No Pictures!

Amazingly enough, we still need cords to move images from cameras to computers. Since I don't have a cord, I will post images later on. (This cord makes me think of the umbilical cord.) I have a slight "thing" against blogging, so I am a bit reluctantly writing. I will tell you all more later and show some images.

Do you recognize this face?

In process is a new member of the protobird lineage. This one is being manipulated by hand.
Go to my blog to see the history .

I find this strangely beautiful

Words from the Theatre

I am an MFA costume designer in the Theatre department. So in a nutshell, I read scripts, analyze characters,themes, etc. and work with a design/production team and actors to create a portion of the physical environment of the play. I am currently in the middle of designing for "Wild Stages: Kabarett MFA!" which is an original work (meaning there is no set script, making this a non-traditional process) based on the cabaret scene in Europe between 1890 and 1930. It's sort of like old school SNL. The show opens in early May, so it's going to be a busy quarter for me!

My sketches are in the costume shop right now, but hopefully I'll steal them back for a little while so I can share some of the process work with you. And then, in the end, there will be production photos and of course the actual play. (May 1, 2, 3, 8, 9, 10, 15, 16, 17 at 7:30 pm, May 4 at 3:00 pm at the Bowen Theatre)

It is difficult to say what my "style" is or to give some sort of artist's statement, because the nature of my work is to be adaptive to different projects' and directors' needs. I will say, though, that the notion of collaboration is very important to me. I could sit around and draw or paint all day, but the excitement for me is in interacting with a whole group of people to eventually come to a common vision that facilitates the communication of an idea or story to the audience.

at a certain point you have to look elsewhere

I’ve posted below a link to some older work of mine. It’s been a loooong time since I posted anything new to it, but it’s a solid body of work that I recognize as important to what I’m doing now. These older works are a sort of “dumbing down” of painting for me; looking for what's important in the idea and nevermind the product. How many different types of solace are there? Through that detachment in the work I became bored with satellite thoughts orbiting the bigger questions and started paying more attention to the spaces of the wall revealed in between the way I was hanging these pieces. Making that space just as interesting as the decoration are to the wall, instead of a respite. That in-between-ness in the works, in the studio, language, understanding, conversation, etc. is what I’m working with now. The weather is changing. The studio pictures I’ve posted here are of recent works based on fortification patterns: migraine-induced concentric patterns I see when my eyes are shut.

www.paulwaltersimmons.com

Recent Conjurations.

SOMEONE TOLD ME ART WAS NEAT!

 

"My refrigerator sounds like Flipper.   I like the sound of switchblades.  A Ghostbuster would be the best job ever!    I will conquer ugly!  Jens Lekman April 1st!  I love people who love robots more than people.  I want to go back to the first time I heard Daniel Johnston in a wet basement in the guts of an anonymous  East Lansing College basement, that night was like a mountain.  I passed out in front of a church in bed of rhododendrons.  Names of flowers are tough to spell.  Always bring weapons when you time travel. " - Ryan Estep

Welcome to Town

"I have found the most satisfactory anaesthetic to be the one, two, three, mixture; by which I mean a mixture of alcohol, chloroform, and ether, in the proportion of one part alcohol, two parts of chloroform, and three parts of ether."
-What A Young Wife Ought To Know

dinner time.

"Ritual is an action frequently repeated, in a form largely laid down in advance; it aims to get those actions right. Everyone present knows what should happen, and notices when it does not."
-Margaret Visser, The Rituals of Dinner

check out my blog: meredithhost.blogspot.com

Chopin's Cantabile, etc.

Hi everyone! I wrote my thesis on a short, overlooked and untitled work by Frederic Chopin from 1834, marked Cantabile. (Above are a facsimile of the original and my transcription.) This word—literally 'singable' in Italian—became the springboard for a broad investigation into its eighteenth and nineteenth-century uses as a broad style, tempo and expressive markings (written on scores), a specific type of aria that peaked in the 1830s, and a musical texture with certain melodic, harmonic, and embellishing characteristics. For the Phd. I am currently most interested in the powerful eighteenth-century aesthetic ideal of 'cantabile' that initiated these later manifestations. I recently explored the angle of 'musical government,' and the fact that a restrained style like cantabile regulated expression and conditioned a response of unanimous enthusiasm from the eighteenth-century collective. Because of my background in piano, I'm most interested in opera and works for piano, and the merging of singing melody into keyboard works. But I really want to make sense of this powerful musical aesthetic that dominated for over a hundred years...

