Wednesday, November 30, 2011

This Friday @ UK: May Photo Lecture & Open Studio

Two events happening this Friday at UK:

1) The second Robert C. May Photo Lecture of the semester, featuring Julie Blackmon at 4 PM in the Worsham Theatre, UK Student Center. Find out more HERE.

2) UK Fine Arts Open Studio—a great chance to tour UK's art department, see student work and make new art friends. The event is from 6–10 PM in the Reynolds Building. Find out more HERE.

Hope to see you there.

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Drawn

... to State of Drawing in the Anne Wright Wilson Fine Art Gallery.  Thanks to EVERYONE who participated to make this exhibition possible.  If you were not able to be at the opening reception and round-table dialogue, you can still check out the show, including People's Choice Award Winner Exposed Roots by Bethany Kalk.
Profs. Darrell Kincer, Sheldon Tapley (Centre) and Daniel Graham

Prof. Boris Zakic with Manifest Gallery Director and Prof. Jason Franz

Dialogue discussants Boris Zakic, Andrea Fisher (Transy), Esther Randall (EKU), Kristina Arnold (WKU) and Jason Franz.

Monday, November 28, 2011

schiele much?

                I have a been a long time fan of the work of Egon Schiele, ever since I had to copy his drawings in my freshman year of college. I came across the work of Adara Sanchez Anguiano and the series of drawings entitled "take your clothes off".  It was an immediate kind of look that you cannot copy and just pretend it is not there. And with no text accompanying the work I was left to think of this as an obvious plagaristic unoriginal action.  I understand a difference in concept, content, and context but it was just a sad day when someone takes something and doesn't make it their own in such a blatant way without acknowledging it. 
Adara Sanchez Anguiano

Egon Schiele

Egon Schiele

Egon Schiele

Egon Schiele

Adara Sanchez Anguiano

Adara Sanchez Anguiano

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Opportunity: Internship Wall Street Greetings--PAID

contact Betsy at Wall Street Greetings. The company caters to financial industry with several major corporate clients. For the complete position listing (it was sent to me as a pdf and I couldn't post it here) Email: betsy@wallstreetgreetings.com or call 859.873.0877

Appropriation, Internet Meme, and Art History

Lt. John Pike, the U.C. Davis campus police officer who pepper-sprayed passive student protesters, is popping up in some of the world’s most famous paintings as part of an Internet meme intended to shame him for his actions. Read and see images accompanying the story of the pepper spray incident (a bit graphic) and view the slideshow of images.
Put simply, pictures best explain this meme. Here's an appetizer:

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Talkin' Turkey!

Fall 2011 Art Seniors talked turkey with viewers at last evening's opening reception for their show:  Plagiarize This! on view through December 8 in the Cochenour Gallery.  Here are some photos from the Happy Thanksgiving event.
Danielle Cinderella, Ryleyanne Vaughn, Shawn McPeek and Department Chair/Advisor Dr. Juilee Decker

Danielle speaking about her process.

Dath and visitors enjoying art.

Ryleyanne sharing her concept.

Monday, November 21, 2011

process before process



              This past week I was took part in a conference event hosted by The OLVDA (Ohio Valley Lumber Dryers Association).  It is a unique organization of some of the knowledgeable individuals. This was my second event to be involved with them and it was fantastic.  On this trip I was able to tour a wood veneer factory, a custom plywood plant, and an international lumber drying and shipping yard. All three were amazing. It really struck me about how far materials have to be processed before they can be put into our artistic process.
             Recently in my artistic practice and process research I have been investing a lot of my time into traditional veneer techniques so the veneer factory was super fantastic to see in action, not just in text form (as I have become familiar with it). The trees are debarked split into "flitches" (half logs), then put back together and soaked in super hot water to soften the lignin. With the molecular structure of the logs softened they can then be sliced into sheets, these are then dried, trimmed and reassembled into full panels through a heat cured gluing process. This is done for the front and back of every piece of plywood you see. The middle core processing is a whole other process altogether. Different logs and species of wood require different types of slicing and assembly.

Sunday, November 20, 2011

An Artful Week

It's Thanksgiving week and we've lots to be thankful for in the art department, including art events every day of this shortened week.

Come one, come all to the Anne Wright Wilson Fine Arts Building, Gallery & the Cochenour space this week....



