From video journals to painting the icons of a new religion...

         An ongoing video art project that should take me well into half of the year 2010, "Global Proposal for a New Emoticon" (working title) will address issues of human adaptability in an increasingly techno-based socio-cultural experience that marks the 21st century as a cybernetic one. Out of the cold emptiness that is satellite, networked connectivity... comes the emergence of new symbols and icons that are rapidly being downloaded into the collective psyche. From a realm where nothing is real, symbols are born into the real, and then recycle themselves again and again back into the unreal, until eventually all symbols are an untraceable mix of culture, technology, science, politics, religion and human emotion... the latter of which is the area of interest that I base this video project upon. 

         Out of context and out of place, many of the daily uploads on the project's YouTube channel - underscoreblank - are intensely personal, while others are over-generalized, banal daily experiences. A further description of the project can be read about in the "About Me" section on the channel's homepage. The culmination of about 400 video uploads will result in one final video painting... a didactic icon that moves with the times.

         I am very concerned about transparency in art production and exhibiting, and this informs my rationale behind my commitment to keeping my process public and available to everyone (everyone with an internet connection, hardware and software... that is). Process is the bulk of the message - both psychological and technical - and the final product, an index that points to it.

         Keep up with me on my channel, or just wait for the exhibition in 2010. 

_c0da: Colorado Digital Art

So, my latest NERDA endeavor is the _c0da show opening up this week at Object + Thought. Thanks to Ryan Pattie for fantastic flyer design. We were scheduled to open to the public on Wednesday morning, but with the snow and a few more tasks with projectors, the show may open mid-day, although visitors will not be turned away... just a matter of tidying some video up.

We've been planning this event for months and we're finally glad it's on it's way to being seen. I can't believe how much work is involved in producing and designing a show... even when you have jurors to choose the work for you. It's still conceptually a lot of work, and I have learned SO much from this process. I finally have been able to use my gallery skills outside of work and school, and I hope we have a packed reception.

The _c0da show is representing artists from MSCD, CU Boulder, UCCS, UCD and RMCAD. I really hope to put together more shows like this again, creating place for art students to have a discussion in the way that they know best. I think it makes much more sense to get your work off campus and see it up, and only then can you really talk about it and get feedback. The classroom is terribly limiting when it comes to critique, in my opinionated opinion.

At least in the gallery the discussion can be done over beers. The mind needs proper lubrication for contemplation. The MCA was giving members each a free drink with the B+ Lectures and I think that's some damn good planning.

I also have a video work in the show as well, a remix of an older work I did in 2008. In a way, the video makes more sense as a remix.

Friday we'll be handing out hilarious awards, too, and celebrating all things NERDA.

A Motley Effort gets review...

The installation that Melannie and I collaborated on - called Wombtomb - as part of a warehouse installation show through Metro State Sculpture Department on First Friday in October, got posted up at denverarts.org. Check it out.

photo by Susan Porteous Evans

photo by Steve Gottshall

It is hard to see from these photos, but the electrical/network cables were attached to the inside of the cast and extended out to the eggs on the side walls.

The animated video I built was 4 minutes long with audio that Melannie provided, and it looped seamlessly. Three candles in a triangle pattern were placed on the floor near the cast. We also had a space heater in the room, to render the warmth of the womb.

Wombtomb was inspired from Donna Haraway's book Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, especially the essay "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,"

Additional inspiration was taken from several lengthy entries in a hefty book by Barbara Walker called The Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, including the entries: womb, cave, wine, menses, salt, and honey. This is an insanely researched encyclopedia that I recommend everyone read.

Video documentary is being put together for both my solo project from the last installation show in May (see my earlier post on Steady Decline: New Religion) and for this last collaborative project. I don't post any of my video work / digital work online in photo-sharing networks or on blogs. I prefer to own my work. I do put up some analog works, such as wet photography, painting and drawing.

When my official website is up and running, you'll be able to see my portfolio there. This blog is for writing and learning about visual art - both my own and the works of others.

Thank you for reading.

Where We Meet

Empty Orchestra was a mutlimedia performance night at the Center for Visual Art that was concepted by Rebecca Dolan and created by individual artists studying at Metro State in the digital art program... specifically, students undertaking Video Art II. Performances ranged from spoken word to sing-alongs to rap to more traditional, narrative performance.

Mine was sort of an anti-performance, addressing the anxiety and incompatability of pigment and video. In a private performance at my home, I filmed my hand painting over canvas that led to an old television set (on and off) which eventually got painted over as well, and I poured paint onto a black dress. The documentation of the performance was then edited and further manipulated, and turned into the video backdrop to the performance I did at the CVA, "Where We Meet." I wore the same dress.

