twenty two

This is an envelope from a letter that was mailed to. I think there is so much to be said for letter writing over emailing or texting. Letters show real care and time and attention that nothing else really parallels. I like this because I know where it was before it was with me but I don't know anything about the process. I can picture the sender placing it in the mailbox and from there nothing-until I pulled it out of my mail slot here. You can envision the change of hands and all of the places that this little envelope traveled. 

twenty one

This is a grocery list from some time over spring break when I went to the grocery store to buy ingredients to make my mother soup because she was sick. I think it is interesting to look at an old grocery least because, at least for me, I remember everything about that day when I wrote those things out on the paper. And grocery lists are so mundane and useless after you go shopping, but it is so cool to look at something and know everything else that preceded it. 

twenty

A few weeks ago my friend picked a flower for me and left it in an envelope hanging on my door. I saw it and thought it was cool but sort of just forgot about it until I noticed that it was turning into a pressed flower, which I didn't think could just happen, but I guess that makes sense. I left it there a little longer to see what else would happen. I like how the color is still vibrant even though it is dead. Usually, when you imagine something that is dead you think of pale or no color, or maybe black, grey, or white. 

nineteen

I found this by the crescent townhouses and I think it is so cool. It's a friendship bracelet in St Mary's colors. Friendship bracelets using this string braiding strategy called Chinese staircase are a staple among college kids and more specifically my friends. It's fun to sit around making them and trading them and wearing them on your wrist or ankle until they get stretched out and fall off. After a while, they start to become a part of you and you stop noticing them. This bracelet probably fell off of someone's wrist while they were walking because the place where it had been tied was weak because they had had it on for so long. It is probably creepy but I am going to start wearing it.

eighteen

I found this by Goodpastor. What really drew me to it was the pigment on the creases; I found that to be especially interesting. Also, the paper is almost soft. It seems like someone carried this in their pocket for months, so long that the dye from the jeans colored the creases. And I wonder why someone would do that. Maybe they forgot it or maybe it was something that brought them good luck. 

seventeen

I found this green square in front of my dorm and I'm not sure what it is. It feels almost waxy, which is strange and possibly gross. I like that it has an even rhythm of vertical (or horizontal depending on your perspective) grooves. It isn't art but it is interesting.

sixteen

I found these on my desk at school. They are menthol patches that I wear almost every day. I started saving them for no particular reason; I guess just to see how many I could amass in a short period of time. I noticed them because they look kind of interesting, almost like the beginnings of something else when they are put together like that-and they smell very strongly. I think sometimes that this is how the process of art making begins. You notice something that you'd never noticed before or you see something differently than you'd seen it before and your mind works over it until you've got some sort of concept. These menthol patches remind me of Steven Holl architecture because of the smell. Not that Steven Holl works with menthol, but because he sometimes gives his buildings an atmospheric feel by coating the walls in beeswax or something like that. The idea of making something that controls the viewers experience so thoroughly that even their sense of smell is engaged is really interesting to me.

fifteen

I saw this gum wrapper on the path and I couldn't resist picking it up. I don't know why it looks like that but it looks like something that is decidedly not a piece of paper with the sole purpose of containing gum within a package. The colors of the wrapper are so vibrant and I'm sure it looks better than the gum tastes. So I wonder whose idea it was to design the wrapper to look like that, who gets paid to have ideas like that, and if the person who sat on a computer creating this design dreamed of doing that sort of thing when they were young. 

fourteen

I chose this piece of plaster to go along with the shells because when I saw them sitting near each other on my desk I mistook the plaster for a shell. Plaster is an interesting medium to me because it is so tactile and also kind of annoying. If plaster is a material through which art is made, does it connote art itself in the same way that dried paint on a palette references painting? Or, because plaster is a more widely used material, does it have no meaning on its own? 

thirteen

I found these shells at Church Point. I was drawn to these shells because they look really cool. Two of them even have holes that would make them perfect for putting on a necklace. I think it's interesting that things like these occur naturally in the world because they look almost too cool to have been created by anything other than a machine. I think that shells and art have something in common but I'm not sure what that is. 

SMP presentation response

Today I went to some of the Art and Art History department SMP presentations. I was especially interested in April Morgan's art history SMP. She studied the way the curriculum of the AAH department changed over time and how this can be tracked through student work in the teaching collection. I think it's always good to be introspective and I would be interested in knowing more about what she found. I think that changes in society over time can be mapped through art curriculum. There was a time when women weren't allowed to go to art school, and if they wanted to they would have to agree to model for male painters. Art movements have been met with resistance before being accepted into the art world and this is also important to note.

I really agreed with what April said about the importance of merging art studio and art history. I don't think you can call yourself an artist if you don't study art history or if you can't write about art. You have to get into stuff and figure out what you like and what you don't like, and how to discriminate between the two without solely relying on personal aesthetic values. I think it's imperative for artists to be able to articulate with words as well as images and other media. 

la grande jetee

This film completely blew my mind. I expected to be bored by the fact that all of the action was occurring in still pictures but after the first five minutes you really lose sight of that. The plot was so engrossing that it was easy to lose track of the fact that it was all being narrated. The ending was great. It was uniquely one of those moments in film where everything comes together and fails to make any sense at all, at the same time. 

olia lialina

Olia Lialina is the artist responsible for "My Boyfriend Came Back from the War," a website created with basic gif images and html code that tells the story lovers reunited after a war. It is "among the first works of New Media art to produce the kind of compelling and emotionally powerful experience that we have come to expect from older, more established media." Lialina calls MBCBFTW a "netfilm." I think this is an important piece because of the way, thematically, it split with ideas of what new media art is and can be by adding evocative emotional elements to relatively simple code and text. 

alexei shulgin

Alexei Shulgin is the front man of 386 DX, the "world's first cyberpunk rock band" featuring an old computer and MIDI software. The use of antiquated technology is intentional as Shulgin is satirizing contemporary technological culture in part. 

keith obadike

Keith Obadike is a "sought after sound designer" on the hip hop scene. Obadike attempted to auction off his blackness on eBay as a performance art piece. The idea that heritage or ethnicity is something that can be bought and sold is new but this piece recalls Glenn Ligon and Adrian Piper, artists who both created self portraits "exaggerating [their] negroid features." Pieces like these show how discussions about race as it relates to identity aren't over just because the sixties are over.