Monday, 5-7 pm in the LRC's Cochenour Gallery space
Plagiarize This! Fall 2011 Senior Show featuring Cinderella, McPeek, Vaughn
GC NEXUS event at 6 PM -- artist introductions and discussion
NEXUS Enhancement also available -- talk to Dr. Decker







Tuesday 5-7 in the Anne Wright Wilson Fine Arts Gallery
State of Drawing exhibition coordinated by the Art Faculty
Panel Discussion @ 5:30 pm in the Gallery is a GC NEXUS event
Watch for the write-up by GC art history major, Catherine, to be posted after Thanksgiving break
NEXUS Enhancement available -- talk to Dr. Decker








and a class project...

Wednesday 2-3:15 in the Anne Wright Wilson Fine Arts Building hallway
Cabinet of Curiosities, project 4 by the Fall 2011 Curatorial Studies students
Stop by to hear the presentations and read the Curatorial Statements
GC NEXUS Flex possible-- talk to Dr. Decker


Thursday, November 17, 2011

Opportunity: Position in Frankfort at the KAC

Hurry--position open until Nov. 24! Thanks to Rachel for passing this on to us! At the Kentucky Arts Council: Admin. Asst

Core Strength



Working out is difficult in the winter months, but not for the Cincinnati Art Museum (CAM)! They've tightened their belt, flexed their muscle, and are offering us a glimpse of their core strength (pun intended).

What I mean to suggest is that through their fresh, new display they are privileging their highlights and giving us a view of their strengths, the reasons their permanent collection is regionally premiere.

Senior art majors and some of their friends and family visited the CAM on Sunday afternoon to take in the art and were in for a real treat. The Emma Louise Schmidlapp Wing, designed by noted Chicago architect Daniel H. Burnham (think 1893 World's Fair!), had been closed for the summer. It's open now and is no longer a Doric-columned parade of ancient and classical civilizations. The corridor that formerly housed numerous Greek, Roman, and Egyptian objects along with an appetizer of modern and contemporary acquisitions has changed -- for the better. It's got core strength -- and by that I mean HIGHLIGHTS from the entire museum.

Behind graduation-tasseled-pods visitors can encounter a singular (or pair of related works) closely. These viewing areas stretch the length of the Schmidlapp Wing, featuring more two dozen major works from key areas comprising the museum's collections: Warhol, Matisse, Avedon are given private, almost peep-show treatment, just as Gainsborough, Flemish panel painters, Duveneck, and an Egyptian mummy are privileged. This new look is intimate, inviting, and absorbing. It encourages quiet, focused study and concentration on singular objects.

But this isn't the only change in the main corridor. Some of the ancient works from the classical civilizations and Egypt will be re-installed in a newly-created gallery upstairs called The Collections: 6,000 Years of Art
. The space (and, maybe, even the core strength corridor on the first level?) will incorporate educative features as well. This space will be open later this fall (it was still under wraps when we visited on Sunday).

If you have the opportunity to visit the CAM over break, please do! The museum is free (bargain) parking is $4.00 (bargain!) but you get that for free as well if you spend $10 in the cafe or $15 in the gift shop. Go----See-----Art, become inspired or learn something knew, and share your passion with friends and family.

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Gallery Hop & "Western Vistas"

Gallery Hop this Friday, November 18, in downtown Lexington from 5–8 PM. It's a great opportunity to see local and regional artwork and meet new art friends. Make sure to ask me for Nexus Flex credit if you attend. Click here to download a map of participating galleries and venues.

And if you're there, stop by Ann Tower's gallery to see the work of my friend Chris Segre-Lewis from Asbury University. He has a show entitled "Western Vistas," featuring large-scale oil paintings of landscapes from the American west. Chris's work will also be featured here at Georgetown in the upcoming State of Drawing exhibition.

Hope to see you there!

