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Lizards of old
Mar. 28th, 2007 09:33 pmDinosaurs! All over my apartment! Just waiting to eat my toes!
Mystery art
Feb. 19th, 2007 06:42 pmI am working with ashes. And got into quite the debate with my instructor over this fact. "What kind of ashes are you going to be using?" "The ashes of my cat." "WHAT? Why? My God, did you love your cat?..." and so on. This conversation started when I asked him how I would best go about adhering ashes to a support. He did eventually give me some suggestions to try out and I did some testers first with wood ashes given to me from a fireplace. It worked reasonably well though it did tend to crumble off the surface, which may be inevitable.
Wood ash from a fireplace is grey, and smoky, and still rather coarse with detritus in it. I love the smell of it, and the feel. There is something very reassuring about it, in an earthy and familiar way. This morning I opened up the package of my cat's ashes. It would appear that the ashes from a small cremated domestic animal are very different than what you'd find in a fireplace. For one thing it's white. Fine white powder. Like dust. And comparatively scentless. I can understand the composition of Bone China better after having handled it. So a switch from grey to white is necessitated. And currently I have little mounds of ash sitting on my paper while waiting for the adhesive to dry.
Wood ash from a fireplace is grey, and smoky, and still rather coarse with detritus in it. I love the smell of it, and the feel. There is something very reassuring about it, in an earthy and familiar way. This morning I opened up the package of my cat's ashes. It would appear that the ashes from a small cremated domestic animal are very different than what you'd find in a fireplace. For one thing it's white. Fine white powder. Like dust. And comparatively scentless. I can understand the composition of Bone China better after having handled it. So a switch from grey to white is necessitated. And currently I have little mounds of ash sitting on my paper while waiting for the adhesive to dry.
This is my brain
Jan. 18th, 2007 06:18 pmThere was a television on while I was eating my lunch yesterday, and on it was an ad for motorized scooters for the elderly. It showed an older man on a scooter scooting around with his grandson following close behind on a tricycle. "The joys of being able to re-engage with your family!" is what the ad seemed to say.
The first association which came to my mind while watching this scenario is the fact that in many species the old and the weak are picked off by predators first, thereby assisting in keeping the rest of the herd/population/what-have-you strong, leading the ad to continue in my brain like this: wolf jumps into the scene, snatches granpa off the scooter and drags him offscreen; enter another character who rather resembles Dave Foley with a bad wig on saying, "Thanks Mr. Wolf! Now I won't have to make the rest of the payments on that damn scooter and can head to Hawaii instead!" - insert scene of Dave surrounded by babes in grass skirts, as all the while crunching sounds can be heard from offscreen.
The first association which came to my mind while watching this scenario is the fact that in many species the old and the weak are picked off by predators first, thereby assisting in keeping the rest of the herd/population/what-have-you strong, leading the ad to continue in my brain like this: wolf jumps into the scene, snatches granpa off the scooter and drags him offscreen; enter another character who rather resembles Dave Foley with a bad wig on saying, "Thanks Mr. Wolf! Now I won't have to make the rest of the payments on that damn scooter and can head to Hawaii instead!" - insert scene of Dave surrounded by babes in grass skirts, as all the while crunching sounds can be heard from offscreen.
What I have to finish for the next year:
Nov. 7th, 2006 09:23 pmMy thesis proposal, just because I spent the time writing it:
Taking a page from science fiction and its use of fiction as a method of reflection on what we know as reality, the depictions of possible realities described through mediums ranging from literature to film will inform my works. I will concentrate on an alternate history of Western civilization where a sense of nostalgia will provoke a looking back to early 20th century history in Europe and North America, searching for a world where it was easier for one to believe in moral certainty and the comfort which that brings. Yet this sense of optimism which we associate with that time period will be turned on its head with its invasion by an irrational reality where pre and future histories take over. Drawing from influences such as film noir, neo noir, steam punk and early cinema the modern utopia becomes a dystopia and perhaps through this inversion gains a glimmer of hope for a real attempt at a new beginning.
This is a world where man no longer holds a place of certainty at the top of the food chain; he has once again become a resource. The metropolises once the pride of modernity are in ruins from forces larger than man could allow himself to acknowledge before it was too late. The animal environment from the colonial world consumes the urban and man is left fighting unknown dangers as well as itself, the result of entropy slowly eating away at the edges of human constructs unnoticed. In this way these landscapes will encompass the anxiety and potential outcomes of losing control over both the natural world and the one created by man.