Hi Everybody

To begin. I write both fiction and poetry (fiction being my official academic designation here at OSU). At the moment, I am working on a "poetic project" developing around my research of the history of anatomy theaters and medical dissection. This subject has acted as a kind of springboard, which has launched me into a (for me at least) complex navigation between using research and events as the basis for work, but not making the work "about" them per se. Needless to say, I like taking up medical terminology and using it in different contexts (the inner spaces of the body are named with such pretty words!). On the page, I am interested in space, how the body of the poem operates both on the page and aurally, how the visual shape comes to interact with the "map" of sound (I have recently been re-inspired by Ann Lauterbach's visit). At the moment, this is the work I am most excited about--I hope ultimately to turn this into a chapbook collection of poems. In terms of fiction, I am working on a few very short pieces that experiment with the ways in which changing syntax can change affect, and the ways we need to change language in order to write about trauma (or from a traumatized perspective). On a side note, I have also just written a story "about" gorillas. I am currently reading Ann Lauterbach's collection of essays ("The Night Sky") and a book by David Ohle called "Motorman." Also, some Amy Bender and Jane Austen, just for fun.

My palette and my brush strokes

that becomes...

text + images

The landscape. The surface. The figure. Movement. The indefinite. The infinite.

I am interested boundaries and thresholds, experiences at the edges of perception. Beneath a façade of quiet, of perhaps emptiness resides an accumulation of information, the product of a single process followed to its logical conclusion. In some cases, the event itself has passed and the work is residue. In others, such as my sound and performance work, the event is unfolding and encompasses the viewer.

In all of these investigations, the passage of time and its relationship to bodies, marks, or sounds is pivotal. Each work evolves out of a system, an order of experimentation. Whether it is the dripping of water onto a page or walking for miles in the desert, each work speaks to a question about the nature of time, of intimacy with material and place, and a physicality of experience.

Included here are several images of drawings from last quarter and documentation of recent performance work in the California desert.

Dance

For my MFA conert (next weekend), I have choreographed Life Like Make Believe, a twenty minute dance theatre piece in which five physically dynamic dancers inhabit a world where the quirks of the Sullivant Hall theater are exposed, 2x 4’s are suspended from the ceiling and a broken cot serves as the set design/playground. Arriving in masquerade costumes, dancers flaunt their musical talents, translate memories and hurl pencils. Life Like Make Believe is a story-like mosaic.

As a dance maker, performer, and teacher, I address the effort and dynamic qualities of the body in performance as they relate to time and space. My choreography explores movement invention as a main component of dance making, drawing its content from improvisation, imagery, and thought. The work involves an experimental movement vocabulary, supported by a solid technical base, driven by action and risk. As a choreographer, I create abstract atmospheres that depict character and relationship without plot, and reality without being narrative.

Obsession...the good kind

Idolizing Leo Version 2.mp3

(Be sure to check the link to the mp3)


This is a little snip from my artist statement:

"My recent work develops out of a fascination for exploring Hollywood films and celebrity as a process. I start by finding images or references that serve as a visual point of departure. It is most often a pop culture reference which has some level of personal significance or attachment. My process of working involves taking these images and allowing them to be deliberately manipulated and broken down, separating the image from its original meaning and content. My goal is to allow myself to become completely immersed in my image and explore these images to a point that they begin to take on their own identity. I consider myself not only a “consumer, watcher, recipient, and victim [of mass media and pop culture]. But also a user of that media and culture: I am a chooser, interpreter, shaper, fellow player, participant, and storyteller” (Gerard Jones, Killing Monsters). The finished artwork is often a byproduct of the process.
When the work is reassembled, in whatever form it may take on, it becomes something that begins to transcend its origins and take on a new existence. For me, the process of this work is a digestive process. By turning these references into shards and fragments and subsequently reconstructing them, new work emerges. Through obsession, I create."

I hope this quarter to begin examining what it means to be obsessed with the movies that I am and to dig a little deeper into ideas about recreating celebrity and whatnot.