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

State of Drawing

Have you ever wondered about your future artworld colleagues and contacts?  What are they up to now, even before you meet them?  Next week, you'll have the chance to speak with teaching artists--and fellow students--from nearby institutions.  They'll be visiting Georgetown College for State of Drawing, an invitational exhibition that showcases original drawings and unique examples of draftsmanship by art faculty from several of Kentucky's colleges and universities.  
Boris Zakic, Boy and a Goose (Boethus, verso, part I)
conte over indigo/white wash, pen and ink on paper
11x14 inches


For more information about the exhibition, including the featured artists, click HERE.  See you in the Anne Wright Wilson Fine Art Gallery on

Tuesday, November 22, 2011 from 5:00-7:00 p.m. 
5:30 Round-Table Dialogue with Distinguished Guests (NEXUS)            

Jason Franz, Director of Manifest Creative Research Gallery and Drawing Center, Cincinnati and Gallery Directors Kristina Arnold, Western Kentucky University; Andrea Fisher, Transylvania University; Esther Randall, Eastern Kentucky University and Jennifer Reis, Morehead State University.  Moderated by Professor Boris Zakic, Georgetown College.
Reception attendees will have the opportunity to vote for a "People's Choice" award.

Monday, November 14, 2011

The Ten

I recently came across an article about an interesting group called "The Ten".  It was a group of painters that banded together in the  1890's to "secede from american art society" (all men). They made an agreement to exhibit their work annually with each other. They did so until 1919. Each artists work was supposed to be represented but it never quite worked out that way with the exception of the 1908 exhibition (Catalog HERE). The group was originally made up of twelve but some backed out of the agreement.  The Ten insisted on abandoning the environment of Boston and New York and cities in general to retreat to farms, summer homes, and artist colonies. However 9 out the 10 studied in Paris. 


I thought it was a fascinating idea and I wonder if it could have happened in this day and age. In some ways it would be much easier to retreat as long as you had access to the internet. But to find the commitment to cut off completely or to have the drive to be in a selective community is something completely different.  I just thought it was an interesting story within the story of art history.

Read the full text HERE

Friday, November 11, 2011

Liverpool: Boyd’s Chaosmos 20TEN revisited

Memories of a Plan(e) Maker. Perhaps there are two planes, or two ways of conceptualizing the plane. The plane can be a hidden principle, which makes visible what is seen and audible what is heard, etc., which at every instant causes the given to be given, in this or that state, at this or that moment. But the plane itself is not given.

There are only nuances of this first conception of the plane. -- It exist only in a supplementary dimension to that which gives it rise (n+1).

Then there is an altogether different plane, or an altogether different conception of the plane. Here, there are no longer any forms or developments of forms; nor are there subjects or the formation of subjects …. only haecceities, affects, subjectless indivituations that constitute collective assemblages.”*

look at those in-betweens and paradoxes”**

***


*from Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal…, p. 265-266. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minnesota UP, 1987. Print.**Chris Boyd, curator's commentary from vimeo trailer Chaosmos 20TEN, release Nov. 2011, Concrete Films Ltd. concretefilms.co.uk, Liverpool.Merseyside. ***image featuring Gordon Cheung (front) Chris Boyd/David Ogle (background). image source: Concrete Films Ltd.



Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Opportunity: Show your art in Kentucky Monthly

Thanks to Rebecca Redding for sharing this information with us. Kentucky Monthly's "Campus Life in Kentucky" Student Photography Contest
Frankfort, Kentucky (November 9, 2011) – Kentucky Monthly magazine is
seeking college students’ photo submissions for a “Campus Life in
Kentucky” pictorial feature in the February 2012 issue. The magazine is
interested in showcasing Kentucky colleges and universities from the
perspectives of the students. Favorite campus activities and locales,
best study spots, favorite faculty members – basically anything that takes
place on a Kentucky college campus and is appropriate for a
family-friendly magazine – is welcome for submission. The contest is open
to all actively enrolled students of Kentucky colleges and universities.

just one more week to...

Instead of Dancing...
WALK to 
Please Call Stella by Black and Jones 
Dance Party Cancelled.
Join us Thursday, November 17, 5-8 p.m. for the Georgetown Antiques & ArtWALK
Anne Wright Wilson Fine Art Gallery

Characters of Little Character

"Good fonts copy, great fonts steal." —Arial

Arial…has a rather dubious history and not much character. In fact, Arial is little more than a shameless impostor.Mark Simonson

I read Mark's enlightening commentary on Arial a while back. For those who have an interest in typography, I encourage you to find out why so many designers despise this ubiquitous font. To read his article, click HERE. To know how to spot the difference, click HERE.

