Thursday, April 24, 2014

Summer Reading


"...in life, in fairy tales, those who, out of fear and poverty, cannot afford emotions and who therefore...have to try out their seemingly atrophied ability to love on inanimate substances and objects unheeded by anyone else -such as ash, a needle, a pencil, or a matchstick." pg 145






"Since (in theory) things outlast us, they know more about us than we do about them - they bear their experience of us within them and are - in a literal sense - the book of our history lying open before us." pg 169




This summer's reading list is mostly comprised of W.G. Sebald (I've oddly started with A Place in the Country as an introduction of his work through his inspirations, and moved to On the Natural History of Destruction and then the emergence of memory). I've also thrown in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five and The Book Thief. Obvious pattern emerging here...


Sunday, April 13, 2014

Orit Hofshi




"There was, I knew, blood beneath the verdure and tombs in the deep glades of oak and fir. The fields, forests and rivers had seen war and terror, elation and desperation; death and resurrection […] It is a haunted land where greatcoat buttons from six generations of fallen soldiers can be discovered lying amidst the woodland ferns."
-Orit Hofshi, in an interview with J. Roca 

Hofshi further speaks about the influence of working in the politically charged environment of Israel as difficult, but immediately and distinctly a present aspect in her work, including an obsessive if you will collection of news, images, and data absorbing the daily life of individuals and society. I am actually interested in the seemingly opposite experience of absorbing tumultuous past and present political and social contexts from a place of displacement, both geographically and in the context of mass multiplied media. The element of obsession is a touchstone, connecting my own personal rummaging and that of our dizzying social media. Actually, both of these processes involve a deep obsession with research and detail that is nauseating as we look at the same images and stories over and over and over again in attempt to make sense of some apparent wholeness or answer through chaos.

There seems an element of mirrored halo in this displacement... polarities of connection and disconnection, of intense fragility and then a numbness that grows with any multiple that is produced, fragmented, appropriated thereafter (Warhol?) . Reinterpretation is my personal motivator, and evident for other artists/friends as well. There is a constant drive to take these heavy burdens and submit through selected processes, tests, experiments, in an attempt to break down the structures that held them/hold them in place. I am very interested in these structures and contexts, as Hofshi mentions, how they affect individuals, and memory.

Sometimes I find my memory has recorded something backwards when I am confronted with hard evidence; photographs, newspapers, statistics, foreign retellings. The tension that exists in between these multiple polarities, all at once, never settling down, gives me the most strange and pleasant vertigo.

Thursday, April 10, 2014

"Swallowing" series woodcut prints


 


Studio shots of the process included some mixing and matching of both ends of the spoon.





Saturday, April 5, 2014

End of Term

Installation shots of my end of term work, for more information on my ideas and artist statement visit the research portion of my blog.



Friday, March 21, 2014

Spoons in progress

Here's a little sneak peek at some very large (4ft) woodcut spoons I have been working on in the last month. Installation begins a week and a half from now!


Sunday, February 2, 2014

Studio Doodles Winter 2014



Some studio doodles I did last month. Instead of scanning them I just took some grainy photographs.. but I actually enjoy the effect...

Saturday, February 1, 2014

Painting of Eleanor

Over the 2013 winter holiday break I did a painting of a dear friend. My underpaintings are in arcylic and sometimes accidently too thick... the subsequent layers are in oil paint.
Finished painting

Details of the eyes

What the process work looks like

On display at the University of Waterloo's Artery Gallery