Ernesto Neto

ernesto neto is considered one of the absolute
leaders of brazil’s contemporary art scene.
his inspiration comes partly from brazilian
neo-concretism. at the end of the 1950s and
beginning of the 60s the movement’s best-known
proponents, lygia clarc and hélio oiticica,
rejected modernism’s ideas of autonomous
geometric abstraction. instead, they wanted to
equate art with living organisms in a kind of
organic architecture, and invite the viewer to be
an active participant.

ernesto neto works with abstract installations
which often take up the entire exhibition space.
his materials are gossamer-thin, light,
stretchable fabrics in nylon or cotton. like fine
membranes fixed to the ceiling by long,
stretched threads his works hang down into
the room and create shapes that are almost
organic. sometimes they are filled with scented
spices and hang in tear-shaped forms like
gigantic mushrooms or huge stockings,
sometimes he creates peculiar soft sculptures
which the visitor is allowed to feel through
small openings in the surface. he also creates
spatial labyrinths which the visitor can enter
and thereby experience the work and interact
with it.

neto’s art is an experience which creates
associations with the body and with something
organic. he describes his works as an
exploration and a representation of the body’s
landscape from within. it is important to neto
that the viewer should actively interact with
and physically experience his work by feeling,
smelling, and touching it.



db online art magazine article on neto....http://www.deutsche-bank-kunst.com/art/2004/7/e/1/268.php

Ernesto Neto

Inventive!

This site is great...

http://www.atelier-v.ch/01.htm

Other needlefelters out there....

toyutoy
this person is on flickr and there are many others....

Fray at the Textile Museum of Canada

FRAY

Ugly Dolls

These are specialty toys that are only sold in speciallty stores. I did see in them in the gift shop at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago last year. Ugly dolls were orginally handmade by their creator when they first came out. They are still handmade, but in China so, according to Wikipedia, there is variations in them which still give them a unique quality. I am just wondering how they think other stuff toys are made? I imagine they are also handmade in China so I don't see much of a difference except these ones are uglier. (that's relative though)

I am interested in these because of their popularity as a chic, mainstream toy just because they are ugly. But what is interesting is that because they are ugly, they are cute.

http://www.uglydolls.com/

Giant Microbes

Lyme Disease

Salmonella

Flesh Eating Disease

I saw these at the doctor's office last time I was there. Flesh Eating Disease looks so cute, I want it.....

Justin Novak

I looked at Justin Novak's work on his website and I am looking forward to his talk. I am intreged with his work. I am attracted to it but repulsed by it at the same time. I am interested in those ideas and feelings in my own work but in regards to the stuffed toy.

Steve Reinke

(still from Anthology of America Folk Song)

Steve Reinke Artist Talk; Intermedia Class, Art For Lunch, and Queer City Cinema

It was nice to have a more intimate screening with Steve Reinke in the Intermedia class and because I went to all of his screenings, I was able to see a lot of his work and it’s progression. It seems that as of late, Reinke has moved away from humour and is dealing with more dark subject matter. I found that he has found a good balance between humourous and dark subject matter. I imagine that he is a little tired of being equated to Woody Allen and has moved into different subject matter. I really found My Rectum is Not a Grave (which debuted at the Queer City Cinema) beautiful and sad. It was the video that I thought most about. The video was a series of archive images from a man who owned a movie theatre in, I think, North Dakota and made films about the people in the town and showed them in the theatre. They were beautifully captured images of these people and the moment that they were in. It was especially intriguing to me because I really felt a sense of loss. The subtitle to My Rectum is Not a Grave is (To a Film Industry in Crisis) seemed to speak to the incredibly flashy, expensive and bad films that are currently everywhere and something as simple as these images of these everyday people are so much more beautiful, complex, and interesting than the overblown Hollywood industry.

Gee Bend Quilters

June Jacobs stopped by the studio and told me to look at this group of women from Alabama. I am happy that I have decided to make my next sculpture considering quilting and straight lines. These quilts are very inspiring to me.

http://www.quiltsofgeesbend.com

Art For Lunch: Richard Fung

Richard Fung is a video artist from Toronto who was here as Fazail's external evaluator. I really enjoyed his work but the problem with video art is that there is not enough time to watch the work completely in an hour. I wanted to see more.

Horses of Disaster, untitled(suitcase still)

I am proud of my piece that I created for this show. I think that it is beautiful and it is everything that I wanted it to be.

