Fall 17 Graduate Drawing/Painting ARTS 6033/6133

For the past two weeks or so, I've been making small, one-sitting palette knife paintings on gessoed paper. I've found that working this way removes some of the preciousness of the materials, allowing me to quickly experiment without feeling like I need to get it perfect every time.  As they dry, I've been working back into them, rebuilding portions of the obscured images. The areas of controlled vs more chaotic handling play well off of each other, and give the pieces more weight.  I've also been working in the same style on larger canvas surfaces, and collaging other elements into the image. These include text from poets such as Anis Mojgani and Allen Ginsburg, blackout poems of my own creation, and other paintings. 

+ Again “Painting” has been transformed into critical questions to me: what is painting and why do I paint? It is not the first time that I struggle with that. It is like life question, you might ask it yourself frequently different times in your life and find a new definition. for instance, the meaning of life that you found in fifteen is different with what you found in twenty-five or you will find in the thirties. + to find the answer, one of my solutions is reading my favorite painters interviews. I started with John Walker this week. Here is a part of that interview:

this weeks reading about critiques is really, really, really helpful.  it definitely made me feel that I am not crazy or alone in my reaction to them.  the fact that I feel that they are too short, are full of idiosyncratic pronouncements, and a lot of the time are criticisms and not critiques.  I find that during critiques, the way that the conversation drifts from topic to topic can make it really difficult for me as the student to follow what is being said.  i like in the reading where it talks about the student and the panelist seem to be speaking different languages.  like by the time I am kind of beginning to follow or understand what was just being said, stream of consciousness kicks in and the topic has already switched to something else.  I really wish that I had the author of this reading with me in critiques so that they could translate for me what is actually being said. I do recognize that I have a part in my experience in critiques.  I ...

Chase Young I spent one day this week at the 5 day long International Sculpture Center Conference and it was plenty. I attended two years ago and had thought attending grad school might give me a different perspective on what was being presented and how it was being presented. It didn't. The panel speakers read word for word from what was essentially a 30 minute long artist statement. It feels as though these panels are set up specifically to allow tenure track professors a chance to add a presenter line to their binders. Is there an international art english dictionary somewhere that is given to you after you receive your MFA? I’ve never heard anyone drone on for so long or use so many pointless descriptors for a pile of rocks with hair sprinkled on it. I enjoy the process of making art, and to an extent I enjoy looking at and discussing art, but I can't shake the feeling that these just aren’t my people. I don't know what I do with that.

First stop on our way to the International Sculpture Conference:   Precious Moment Chapel, Carthage, MO Traveling on windy back road a few miles from the highway in Carthage, Missouri we emerged in front of the Precious Moment Chapel. Precious Moments is a company that sells giftware figurines centered around religion and special occasions. The artist and creator of precious moments, Samuel J. Butcher, created the Precious Moments Chapel as a gift of thanks to god. The Chapel is a representation of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel in Rome only all of the figures are replaced with paintings of Butcher's Precious Moments Figures. I found the whole thing to be disturbing as it combined religion and consumerism. In the image on the far left there was a small chapel with pews and I found myself wondering if I was worshiping a religious scene or Idealizing the Precious Moments brand. Adding to this is their Precious Moments Welcome center that contains a gift shop that is equiv...

I don't really get why the formatting gets weird when I copy text from another source. Anywho...doing some writing for my thesis paper, working out the section of the paper where I talk about the story and underlying themes. Very very first draft material here. The Story For Wintonbury is a collection of fictional short stories about the inhabitants of Bakers Street in Wintonbury, Massachusetts.  The reader is introduced to vignettes of the lives of seven characters in a neighborhood of connected stories, beginning with the writer in first person omniscient, Annabel Olive. There are five houses on Bakers Street. In the first house, Henry and Walter reside. Henry is a young boy who has recently lost his mother, and has, thus, gone to live with his grandfather, Walter. Walter is a lonely widow who is now trying to take care of his grandson. Harvey and Theo are brothers. Harvey is a young boy who is nonverbal, and Theo is a college student who feels a responsibility to st...

I have the multiple pieces sewn together and stretched on stretcher bars. I've been painting them separately but when they came together the marks still resembled my usual way of working. I did sew the pieces together because I'm worried about finals. I have enough work but not enough time invested in each piece to show what I'm after. I'll never sew wet canvas together again. If I ever do it I'll use spray adhesive to fix the canvas instead of piecing everything with pins. There's several areas where the canvas buckles. The feedback did come in after 3 weeks. Don't understand what took so long. One professor recommended these artists: Emma Webster, Evan Boggess, Kati Heck, and Sean Downey. With the few weeks I have left I'll focus on edge work and color relationships. I'm not rushing anything. I'll still be working on these pieces after finals in two weeks. Have to remember to pace things. 