Cityscapes will be combined with both animal and human figures and the natural world in images sourced from historical photographs, Hollywood films and pulp novel covers. The resultant compositions will remain faithful to the illusion of three dimensional space and perspective to show a world that could have or might yet be. The images will be rendered in ink and charcoal on paper in order to emulate the atmosphere of old black and white or sepia toned photographs and the chiaroscuro of film noir. Like faded snapshots of a forgotten world the final images will retain a sense of ambiguity, leaving the ultimate fate of the world it described as yet undecided.
Five years of school, yar.
Taking a page from science fiction and its use of fiction as a method of reflection on what we know as reality, the depictions of possible realities described through mediums ranging from literature to film will inform my works. I will concentrate on an alternate history of Western civilization where a sense of nostalgia will provoke a looking back to early 20th century history in Europe and North America, searching for a world where it was easier for one to believe in moral certainty and the comfort which that brings. Yet this sense of optimism which we associate with that time period will be turned on its head with its invasion by an irrational reality where pre and future histories take over. Drawing from influences such as film noir, neo noir, steam punk and early cinema the modern utopia becomes a dystopia and perhaps through this inversion gains a glimmer of hope for a real attempt at a new beginning.
This is a world where man no longer holds a place of certainty at the top of the food chain; he has once again become a resource. The metropolises once the pride of modernity are in ruins from forces larger than man could allow himself to acknowledge before it was too late. The animal environment from the colonial world consumes the urban and man is left fighting unknown dangers as well as itself, the result of entropy slowly eating away at the edges of human constructs unnoticed. In this way these landscapes will encompass the anxiety and potential outcomes of losing control over both the natural world and the one created by man.
Cityscapes will be combined with both animal and human figures and the natural world in images sourced from historical photographs, Hollywood films and pulp novel covers. The resultant compositions will remain faithful to the illusion of three dimensional space and perspective to show a world that could have or might yet be. The images will be rendered in ink and charcoal on paper in order to emulate the atmosphere of old black and white or sepia toned photographs and the chiaroscuro of film noir. Like faded snapshots of a forgotten world the final images will retain a sense of ambiguity, leaving the ultimate fate of the world it described as yet undecided.
Five years of school, yar.
How smart is DNA?
Sep. 26th, 2006 11:42 pmI was thinking about the kakapo, a nocturnal flightless parrot which lives on New Zealand. Living on an island with no natural predators the kakapo has developed a complicated mating ritual which makes it rather hard to find a mate and produce offspring (I'm thinking back to Douglas Adams's book Last Chance To See). Seems kinda self defeating at first but it's basically a built in form of self regulating population control. Otherwise they would have overpopulated the island and totally screwed themselves over for the available resources.
Now how exactly do traits for the limitation of offspring get selected for in a population??? Wouldn't the kakapo (really you know I'm just thinking about this cause the name is so damn cool) who were more promiscuous beat out the more moderate faction of the population before such elaborate regulations on mating could take hold? I mean we're basically talking about the logic of a bunch of amino acids.
Anyhow they were doing just fine until the island got invaded by humans and their livestock and other introduced species. Now the lonely solitary egg that they manage to create when they succeed in mating gets promptly eaten by a goat. But before that the fact that they had self imposed population control was what helped the continuation of their species and avoided overextending themselves into dying of massive famine and fighting flightless parrot battles over what was left.
Now the question is, how did they acquire this behaviour in the first place? If there is anything like a genetic basis for controlled population growth than there could actually be some hope for humans. Until of course the aliens come and start eating us up.
On second thought maybe the kakapo would have been better off to have developed those flying skills a bit better instead.
Now how exactly do traits for the limitation of offspring get selected for in a population??? Wouldn't the kakapo (really you know I'm just thinking about this cause the name is so damn cool) who were more promiscuous beat out the more moderate faction of the population before such elaborate regulations on mating could take hold? I mean we're basically talking about the logic of a bunch of amino acids.
Anyhow they were doing just fine until the island got invaded by humans and their livestock and other introduced species. Now the lonely solitary egg that they manage to create when they succeed in mating gets promptly eaten by a goat. But before that the fact that they had self imposed population control was what helped the continuation of their species and avoided overextending themselves into dying of massive famine and fighting flightless parrot battles over what was left.
Now the question is, how did they acquire this behaviour in the first place? If there is anything like a genetic basis for controlled population growth than there could actually be some hope for humans. Until of course the aliens come and start eating us up.
On second thought maybe the kakapo would have been better off to have developed those flying skills a bit better instead.
Terrorism as a spectator sport
Sep. 18th, 2006 01:44 pmIt was pointed out in one of my classes last week that the world trade center attack was staged for an audience. It was good media. An event organized to hold people's visual attention. In contrast the attack on the pentagon, which would have crippled the United States military had it been more successful, received very little media attention and barely registers on the contemporary cultural landscape.