Therese Chabot

Therese was Robin's external evaluator and a very gracious and kind woman. I very much enjoyed my critque with her. I think that she liked my work and thought that I should add some sort of performativity to my work or it was there somewhere because of my interactions with my sculptures. I enjoyed her Art for Lunch talk. I also found out from her talk that art had an birthday!

Article on Therese Chabot's work.

William Pope L.

Pope L. or "The Friendliest Black Artist in America" spoke at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in conjunction with the Situation Comedy show. His talk was a performance in itself and I found him and his work fascinating. With his work he tries to unpack identity and stereotypes with humour.

Luis Gispert

Luis Gispert Artist Talk, MacKenzie Art Gallery and Art for Lunch

Luis Gispert was brought to the MacKenzie Art Gallery in conjunction with the Situation Comedy show. The New York based artist presented his body of work some of it based around hip hop culture which he participated in as a youth in Miami. Gispert plays with and subverts stereotypical images from that culture with humour to look at hybridizing of culture and cultural identities. I also think that by doing this, Gispert is also critiquing stereotypes associated with these cultures through this subversion. I enjoyed his work and the humour that he finds and creates in his work. I wish that I had enough money to create a film like Stereomongrel. It was beautiful and mystical. I was happy to be able to see it twice because it was a lot to take in at once. I could probably watch it again. Gispert himself was a down to earth nice guy and very approachable for an art star and I was able to have a good conversation with him.

Massimo Guerrera

Darboral (and the maintenance of a practice field), Dunlop Art Gallery

Darboral was a show by Montreal based artist Massimo Guerrera that was at the Dunlop Art Gallery this fall. People were required to leave their shoes at the door and entered the gallery space to find a collection of photographs from previous shows, ergonomical sculptures made from interactions with other people (shaking hand sculpture) which were made by a very touchable material called hydrastone, and most importantly an entire spread of food and it’s remains. Viewers were welcome to come into the gallery space and touch everything that was part of the show as well as sit down and enjoy some tea and snacks. This show is based around the theory of relational aesthetics. In this case this show is: “based on the notion that we are overridingly beings shaped by our relationships, he uses food as the main metaphor to implement this idea of constant change and digestion where certain people are concerned.” I attended the show with the artist in attendance. He was a very welcoming man who seemed to encourage an interesting interaction with and between the viewers. I realized that this was the show, if it really weren’t for the people participating in the space, it would not be the same show. The viewers make the show. I just liked that when I was at the library while the show was on and usually I was starving, I knew that I could stop by, visit with Margaret, have a cup of tea and a yummy snack. Is show a soup kitchen for poor students? I considered it but I was grateful anyway.

Kelly Mark

Kelly Mark, Artist Talk, MacKenzie Art Gallery.

Kelly Mark is an artist whose work is currently being shown in conjunction with the Situation Comedy show that is currently on at the MacKenzie. I went to Mark’s lecture not familiar with her work (I had not fully explored the show at that time) but I was overly impressed with her repertoire. I enjoyed the humour and beauty that Mark sees in relatively mundane, banal activities of the everyday such as time card punching or spoon collecting (but instead, Mark collects plain old table knives which every one she has stolen if she did not already have it). I also found her drawings entertaining where she literally covered chairs, tables, pictures and still lives with graphite markings made with a pencil. One body of work that I interesting was titled “Glow House” which was an installation where Mark filled a house with about 50 televisions, tuned them all to the same channel at night in the dark house. The house seemed to be pulsing with all of televisions flashing from scene to scene. I love how Mark takes a simple everyday occurrence or object and seems to make a spectacle out of it or monumentalize it. I also found the element of surprise interesting particularly in “Glow House” or the idea of the unexpected audience.

http://www.ireallyshould.com/

Epoch Bookmark show

I got accepted into an art show in Toronto at the Koffler Gallery entitled The Bookmark Project 2006: Epoch. The bookmark was one of my Senior Intermedia class projects.

Koffler Gallery

Art For Lunch: Rae Staseson

Rae Staseson is an intermedia artist, working in a variety of electronic, digital and live forms. Her videos have been exhibited at such prestigious venues as the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), Carillo Gil Museum (Mexico City), Goethe Institute (Montreal) and the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), and the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her work has also been screened in museums and galleries in the United Kingdom, France, Taiwan, Hungary, Argentina and Venezuela.
Rae Staseson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada where she teaches video practice/theory, visual culture, and media studies courses in both the undergraduate and graduate programs.