After *finally* receiving my midterm feedback, I have been thinking through a lot. Some things that have really stood out to me are:  How can I invite viewers to think about identity and disidentification in my work other than through nuance?  I am thinking through this by making objects that I can directly relate to myself. For example, I have looked at and recreated a Moon Jar, a Korean vessel that is round and wonky, meant to resemble the moon. This has brought up questions of how would a shadow or reflection of the moon actually look like? Would it actually cast a shadow, and if not, what does this imply in terms of identity? I also treated the moon jar with a much more loose approach, rather than throwing it, I pinched it and left document of my touch.  Making something sloppy with intention is different than making something the best you can but having it be sloppy. My sloppy is very crafted, is this physical sloppiness a commentary on contemporary ceramics...

Revised Statement I am painting landscapes on panel, where the panel itself goes through various forms of trauma. Intermittently, I collect the fragments and debris, and reintroduce them by mixing with paint or adhering them to the surface. The landscape resting atop an unstable and often fragile foundation of recycled materials, including: cardboard, MDF, and other waste. The landscape, the painting, and I are forced to adapt to the erosion of our interactions. Likewise with my digital works of landscapes, I mishandle the files, let the instability of the compression algorithms influence the image, and add fractions of the stable image back into the transmission. This process of destruction and reconstruction mimics that of the forest; as plants decay, they supply nutrients for new life. The situation seems to become more complicated as the artificial world gets mixed into the circulation. In this contemporary moment of turmoil, I want to approach landscape painting through mul...

Artist Statement I approach landscape painting, in a contemporary moment of turmoil; where the human presence has put pressure on ecological systems across the globe. I want the images I create to reflect this interruption of the natural world. One way that I achieve this interruption is in shifting the physical surface of the painting from a stable and predictably flat panel to a series of panel fragments. The division of the landscape is made manifest in the work. The landscape resting atop an unstable and often fragile foundation of recycled materials: cardboard, MDF, or other waste. The world that we were born into is fundamentally different with our presence in it and we can no longer approach old problems with old solutions. As we sustain the barrage of natural disasters our resources and our ability to respond diminishes. Which is why in my work, I want to focus on the reconstruction of the landscape after these interruptions. The work I am currently working on is landsc...

I have been looking at Mark Rothko's paintings in the layers of translucent and opaque paint layers that he would apply.  it would be pointless to try to copy his methods because of the secretive nature that he would work.  a lot of the time he would even refuse to let his studio assistants watch him paint.  his layering techniques would use different mediums that would shine or glow differently due to the way that the material filters or reflects light.  Rothko used materials outside of the standard materials used by artists and he would use traditional artist materials in non traditional ways.  he would modify the properties of oil paint to get the drying time, flow and colors that he was looking for.  he would use traditional resins, egg, glue and dammar resins that increase the viscosity of the paint so that the paint could be diluted without loosing their consistency or the quality of the color.  his process has also been difficult to figure out ...

My sessional depression is coming. I'll be sunning around SCUL soon. Maybe bring a cold beverage and enjoy the sun. I purchased a $20 sewing machine from a Goodwill last weekend. This piece of equipment will help me finish a piece I've been working on the past two weeks. I'm painting on unstretched canvas and then sewing it into place. I need a solid week of dry time before I can sew it together. With three weeks before finals I don't have much time. I'm hitting the painting one more time before I let it sit. Once a part comes in I'll be sewing everything together. I working on finding a balance in the look of each piece. The range stylistically needs to be amped up within each work. I'm pushing back and not wanting to do this. It feels uncomfortable making the sections not go together. One section might look like an abstract expressionist and the other "realistic." I do need to be more selective in how I'm choosing each method of mark mak...

My studio visit with Dylan brought up the concept of futility in my work. Futility has been present in the art I make for some time, but I am still working on the why’s of its presence. Dylan pointed me to a French philosopher and writer named Albert Camus. His work focuses on the philosophy of Absurdism. He has a whole book on the topic of the absurd that I am really wanting to delve into titled “The Myth of Sisyphus”. Part of a summary of the book states “ Absurd art does not try to explain experience, but simply describes it. It presents a certain worldview that deals with particular matters rather than aiming for universal themes.” I really like this explanation and think it relates to my art pretty well. I’m adding it to the ever growing list of reading material that I have no time to read.

Men Working In my ongoing "Men at Work" series I look to break down the barriers and stereotypes that surround gender roles. In this unspoken system the female assumes the role of maintaining the home while the male provides monetary support. I find that this system is inefficient and creates tension, conflict, and underappreciated as each role struggles to understand one another.  To break down these barriers I transplant the genders out of their typical role and place them in the apposing environment while assigning them the apposing tasks. The male role is taken from his construction job and placed in the home environment where he fulfills tasks of the domestic role. Conversely the female role is placed into the blue-collar environment and performs tasks that were previously assigned to the male role. "Men Working," joins the "Men at Work" series through a 15 minute performance and on construction site documentation. In this performance I am direc...

