A nice slide show is up on the GDAC site of Materials Hard and Soft 2009.
As I was looking through them, I was thinking about black backgrounds vs gray. Then I flipped to my work and thought…ew.
I’m also going to have a print at the Center for Fine Art Photography in April. It is from a series of images that I never posted online anywhere. Needless to say I still don’t quite have the balls to do it. The show is entitled The Human Canvas. From the thumbnails, it seems to be quite a variety of fine art, conceptual photography, and naked women. I guess boobs, butts, and fine art photography just go together?
I’m also excited that I’ll have 2 pieces in a show entitled Decorative Resurgence, which will be up in conjunction with the SNAG conference in Philly this May. I’m stoked except that one of the pieces that will be in the show just returned to me after being abused by UPS. Apparently, in the repacking of the piece, the support I made specifically for the piece was not even put back in the box. Sooooo, the piece rolled around in said shipping container, sans support, from CT to TX to NY and died a horrible death. I’ve managed to fix it, but…. I’m still fighting with UPS on this one.
No new images of work…I’m mostly frustrated with myself and my apparent stranglehold on being literal and my ability to miss all things blatantly obvious. I constantly feel like the key is right around the corner, but I never seem to get there.
I’m also frustrated by a lot of the work I see being held up as “good” work…lets say in magazines, online, whatever. I think that craft, in general, is missing some seriously needed criticality. I’m in no position to offer it to anyone but myself right now, but, I’m tired of a lot of the things I see. I know in some respects it is a “make what my gallery can sell” situation, but, if you are making work specifically to sell, it isn’t art in the most general sense. It is craft, sure. But, since there is this serious fight going on about art using craft but craft never being art, then, perhaps in some respects craft shoots itself in the foot by specifically making work to to function in the market place. Not to say that artists don’t do this, but perhaps there is this perception that art is idea first…big money later? And a perception of craft as commodity? Craft fair vs auction?
I’m not really sure…won’t be for a long time. I mean, I can’t even figure out what I’m working on, let alone try to understand the nuances of art v. craft.
congrats on the shows!
post pics post pics post pics
your blog makes me want to get making stuff!! yea making stuff!
but, my two cents anyway:
it is frustrating that the art vs craft debate continues on and on and on…and on…and… well, you get the idea. i keep pretending it’s over, but it isn’t. and probably won’t ever be.
as i tend to make objects a little more crafty, a little less arty, but still somehow hope they can be both, i feel the pain. currently, i sort of think it is best to not worry about the “criticality”, since that is in the perception. we pretend that we guide perception as we are making things to be perceived, but society does the perception guiding. we just try to make things. just keep up the making.
I should have some pics…soon. We have midterm crit soon! I’m working on a couple of things, which might be steps in the right direction.
We had this big discussion the other day about craft and intimacy, an idea I was really getting into…and then you have that whole authenticity thing.
id like to hear about craft and intimacy. i myself have a forever internal debate of art vs craft. but id like to know where you feel intimacy fits in…
We were just talking about a statement by Bachelard where he basically says that intimacy is one of the highest conditions of human existence. And, the fact that when you look around the room of people who work within the field of jewelry/metals and you ask them what unites them….like, if they are jewelers…not everyone will raise their hand. Not everyone works with metal either…so we really don’t have one uniting bond, but, it is what makers DO that you could argue is the uniting factor. It is the intimacy of the maker and the made that seems to have survived as a common theme.