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Opportunities: Internship at LVAA

Organization Background
The Louisville Visual Art Association (LVAA) internship program welcomes students and recent graduates who wish to supplement their education and professional experience by working in a not-for-profit arts organization.

copy that?

What is excellence in the arts?  A provocative question, and one that Franklin Einspruch addressed in a keynote speech he delivered October 21 at Augusta State University.  Not only is his essay, entitled "High and Low: What is Excellence in the Arts?", an interesting read (it was included in the College Art Association's online newsletter last week), it contains a passage that speaks to previous blog posts regarding copying another artist's work:

"And because excellence is a dynamic, it’s impossible to know how many traits or which traits are the right ones to copy or not copy. The problem is nearly paradoxical. The only way to relive the experience that good art gives you is by making things that are different from that art, and it’s usually not obvious as to how the new art should be different. At this point, a lot of artists chicken out.

... Figuring out how to make something good and different, when it’s not obvious how to do so, requires courage."

Forger Wolfgang Beltracchi, left, in court, and the alleged forged paintings by Derain (centre) and Leger (right).  Photo courtesy of The Art News Paper Issue 229, November 2011
Published online: 03 November 2011 
Ah, copying, a topic which brings me to point out another intriguing article I came across in The Art News Paper regarding art forgeries. Apparently, the German media is treating a family of forgers with kid gloves, including likening their actions to that of Robin Hood, where the ultra rich are taken to give advantage to the poor.

Finally, in addition to wanting GC::VA blog readers to muse as I did about these two seemingly unrelated stories, I would like to guide you back to the same issue of CAA News.  It has a link to an article in the Stranger that asks whether U.S. visual artists should be entitled to royalties.  (The responses are quite thought provoking.)  

So, in trying to put all of my musings about these articles into some sort of summary, I came up with this:  some artists appropriate excellence and some artists (?) fake it, and other artists (in California) get paid when their originals are re-used.  Do you copy?

Monday, November 7, 2011

Partial Works


           I recently saw a video on the metropoliton museum of art website for Islamic art curator Navina Haidar where she "extols the implications and aesthetics of the broken or incomplete". Great 4 minute video that tours the viewer through a collection of fragments in the museums collection. Beautifully photographed fantastic objects that really do create their unique narrative through there partiality.

View video HERE

          I had a professor in college named George Ferrandi who had a huge impact on me. I remember one day a students getting into a debate over the visual elements and choices of a particular artist that was in the gallery at the time and George chimed in with the question. "What is more beautiful, a porcelain doll, or a porcelain doll that has been broken and put back together?" As a young undergrad just getting into art this question really challenged me. Not just for the aesthetic debate but also the question of intentionality. I responded with a question, asking if the person broke the doll on purpose? Was it found or was the person assembling it the original owner?  For some those things didn't matter. But they did to me in order to form an opinion. To this day I believe that the development of context and a conceptual framework is so important to the works in which we view.  Of course there are some minor exceptions I have found myself in the middle of but they are very rare.
         I found Navina Haidar's statements to be really interesting, especially in the context of her job as a curator. The ideas of self producing narratives with incomplete objects, filling in gaps with pleasure rather than questions, I found these practices fascinating to me.  She talks about the cultural context that weighs upon finished works falls away when things are abbreviated.  What an interesting thought that the less information you have the more liberated you can be.

Friday, November 4, 2011

Alumni Spotlight: Brandon Long


Brandon Long, roof tin assemblage, 32x32 inches (@WAB, Fall 2011)