Since starting at OCAD I've heard no end about the events of September 11th. Any class that touches on contemporary issues has mentioned it. Movies, books, artworks have been based around it, students have produced works epitomizing the suffering of the victims. Poems have been read in class about it. Personally I'm sick of the whole thing. The only instance of these events worked into a piece of art that I truly appreciate is Truce by the Dresden Dolls. None the less there are motifs that creep themselves into my own ideas for work.
The first thing I thought of right after it happened, in the stunned surreality of the day, was the Tarot card for The Tower. There is something psychological about height, and by extension, towers. In Florence or Siena around the time of the renaissance there was an edict that no one could build towers past a certain height. This was to prevent the wealthy form wasting resources in a "my tower is bigger than your tower" competition. It's this symbolic psychological aspect of an image of power being attacked and taken down that has everybody up in arms as much as the quotient of human suffering that was involved, after all, many times the number of people who died at Ground Zero (a numerological way of addressing the sudden lack of towers) die all the time, in other places, more quietly, and most likely on the ground without the advantage of height to give their end such media importance and mythic connotations.
I think at this point it's pretty inescapable that something related to the idea of height and towers and perhaps, falling will end up permeating my art. If nothing else I had been obsessed with the imagery of skyscrapers from living in an urban environment since far before the attack in New York happened. Only I think I will opt out of the media race and claim instead that my work is referring to The Two Towers by Tolkien. Or the paintings of Babel by Bruegel the Elder.
Since starting at OCAD I've heard no end about the events of September 11th. Any class that touches on contemporary issues has mentioned it. Movies, books, artworks have been based around it, students have produced works epitomizing the suffering of the victims. Poems have been read in class about it. Personally I'm sick of the whole thing. The only instance of these events worked into a piece of art that I truly appreciate is Truce by the Dresden Dolls. None the less there are motifs that creep themselves into my own ideas for work.
The first thing I thought of right after it happened, in the stunned surreality of the day, was the Tarot card for The Tower. There is something psychological about height, and by extension, towers. In Florence or Siena around the time of the renaissance there was an edict that no one could build towers past a certain height. This was to prevent the wealthy form wasting resources in a "my tower is bigger than your tower" competition. It's this symbolic psychological aspect of an image of power being attacked and taken down that has everybody up in arms as much as the quotient of human suffering that was involved, after all, many times the number of people who died at Ground Zero (a numerological way of addressing the sudden lack of towers) die all the time, in other places, more quietly, and most likely on the ground without the advantage of height to give their end such media importance and mythic connotations.
I think at this point it's pretty inescapable that something related to the idea of height and towers and perhaps, falling will end up permeating my art. If nothing else I had been obsessed with the imagery of skyscrapers from living in an urban environment since far before the attack in New York happened. Only I think I will opt out of the media race and claim instead that my work is referring to The Two Towers by Tolkien. Or the paintings of Babel by Bruegel the Elder.
Andy Warhol
Aug. 7th, 2006 05:32 pmMade it to the AGO to see Supernova: Stars, Deaths and Disasters, 1962–1964, the Andy Warhol exhibit curated by David Cronenberg. The show itself was fairly small. What made it interesting was the narration by Cronenberg on his ideas of the links in the work. Also since the paintings are such instantaneous images I'd never really taken the time to stop and look at them past their usual pervasiveness in mass media (where I always wrote them off as uninteresting at best). Being confronted by several roomfuls of them gave me a new appreciation for their existence.
Despite the flat factory aesthetic of how Warhol used his images seeing them in person there was an element of almost poetic rhythm to how the images are repeated I hadn't noticed before. The choices of colour or lack of and intensity of the prints all changed the final effect of the images. Celebrity and tragedy are united and become one another. Stars fade out and common people become famous through dying. Both achieve immortality through the media. The instant moment becomes eternity.
Looking through books on Vodou today I also came across this passage: The Gede family of spirits are the guardians of the dead and the masters of the libido. They embrace the dual domains of human frailty and mortality, the creation and the conclusion of life. It seems to fit with what Cronenberg was saying about Warhol, especially with his description of Silver Disaster #6 as a very sexual image. The painting is of an electric chair in an empty room.
Ah yes, he was also a voyeur.
Poet John Giorno: What are you working on now?
Andy: Death
Despite the flat factory aesthetic of how Warhol used his images seeing them in person there was an element of almost poetic rhythm to how the images are repeated I hadn't noticed before. The choices of colour or lack of and intensity of the prints all changed the final effect of the images. Celebrity and tragedy are united and become one another. Stars fade out and common people become famous through dying. Both achieve immortality through the media. The instant moment becomes eternity.