As the video (with sound) played I had Melannie hold a roll of green duct tape for me so that I could wrap myself in it. Once I was bound (ran out of tape a bit early... you'd think those rolls are longer than they are) I stood at the microphone and proceeded to laboriously breathe. I'd planned for a large amount of time for only my breath to be heard (I was taped up at the mouth), but I did not plan to be strangled at the neck like I was (bound myself a little too tightly). I struggled to breathe, the air from my nostrils loud and amplified. I held my breath for a while for a break but then I realized that passing out - although a potentially nice touch to my piece about struggling between old and new media - probably wasn't a good idea with electronics and expensive equipment sitting at my feet.

Video stills from Where We Meet

 

Family Portrait aka Self Portrait (originally 2007)

This was an examination into the offspring generations of immigrants (to America) that dealt with an onslaught of cultural prejudice by assimilating into the standard American value system. A visual exercise in the expression of the loss of ancestral values, languages and traditions.

This project was one of my first sculptures, and deals with psychological discordance between members of an American family that has been stripped of cultures of origin. My own experience of being both Mexican and Polish descent facilitates this personal project. My grandparents on both sides spoke in their native languages very fluently, often to my dismay because I could never understand what they were saying, except when they chose to speak in English, which they were also fluent in. Somewhere between theirs and my generation, the language and culture was set completely aside, and I blame not the baby boomer generation but the messages that they were bombarded with in media and in school. (If you want to succeed in the US, speak ENGLISH.)

I have no qualms with English, but I do take issue with the loss of language from those cultures - particularly Spanish - since so much of our population now is migrating from Mexico and we limit ourselves greatly by not learning to speak such a crucial language in such a crucial time.

Self Portrait (Voyeur Series)

As part of our digital art requirements, we must take a series of photography classes, including wet photography (film).

This was taken in 2007 with the Canon AE-1 SLR (35mm) that my father gave to me after high school as a gift. He never used it when he bought it in 1981, so I got to reap the benefits of that! Nearly dropped it in the tub a few times. I took a series of photographs after having read about Cindy Sherman and some concepts about the female form in photography, particularly about how the lens has traditionally been the realm of the male utilizing voyeurism (to intentionally or unintentionally objectify the female). It intrigued me, because I had been a figure model for life-drawing classes since 2000. (I reaped the rewards in under-the-table, awesome hourly wages and in free drawing classes any time I wanted). I was constantly being stared at, in the nude, by other artists I'd walk around the room each break I got and checked up on people's art to make sure there weren't any creepers in the class. The person that ran each class also knew the people that showed up to draw, and it was pretty safe all around. I was proud to help out artists learning to draw or honing their already gifted talents. And I was not too shabby of an artist myself, so the free classes helped me brush up.

But I couldn't help thinking that there was an inherent voyeurism to life drawing, and photography, that I'd failed to notice all those years. Could I have been an exhibitionist, and not realized it? I still model on the side, for extra cash and for respected artists in the community. Am I just as much a voyeur, then, since I too draw the human form and scrutinize the images I seek behind my lens? For the series of photographs I was to take for a project in my photography class, I decided to explore the idea of voyeurism, and use myself both as subject and object, both the voyeur and the exhibitionist.

For the glossy effect, I used a floodlight and would submerge myself under water in my tub, leaving the camera outside of the water in my hand. I'd try to take the photo as soon as I came out from under the water, so the thin film of water was still on my face. Used a mirror to get the image of myself, and the tub was my prop to hold my hand still with the long exposure time. I had fun with it.

Multimedia performance Steady Decline (New Religion), 2009

The fully installed church, located in a warehouse for the Antithesis Exhibition on May 1, 2009, was a piece that explored the repercussions of addictions to online social networking sites through the lens of instituionalized religious practices. Video projections involved animated emoticons (icons) interspersed with snapshots of my facebook contacts' status updates. I did 4 different performances/rituals throughout the opening night - mostly appropriated from my memory of Catholic mass as a child - where I paid homage to the icons/emoticons/prophets of a new religion, blessed myself and the church-goers with water, beer, bubbles, silly string, pringles, and candy. Gregorian chanting played in the church throughout the night.

: \

Video stills from Steady Decline (New Religion)

There were two videos projected onto large white screens (fabric) on left and right of the altar in the front of the installation/church environment. These were some of the icons that built and animated in After Effects for the projections, which also included facebook status updates from my contacts. The videos themselves, as a relic of the performance, are jointly titled "Icons of A New Religion."

"Modern Crisis"

"Modern Crisis"

2007

chalk pastel on paper

18" x  24"

For this project in Drawing I,  we were to use a photograph of some kind. I chose to use a scanner, and so I put a mixture of candy and over-the-counter medications on it and covered them with a purple sheet of paper. I think the message is self explanatory. 

