediated counterpart, magical existences in and through machines, an affect bred through technology and the emergence of a cybernetic hero.

for ayesha

i didnt read all of this, but i saw this and thought of Ayesha. especially the photograph "Within and Beyond the Frame"

http://bareface.wordpress.com/2011/06/14/daniel-buren-stripes-here-there-and-everywhere-2/

Garry Winogrand’s John Simon Guggenheim Grant Statement in 1964

I look at the pictures I have done up to now, and they make me feel that who we are and how we feel and what is to become of us just doesn’t matter. Our aspirations and successes have been cheap and petty. I read the newspapers, the columnists, some books, I look at some magazines [our press]. They all deal in illusions and fantasies.  I can only conclude that we have lost ourselves, and that the bomb may finish the job permanently, and it just doesn’t matter, we have not loved life.

I cannot accept my conclusions, and so I must continue this photographic investigation further and deeper. This is my project.

Artist Statement (250) Su

EDIT

A different version. Might be clearer.

I make flat, still, rectangular images – paintings and photographs. They are not generated from a singular idea, nor unfolded as a linear development. Each one comes from a different question. Each one represents a rupture in normality. My work is my own Wunderkammer.

The two-dimensional form holds significance in my work. Just as we understand the world via abstraction, a still image as the most abstract visual form collapses the four-dimensional space-time onto a picture plane. In doing so it creates a dilemma: despite the intention of making sense, imagery generates ambiguity – the problem of representation.

This problem, encountered by many artists and thinkers, is exactly what I desire. We are in a time of great uncertainty, in economical-political structure, in science, in faith, in our future. I feel the need to reflect these doubts in my work. Ambiguity slows down minds, delays actions. Thus the problem of representation is conceived as a battleground between progression and self-reflection, a mark that rejects clarity.

My subject matters cover a wide range of topics, from scientific problems to personal experience. I aim for a representation of life in its every aspect. However, by transforming it into banal images and displaying them together my work becomes a neutral ground stripped of life’s specificity.

Within this negative zone lies hope.


Old version:

What does it mean to make a flat, still image contained in a rectangle or a square, right now? In a time when art forms reach ever closer to real life experience, why turn toward the most reduced, abstract ones, i.e. painting and photography? They collapse experience, thoughts, emotions and knowledge onto a two dimensional surface, creating ambiguity rather than clarity, generality rather than specificity. What is the use of them?

Art is the opium of people. I believe we are in a time of great uncertainty, of doubt, in the economics, the political pictures, science, in our fate – a time for reflection. The flat surface is the perfect ground for this reflection. By potentially negating any specific meaning, the image of a painting or photograph can become an empty slate, tabula rasa, for anybody to project onto. The entire meaning of negativity is enclosed in this exchange between the viewer and the image, this projection. For this momentary pause slows down thoughts and actions, inducing much needed confusion. The desire of knowing and doing is halted.

I put various kinds of images and surfaces together to create a set. The individual pieces can be banal, transgressing or opaque in its subjects. They are drawn from life experience, scientific formulas and philosophical texts, or generated from painting and photographic processes. I aim to negate the specific meaning of each piece in the set as a whole, thus generating a void for the viewer to step into, to be lost within.

ACRE scholarships announced:

ACRE is pleased to announce 2 new scholarship initiatives for 2013 ACRE Residents.

ECHO SCHOLARSHIP
The Echo Scholarship is designed to empower former residents to support incoming residents. A number of alumni-donated works will be available at auction at ACRE Projects (1913 W 17th Street, Chicago) and online (via ACRE’s Facebook Page and Website). The proceeds of the sale of each work will go entirely to an artist who has demonstrated financial need. The alumnus who donates the work determines who is eligible for the scholarship by setting parameters that may be tied to fields of practice, race or ethnicity, age, sexuality, gender or any combination thereof. The scholarship is jointly named after the winner of the auction and the artist who donated work.

The first auction will launch on March 24th and end on April 14th at 9pm CST. Featuring art work by former residents Betsy Odom, Angeles Cossio and Hilary Baldwin, scholarships generated from this auction will go to one female artist who has been out of school for at least 2 years, one oil painter and one artist currently in an undergraduate program.

THE ACRE BOARD GRANT
The newly created ACRE Board Grant generously donated by two board directors, is intended to provide a full 12-day residency for one artist from an under-represented population.

Applicants who indicate financial need on their application will be eligible for these awards. Scholarships are awarded based on financial need, application score and parameters as determined by each scholarship donor.

For 2013 applications and more information about ACRE, please visit acreresidency.org

Eliot's 125 word statement/manifesto

I create images with the notion of beauty in mind. I am a Romantic and because of this my images take on aspects of the romantic.