Looking through books on Vodou today I also came across this passage: The Gede family of spirits are the guardians of the dead and the masters of the libido. They embrace the dual domains of human frailty and mortality, the creation and the conclusion of life. It seems to fit with what Cronenberg was saying about Warhol, especially with his description of Silver Disaster #6 as a very sexual image. The painting is of an electric chair in an empty room.
Ah yes, he was also a voyeur.
Andy: Death
The connection between flesh and bone is primordial and fundamental.
I love it when the first line in an introduction to a cookbook manages to bring up associations in my mind with Carl Jung. I become even more enamored when I keep going through the book and discover passages about the Paris catacombs, the use in history of bones for ice skating or in textile design, bones used in jewelery and of a man named Robert Roberts, who was found guilty in London in 1771 of stealing sixteen silver marrow spoons and punished by being transported to Australia. The book's aim is to overcome the trend for convenience in food preparation that has eliminated the presence of bones in food, despite the taste and nutrient content in them.
Having been veggie for about five years when I first started eating meat again I would eat all of it. Not just because of wanting to sink my teeth into flesh but because I did not believe in being wasteful. If it had to die for me to eat it, it may as well be put to good use. This of course resulted in much fun as I horrified properly brought up people by eating meat with my hands. I've never understood the idea of 'distance' from food either; eating in a manner that denies the physicality of the food one is ingesting. Proper table manners are well and good and I love my matching cutlery but I also am of the opinion that table manners, like many social customs, developed as a marker of class, a way of saying we are the ones with money because we know how to use these odd pieces of obscure cutlery and we can tell that you are not. I'm thinking of the extremes of Victorian table manners here, and of course they were also big on wasting food as a marker of wealth as well. Food is nourishment, it is meant to be eaten, not played with.
Severe nutrient deficiencies had me eating calves liver this summer, the first time I remember going out of my way to cook the stuff or volunteering to eat it. It also had me progressing one step further than picking meat clean off bones as I use to do, now I was eating the bones themselves and any marrow I could get from the insides. There's basically shards of bones left when I am finished, after eating all the softer parts and the insides. The cookbook in question (Bones: Recipes, History & Lore by Jennifer McLagan) has a recipe for Barley Marrow Pudding, stating that "according to Chinese medicine, the combination of barley and bone marrow is an excellent tonic for the body", explaining why I feel better after eating this stuff.
The whole thing has me thinking of archaelogical sites where they unearth bones that have been broken into to extract the marrow as well as thinking about studying anatomy, I've been taking figurative drawing but haven't actually studied things on the level of bones and muscle yet, though I think of the commonalities in structure between differing species.
I love it when the first line in an introduction to a cookbook manages to bring up associations in my mind with Carl Jung. I become even more enamored when I keep going through the book and discover passages about the Paris catacombs, the use in history of bones for ice skating or in textile design, bones used in jewelery and of a man named Robert Roberts, who was found guilty in London in 1771 of stealing sixteen silver marrow spoons and punished by being transported to Australia. The book's aim is to overcome the trend for convenience in food preparation that has eliminated the presence of bones in food, despite the taste and nutrient content in them.
Having been veggie for about five years when I first started eating meat again I would eat all of it. Not just because of wanting to sink my teeth into flesh but because I did not believe in being wasteful. If it had to die for me to eat it, it may as well be put to good use. This of course resulted in much fun as I horrified properly brought up people by eating meat with my hands. I've never understood the idea of 'distance' from food either; eating in a manner that denies the physicality of the food one is ingesting. Proper table manners are well and good and I love my matching cutlery but I also am of the opinion that table manners, like many social customs, developed as a marker of class, a way of saying we are the ones with money because we know how to use these odd pieces of obscure cutlery and we can tell that you are not. I'm thinking of the extremes of Victorian table manners here, and of course they were also big on wasting food as a marker of wealth as well. Food is nourishment, it is meant to be eaten, not played with.
Severe nutrient deficiencies had me eating calves liver this summer, the first time I remember going out of my way to cook the stuff or volunteering to eat it. It also had me progressing one step further than picking meat clean off bones as I use to do, now I was eating the bones themselves and any marrow I could get from the insides. There's basically shards of bones left when I am finished, after eating all the softer parts and the insides. The cookbook in question (Bones: Recipes, History & Lore by Jennifer McLagan) has a recipe for Barley Marrow Pudding, stating that "according to Chinese medicine, the combination of barley and bone marrow is an excellent tonic for the body", explaining why I feel better after eating this stuff.
The whole thing has me thinking of archaelogical sites where they unearth bones that have been broken into to extract the marrow as well as thinking about studying anatomy, I've been taking figurative drawing but haven't actually studied things on the level of bones and muscle yet, though I think of the commonalities in structure between differing species.