Over fall break, I ran the bumper cars, which, during the off-season, offers great thinking time.  I’m an artist, storyteller, and collector of ideas. I paint, build, or write, depending on the medium which best suits the details I narrate at a given point in telling the story. My process is additive; the details of the story come in pieces. The story begins with a thread when I’m not searching for it. I hear a sentence in a movie, television show, book, or in front of me, and it catches my attention. The constants in the sentences which catch my attention are: peculiarity, specificity in object or declaration, and an immediate mental image of what that sentence may look like if it were carried out visually. The additive process of ‘writing’ the stories --by painted, made, and written word --comes next. I begin with a drawn sketch of what the scene of the sentence may look like. I find physical objects that might connect to the story. I write, adding my own experiences and thr...

Chase Young Artist Statement As my work is continues to address themes of relationships, humor, and absurdity, my focus has shifted in a direction that is increasingly concerned with the formal aspects and possibility of the work. I have been exploring alternative methods of mark making through action such as breaking and repairing glass and marking missed dart throws on a wall. Line has also emerged as an important element in this work providing contrast between the man made, and the organic character of natural forms. I’m continually evaluating the purpose of and need for humor as it plays a key role  in my work and have tried to see how I can make art without it and what the result is. Through continued exploration I am finding an interest in artwork as the residue of performance by the artist, the evidence of action. As I move forward I am allowing my work to influence itself creating subtle thematic and visual ties that allow seemingly disparate sculptures to inhabit the s...

Studio visit with Sean Morrissey I had a studio visit with Sean after midterm crits to get some fresh input on my work from someone I have never had a crit with except in a final critique with half the faculty. Some new things came up during the visit and some things that others have mentioned were reiterated. One topic that was brought up was the question of scale. A lot of my work seems very self contained and why I choose the scale I do is something I haven't given enough thought to. One thing that was reiterated from a crit with Mike was that high level of craft is one of my strengths and that I should embrace that quality. I am certainly happy to do that, I guess I have just felt that craft was looked down upon here as a crutch to avoid a more conceptual practice. Sean also used the term “ a return to analog craft” I’m not exactly sure what he was referencing, I think maybe some of the components in my reef, but I like the phrase.

+ After deeply pondering about borders of abstraction and representative painting and role of narrative, suddenly I found myself depicting a historical-political poem on a very large canvas I usually think a lot about my roots, my culture and I try to find the relationship of my art-habits with my culture. Since I believe that culture cultivated something in us which shows itself in entire of our life, specifically in art, both in process of making it and in the result. + Base of our culture and art is founded on literature, verbal and linguistic things. Even our visual art stuff has been produced as a supplement of literature: they are the illustration of story or poems and they only exist in books.

I am interested in dissecting the layers of identity that I have formed as a queer Asian-American, and the impact of that identification within the present societal climate. I look to the writings of José Esteban Muñoz as a reference to inform and empower my multiple strata of identity as a minority. Muñoz’s theory of disidentification builds on the idea that queer people of color “tactically and simultaneously work on, with, and against a cultural form”, as well as find ways to both rework and read themselves into the cultural codes of the mainstream, a simultaneous insertion and subversion. Through making ceramic and plastic objects I want to provide an alternative to ways of thinking about beauty and material. I am currently using plastic as backdrops and props within installations in which the loose material of the plastic contrasts with the rigidity of the ceramic vessels, and both materials reference containment and permanence. I view the seductive and shiny surface of the ...

My work is currently in a state of transition, turning away from my past body of traditional, Caravaggesque portraits. I am attempting to do this in two ways: first, by enriching the content and concepts of my work to create pieces that are more accessible and meaningful to both myself and the viewer, and second, by employing new methods of mark-making and treatment of the surface. I am very interested in juxtaposing two contrasting ideas against each other and exploring dualities in both concept and form. One of the largest flaws in my work thus far has been its inability to be read – it stands walled-off from the viewer, nearly incapable of meaningful engagement. I believe this was the result of my own subconscious tendency to shield myself from vulnerability; if the work existed in isolation, separate from both myself and the viewer, I was protected from scrutiny. To combat this, I am now creating work that is deeply personal to me, largely concerning my struggle with depressi...

Inspired by German romanticism and Walt Disney animations, I transform disasters into colorful and cheerful landscapes. The general notion of my paintings is depicting the paradox, which is the confrontation of hope and disappointment. So, I started to picture tragic stories and historical events with a playful disguise. This semester, I am struggling with two general principles. One, is to define the distinction of abstract and representational paintings in my own project. Second, is the role of narrative in my pictures. Also, I am experiencing different types of interactions between paint and canvas.  Ziba Rajabi, Fall 2017