To be romantic is radical.

To be beautiful is radical.

Therefore I can only surmise that my work – my photographs – are trying to be radical.

My work takes itself very seriously.

I photograph sentimentality and other more complicated emotions and to me this is a radical action. However it should be noted that I don’t find myself to be a radical artist – just as artist who makes work that could be seen as radical.

My photographs are simple and executed to the highest degree of my ability.

I am a photographer of human moments.

I am content but my stomach still growls – this is why I continue to make work and why my work continues to define me. 

RMB Manifesta (250 words)

RMB Manifesta

In my work as a photographer, performer, and cultural theorist, I mash-up familiar icons and personae, disorienting myself from a conventional experience with them as a passive consumer.  Engaging the visual language of mass media, I create timeless, placeless stages, leaving only the represented body and the constructed image to reconfigure signifiers of authenticity.

Through still lifes of books, album covers, and other mass-produced objects, I excavate links to the narratives of those who attempted to subvert oppressive paradigms, only to be reabsorbed back into them. These narratives are vital to creating my own mythology, not suffering through trends of cultural consumption but fostering an oppositional gaze. With each meticulously displayed gesture, I ritualize my privilege to work this way.

Following this same focus in my performance and video work, I embody what I call a “contemporary freemason,” a culturally syncretic trickster who possesses skill in repurposing symbolic meaning.  Depicting multiple roles of jester, servant, master, and creator, the self-portraits and performances intentionally reassign modes of representation as sites of resistance and choice.

By exploring the overlap between the performed and the personal, I attempt to recover a sense of agency in my own representation. No longer the subaltern or the abject, the intact black female body dominates as the vehicle through which the possibilities of self-determination and multi-consciousness manifest. The dilemma of double-consciousness will be damned.

Soohyun Kim_Statement (250 words)

In my photographs, I am acutely aware of the tension between a clarity of the thing itself and a vagueness toward what it represents. The photos often have a literal or figurative translucence, adding to or diluting intrinsic meaning. Objects are redefined by each other, in the midst of an ongoing investigation of architectural space. Defined spaces or items — street paraphernalia, window displays — are turned into abstract portraits, but their true functional nature, and those of the places I capture — slums, housing projects, horse stables — remain like echoes. The real slips into the unreal, or surreal. At the same time, these depictions are also a conscious way of addressing poignant historical and cultural contexts and conflicts. 

The subjects of my photographs are drawn from concerns arising out of my immediate environment, first in South Korea and now here in Chicago. In South Korea I was particularly concerned with capturing the social and political complexities arising as consequences of the fast economic development and the controversial effects of the contemporary, capitalist paradigm. My recent photographs in Chicago continue these same concerns and explore spaces of political and social tension. I see traces of modernist, utopian experiments, for which Chicago was the testing ground, and I see the reminders of their failure thrown into contrast by a contemporary reality in which there is still so much injustice and inequality. 

Kevin Weil

I’m interested in slipping myself into the gestational period between the birth and death of an object or event’s ultimate trajectory. It is in this liminal highway of layered histories where I interact. I’m engaging with infrastructural elements of a commodified framework so as to locate myself within the much larger system that I’m interacting with. It is through documentation of these evidential relationships that the cause and effect nature of systemic interaction can be charted.

The arc of an event’s occurrence is relative to the individual’s point of entrance and exit in perceiving it. There is a slippery absoluteness that is often the result of individual experience. The entrance is not the only entrance. There is a back door perhaps, an open window, and these too function as an entrance. I believe that the process of locating our entrances and exits is vital to our understanding of where we are, of how we came to be there, of where we can go.

It is there deep in the web of interactivity, or maybe it is right on the surface, or maybe there is no difference, there is only that which is imposed by language and systems resultant. Because things are not so linear and upright and absolute there is infinite room for error. It is here where the wiggling can occur. Where things spill and other things absorb the spill and those things become another thing. This is the place where places claim to be.

Hayden's Shortened Statement

A disease is haunting the human condition - the disease of striving.

As relationships form, money is gained, and materials are accumulated, the disease feeds itself. It latches on, and attaches itself to the objects and entities it comes in contact with. On the surface, this continual push to strive may disguise itself with a droll cloak, but at its core, within its purest essence, it is desolation. It is a loneliness that goes undetected, yet embeds itself in public, as well as the most intimate spheres we come in contact with or reside in.

I am not immune to the disease.

My practice is somewhat ironic. Through exploring the "strive" objects that surround me, I myself am in a state of "strive". I am fueling the epidemic.