Self Portrait (The Shadow)

"Self Portrait (The Shadow)"

2006

graphite on paper

18" x  24"

Breaking Cycles

"Breaking Cycles"

2007

watercolor and color pencil
12" x  32"

"Monster Artifice" Series, 2008

Silver gelatin prints (35mm) taken with a Canon AE-1 SLR. The outfit consists of a Speedo, those little white ringlets that stick on to hole-punched paper to keep them from tearing, swim goggles, and wings I crafted from plastic wrap and bailing wire. I think I was reading Donna Haraway and Orlan at the time I did these. Again with my own lens turned on myself. I'm sure I'll figure out what I'm trying to say, someday.

Life Drawing Studies / Men: Young & Old

The first two are the same young fella.
The third is a guy from a burlesque show I photographed and then drew my own thoughts.
The last two are different elders.

These were done anywhere from 2 to 30 minutes, done in 2006-07.

Conte crayons, chalk pastels, charcoal.

On the Idea of Painting

"What It Is Not" and "What It Is"
diptych set

Acrylic and oil on canvas. Each one is 2ft x 4ft. These were the last real paintings I did before switching to digital art as my concentration (previously I was registered in painting). Still haven't really picked up the brush, except for some recent video/performance pieces that deal with my criticisms of the medium that I used to use all the time, prior to this thing called a fine art education. It really is amazing, the processes we go through, to find out what it is we are trying to say and why we are trying to say it.

2007 Alexan Collegian Mural Contest, 1st Place Winner

Out of submissions by Colorado undergraduates, three finalists were chosen to paint their proposed murals on the inside walls of the fairly new Alexan CityCenter in Englewood, CO... each muralist had roughly 45 days to complete their mural, a dimension of 30 ft. x 10 ft.

I wish I had more photos of the mural... keep meaning to go back and take more pictures. I researched and photographed about 50 key locations in Englewood that had either public art or art & recreational ammenities & events, and included more than half of those references in the mural proposal (and final painting). The panorama was of Englewood and as you walked down the hall you could see the changing of the seasons occur throughout the mural. It's a slender hall and you can't really see the mural all at once; the photo tells the story.

On top of four other classes and a job and the Drawsome organization, I would go here at night and work late late late. I was a slave to this project. On the reception night I got first place, and the funny giant check to go with it. And I think I gave a half-drunk acceptance schpeel on public art and community engagement and education and what-not... whatever man, they clapped.

Selected oil paintings, 2007

"Christopher Lee" oil on canvas (one pigment: cadmium red and lots of turpentine, wipe-away method)

"Cesqua" oil on canvas

;) Welcome to Iconographilia...

Iconographilia is intended to be a personal reflection of my art education, and I will be expanding upon project explanations here, as my art as of recently has evolved from traditional media into video art, performative acts, and installed environments.

Here you'll find my art endeavors, art ramblings, links to other artists or organizations, etc.

Iconographilia.

What does that mean?

It is the affliction/addiction of studying contemporary icons. At least that's what I want it to mean. It explains what I am interested in as a visual artist. I take hyper notice of many forms of media, but I especially love to analyze text and iconography. The icons of the 21st century are increasingly being defined not in terms of reality, but hyperreality, as they are being born of the great Nothing (and yet everything) that is the internet. They icons are propagating within that realm, where they sit and fester and multiply via the amount of eyes that see them (memes), until they ultimately jettison out and into what we call "reality". Icons for happiness, sadness, laughter, confusion, anger, frustration, fatigue, goofiness, surprise, fear, etc. are all universal human emotions.

What once took the great writers and philosophers hundreds of pages at a time to convey timeless human emotions, now takes one or two seconds to convey through a keyborad or handheld device, and takes the receiver just as quickly to decipher it's meaning.

:) = happy

:\ = confused; hmmm?

;) = wink and a smile

:o = shocked

And so on.

The effective transference of specific, universal emotion from one person to the next - or, from one online social networker to the next online social networker - in a matter of a few seconds both in communicating and receiving emotions, is fascinating to me. I was born in 1979 and grew up using DOS. I was using computers long before public use of the internet was launched in the mid 1990's. I saw everything change very, very quickly. 

I am interested in where this huge social change is leading art. New media, web art, installation art, and interactivity in creative expression all suddenly seem to have forced a seat at the dinner table of 'fine art.' But even now, that is not enough. Soon this New Media creature's offspring will be old enough to demand, each one of them, their own seat at the table, for they will have grown strong enough, competitive enough and capable enough of providing what everyone wanted in the first place - great conversation, and wouldn't you know it, inspiration. You just didn't know how big the party was going to get by inviting New Media to the table. 

News flash, New Media's got lots of babies, and they're all hungry. Just wait until they can talk. ;)