Amy's First Post!

Here are two links to pieces I have on a couple of small online journals. Both pieces are part of my MFA thesis, which explores the relationship between my parents' courtship, marriage, and divorce, and my first major relationship at seventeen years old. I'm working on a particular use of the present tense in my writing; although my thesis takes place entirely in the past, I'm interested in the conflation of time, so that the insight of an adult narrator can very subtly shadow that of my characters at different points in the narrative, analyzing their motivations with each other. The two links I'm posting show pieces centered on my parents, whose romance, for me, is as Kathryn Harrison's describes in The Kiss--a lifelong obsession of all sons and daughters. Thanks for reading!

http://www.wordriot.org/template_2.php?ID=1398

http://www.flashquake.org/archive/vol6iss4/nonfiction/errands.html

a pinch of salt, a dash of water, a sheet of newsprint

Using easy-to-find and cheap materials, I've been trying to make pieces that transcend the sum of their parts. Newsprint has provided a lot of inspiration, as has road salt, ceramic slip, charcoal, fabric, paint, and water. I have a background in painting and ceramics, so it's really interesting to see how they are making their way into the work. I'm trying to generate as many experiments as possible, which has been a really liberating way of working in comparison to the narrative, symbolism-rich work I made prior to OSU. The predominant themes I see at play so far include: making evident the presence and absence of water; referencing fabric without using fabric; challenging viewer expectations of materials; and engaging the floor/the lower periphery of the eye. Over the break, I put together a blog: http://www.nicolemgibbs.blogspot.com/. I feel so official now!

It gets into your eyes

Above are a few images from recent work that was included in my second quarter review and also parts from my statement and some questions to think about.  My most recent work consists of largish (around 6ft x 5ft) paintings on canvas and small, odd shaped drawings on paper.  I am interested in the ability of the painting surface to provide a space for fragmentation and flux, simultaneous associations and stimulate sensation.  Painting is an open, liquid form and is received through the openings in the world, through the senses... I don't know why this paragraph is looking like a link....it won't take you anywhere...this is where you need to be... I will put some more images on some sort of blog or my space page by Friday!

Everything is fragmented by everything else.

It's a cut.

This A cuts this B cuts this ship cuts this sky cuts this water.

Platinum Black.

Your love has just gone platinum.

Language can both cut and inflate.  Each word occupies space on its own.  But a word is never on its own.  A mark is never on its own.  The conflation of marks and words fills a pocket of space with air.  Sometimes the pocket bursts.  Sometimes the pocket of space becomes so enormous, its skin rubbing up against the farthest matter in the universe.  Sometimes the pocket of space catches the gaze of a viewer and fixes itself to the gaze.  

It gets into your eyes.  Sometimes it gets into your eyes like glass sparkles.  Sometimes like fireflies.  Sometimes like a kaleidoscope filled with tilt-a-whirl and mountain dew.  The catching and fixing is a sensual event that suspends time and transcends times.

It's a form of mediation.

The scale of a gesture is determined by the next gesture.  Even the frame is a gesture.  Is the frame even a gesture?

Be the Ultimate Juicy Girl.

The everyday affair.

Catch a piece of pickled purple sparkling slipper and slip into backwards, towards, higher, further, faster, than tangerine graffiti.

Hard hats required.

The artist is the great punctuator.

Questions:

Where in the world do the materials of my art come from? What are the actual materials and what are the visual materials? Is there a difference? How does the visual transform the actual? Does it at all?

Do my paintings direct the sentiment or the viewer in anyway?

How is a still object punctuated? Choreographed?

How is a painting read?

How does an event take form and what does it look like?

what role does fragmentation play in relation to the visual event?

What is attitude and where does it come from? Is attitude visual? How can it be visual?

What is meant by cultures of color? cultures of mark?

Slabs..crocheting...more slabs...

Right now I'm working finishing 2 of the 4 pieces that will be in my MFA show. I feel like a slab rolling sanding and crocheting machine that is on auto pilot. Both of these images are of work in progress.
I started my own blog..it's sortof a mush of my own work, things about clay, knitting and crocheting, my friends work, and other random things that I find interesting and fit into my asthetic. It's ImTangled.blogspot.com
Toodles!