For Art For Lunch, Rae Staseson talked about The Laurie Project, a performance documentary that examines how the process of learning and the role of mimicry can be used as research tools to investigate performance art and its intersection with popular culture. I found her work funny and she was full of enthusiasm which seemed to resonate through the room.

Louise Bourgeois Fabric Sculpture

This woman never ceases to amaze me. I love her work and I am particiularly interested in her fabric sculptures. I got these images from this online magazine that has a great article about the show that these pieces are from entitled Stitches in Time.

Art For Lunch: Arts Action Inc.

I think that this is an exciting project. I can't wait to see it realised.

Arts Action Inc.

Time Transit

Time Transit was a collaboration between artist Kim Morgan and TR Labs which involved a city bus, bus stops and an interactive website. The work was intended to make people consider time, technology, sustainability, and space (the boundaries between public and private space). The components of the piece were a computer, GPS, 4 monitors, 6 cameras at various bus stops along route number 4. The monitors on the left side of the bus showed the last bus stops that the bus was at in transparent overlays in real time and the monitors on the right side shows the next bus stop where the bus is heading to also in real time. Also along the bottom of the screens was where instant messages sent to the buses would appear. According to Morgan, the experience is the art and the viewer becomes the art. I think that Morgan had an interesting concept and talked about the work really well but I don’t think those intentions were carried out as well as her idea. My reasoning for this is because of my experience with a friend who was familiar with the project (a friend from out side the art and university community who had visited the time transit website and was familiar with the work) but when she did experience it, she didn’t know what she was looking at. I think that it has a lot to do with the unfamiliar views of bus stops that you are leaving and approaching (I has a hard time recognizing the university bus stop where I have waited for 3 years) so it is hard to put the idea of past and present when the bus stops is not familiar. But on the other hand some other people that I talked to felt like there was an invasion of privacy with the cameras playing in real time. So maybe in that way the public/private aspects of the work were realized. The instant messaging part was amusing but seemed more novel and like a venting ground than any kind of consideration between public and private but did fit well in to an technological aspect of the work.

David Hoffos Show at the Dunlop

David Hoffos: Scenes from a House Dream, Dunlop Art Gallery

This show was amazing. It had a feeling of accessible magical-ness because of the low-tech aspects of the show. At least to artists who try to think of achieving something like this and think about a bunch of crazy technology to make it happen. It’s like it is a magic show with its use of mirrors. I loved the dreamy air that you felt crossing the curtain, like into a world of the subconscious. It was difficult to navigate the space at first because of the darkness and I was surprised by the projection of the little boy but felt entranced at the same time because of his placement in the space and the boat that he was floating. Even while viewing the rest of the installations (I would still look back to see what the boy is doing) The entire space felt like a mixture of dreams and nightmares (because of the ghostly apparition in the middle of the house). I went back to be in the space a couple more times and did not tire of it. I need to see more.

Reasons for Numbers

Reasons for Numbers, Performance

Reasons for Numbers was a collaborative performance between John Noestheden and Michelle Sereda with Lee Henderson as a special guest. The premise of the performance was an interaction between the artist and his muse (Sereda representing Noestheden’s passions such as numbers and astronomy). Henderson played the role as the video artist who captured microcosms of the performance with a video camera that was projected on screens above the performance area. Visually it was an interesting performance (neon lighting, large crystal spinning around all I felt were for beauty’s sake) but I found it a little disjointed and confusing at time. The verbal dialogue (after the introduction of Noestheden’s practice) seemed disconnected or maybe I just didn’t get it or didn’t really feel like paying attention because of my confusion trying to put together all of the elements for the performance. I understood that some of the dialogue pertained to Noestheden’s art practice only because I was familiar with his practice where an outsider (like the friend that I brought along with me) would not quite understand that. The video element while quite beautiful but it kind of reminded me of video screens at rock shows where elements of the rock show are displayed on screens above the performers heads. I am not sure (and I really don’t think) that this was the intent. I didn’t really feel satisfied after the performance was done because it felt too short and disconnected but I did like the gluing of the crystals on the back especially on the video screen (again, it was pretty).

Randal's website

Randal Fedje is back and town and he gave me his web address. His work looks good and it is exciting to see the stuff created while in school in Australia.

www.eyeonweb.ca/randalfedje

Art For Lunch: New Grad Students

Today the new grad students showed their body of work. They look like an exciting bunch and will be an asset to the Visual Arts program at the university. Here is are a couple of the students websites:

Chrystene Ells

Kyle Herrnanen