I dont know exactly why I am attracted to these objects. I think there is something I find (in between) the tragedy and the comedy, that is somewhat indescribable. An in between existence. Neither here, nor there. Neither home, nor away. In this in between state, I believe humanity is summed up.

Kayl//Brief Art Statement

I make still lifes.

I am an image maker, balancing depictions of the real with graphic counterparts.

I am interested in objects, their connection to the history of art, to contemporary connotations. I want to imbed myself in the ongoing history of the still life genre's traditions while questioning photography and the ways a photograph comes into being.

Through the studio, I can empty objects of potency through erasure of context.

I am, above all, a gatherer and interpreter of popular imagery, which I present in order for the viewer to reflect their full identity, consciously or subconciously interpreting the image and its content.

By photographing, I point a finger. By viewing, the audience names.

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            My current body of work investigates the relationship I have with my eccentric, estranged grandparents.   Through narrative portraits and still life images of their belongings and rooms of their house, I attempt to understand my place in their world.  As an adult the dynamics of our relationship have changed drastically as we have developed class, cultural, political, and other opinionated differences that drive a wedge between us.  These clashing ideas result in terse discussions and greater distance between our phone calls and visits.  This displeasing disposition we’ve developed is one that I challenge to break through, wanting our differences to no longer come between us. In these photographs I document my lonely visits to their house, using my camera to bond with their belongings and push for more portraiture in order to better assimilate this division.

Eliot 250word statement

I strive for honesty in my work, at any cost. I believe that in order to create a body of work worth remembering one must put in as much effort as they can in order to achieve the highest level of understanding from their viewers. That being said, my work is thought-out, planned, and executed with regard to the highest of standards - my own. Regardless of the project I undertake I always strive to produce the best image possible both conceptually and technically. This can only be achieved – I feel – if the work is honest and made with very specific intent.

My work has always been about sentimentality – whether it be my own sentiments or those of another. My portraits focus on the depth of human emotion and all that carries with it. My landscapes and still lives evoke a similar feeling of knowing – complete empathy between my subject, my audience, and myself. It is these aspects, I believe, that make my work romantic in every sense of the word. For what greater honor is there but to share an emotion with another human being.

Brian

When I was studying philosophy, one of the reoccurring questions was the essence of human nature: what distinguishes human from any other beings. The answer that appeals to me the most is our ability to imagine. I like to think that the most important trait that differentiates human from others is that we can imagine being something other than ourselves. We imagined flying like birds, and we invented airplanes, and no other being that I know of is capable of imagination to such extent. So then my question is, can humans actually become something else. Can we as a human race become something other than what we are? So far in history some may argue that it is not our nature, but our tools, that evolved. Can we change? Can we do to ourselves, what we did to wolves to create dogs?

While my curiosity seems like a philosophical question, I found the field of philosophy to be unfitting for my pursuit. Immanuel Kant argued that our ability to reason was the essence of human; therefore, lying could never be justified since it disables men’s ability to reason. J.S.S. Smart argued that a man was only responsible for the predictable result of his action. However, is it really possible to live without lying? In the age of internet and overflow of information, can “I didn’t know that would happen,” really be an excuse? There are theorists working in the field of philosophy who deals with these questions, but not in the manner that scratched my itch. On the other hand, I found a satisfying answer in Diane Arbus, who photographed people we normally don’t look straight at but through the edge of our eyes. She photographed her subjects at the center of a square frame with straight lighting. Thinking of photographic gaze as a gesture rich of ethical statement excited me. Also James Turrell, who made me question my bodily perception by creating gestural space with illusionary awe. Thus I turned to art making as my ideal quest.

My most recent project is a starting point of my inquiry and it consists of two elements. First part is a photographic documentation of my applying wet clay to my body, wearing it for the duration it takes to dry, and documenting the remains. My aim is to create an awkward and painful situation for myself to emphasize the diminishing meaning of bodily presence in contemporary society. We live in a world of virtual reality; our existences depend on facebooks and twitters. As long as I have access to an internet device, my not being able to move my elbow or knee is meaningless. My identity exists in hallow.

Second part is my psychological response to the first part. After photographing my body as a negative space, I felt an urge to create something that reinforced my bodily presence. Thus I made a human scale triangular pyramid out of clay. I wanted to make an object that contained the trace of my labor and it was only fitting that the process resembled a primitive method of object making. I wanted the pyramid to be a perfect tetrahedron, which I also knew was impossible via hand making. However, the sculpture exploded in the kiln, and when I was making another pyramid, I found that my idea of perfection became the nonexistent first sculpture. Therefore, not through labor and care but through destruction, the first model reached perfection.