Georgetown College's, Painting Class, fall 2000

I have followed Brandon Long’s work for over a decade now. He is an artist of principled views of engagement. Even more remarkable, he is temperamentally inclined to follow through on his own terms, too. Neither a validation seeker nor is bothered about any careerist complexes, he just goes about his business.
So in this sense, what to make of the five towering, dingy-clangk, borderline-dangerous “roofing tin assemblages?” The easy answer may be “rustic and farm-boyish,” but you can easily miss the larger picture. Sure, they are held together by the rusty old nails found alongside the very barn-detritus used. Sure, they are also very weighty, beat-up and sharp. Sure, there are no protective bolts, no “Nancy Rubins” tensile cables. If you see wary newcomers to our building slightly lean away from the work’s surface, that’s no surprise. I caught myself at it, too. While the intentions of Long’s work may have appeared quite clear at the quick draw, it has also occurred to me that what I had initially (and narrowly) embraced as a processes of aestheticizing patch-work of rural repairs, was in fact, also steeped in a larger history: as a type of landscapes of protection and/or as a kind of conflicting abstraction of self-preservation. In the walls of the Athenian acropolis today, as a comparison, we can also encounter columnar drums, friezes and metopes of the temples above in the bulwark that is so designed to protect them. The repairs in Athens, as in Long’s sources, are usually made with whatever materials were available and at hand. Long supersedes them only in that it’s done in the name of wall-based painting, accounting for mid-20th sensorium at the precipice of our Blue Grass today: “Inspired by…the collages and assemblages of Kurt Schwitters and Robert Rauschenberg,…I often have to remind myself to not overanalyze any elements of composition, but to let the materials respond to their juxtaposed placement.” (from Long’s wall text, 2011)
Brandon Long, class of 2001, is currently a Programming Director at the CAC Danville. The work is on view through December, 2011.

Thursday, November 3, 2011

You Are Your Own Asset


It's the beginning of the advising weeks, so faculty are sitting with students and talking to them about next semester, and the one after that, and the one after that. As a student myself, I always found advising and picking courses to be a thoughtful, reflective, worthwhile, and eye-opening experience. I had high hopes for each new semester and the challenges it would bring inside and outside the classroom. Every dime that I spent, then, seems such a sound investment to me, now.
As you're looking at schedules and contemplating your education and your future, consider making the most of your experience in college. Definitely consider studying abroad (as has been mentioned on this blog so often!). Also, consider undertaking an internship for academic credit or otherwise. Please see any art faculty if you have questions about recent interns and where they have served. Consider, also, taking an extra class -- if it will fit into your 18-hour schedule -- just for the sake of learning. As a full-time student you're entitled to take 12-18 hours at the same rate of tuition. Why not make the most of it, by taking additional hours -- beyond what you "need" -- and, possibly, taking them pass/fail or auditing them? That way, you can gain knowledge without having to invest as much time as if you were a full participant in the course.

Finally, consider that education is an investment. Despite the controversial stance coming from the Occupy Wall Street movement as to the astounding amount of college debt, there is Obama-style HOPE forthcoming (likely) with the President's announcement last week of plans "to expand loan consolidation and income-based repayment programs a bit." Consider, too, Justin Wolfers's observation that when you take out a student loan or undertake some other investment in your own education, “the asset you are borrowing against is human capital” and that, unlike home values, the value of human capital isn’t likely to drop sharply in a year, he says. (See article here.)

Invest in yourself. The rewards and payoff may not be immediate, but your hard work, diligence, and a stake in your own education may serve you well down the road.
Pictures, from the top: Angelina and Earl Grey at GC Commencement, 2010; GC grad Hannah (GC'11) at the Speed Museum, spring 2011; Jacob (GC '11) at the opening of our exhibition for Curatorial Studies, Fall 2010; Anna (GC '14) and Earl Grey at the International Museum of the Horse, Fall 2011.

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Robert C. May Photo Lecture Friday

Mark Klett
Lecture: 4 PM, Worsham Theatre in the Student Center at the University of KY (Euclid Ave & MLK Blvd, Lexington)
Exhibition: October 9–November 13, University of KY Art Museum, Singletary Center

"Mark Klett walks in the footsteps of nineteenth-century photographers who journeyed to the great wilderness of the American West and created iconic images that helped define us as a nation. His work at locations like Yosemite National Park and the Grand Canyon examines the intersection of time and place, analyzing how we conceptualize both.

Klett, who trained as a geologist, takes a long view of the landscape. In 1977, he and two colleagues began the Rephotographic Survey Project. Looking at photographs made a century earlier, they located the exact vantage points used by Carlton Watkins, William Henry Jackson, and others, and then meticulously rephotographed the view. The old and new images, published side-by-side in a 1984 book called Second View, revealed both enduring geographic features and the human impact on the environment.

In recent years, collaborating with Byron Wolfe, Klett has created large scale panoramas that merge his own photographs with historic views, uniting past and present in a visual continuum. In Rock Formations on the Road to Lee’s Ferry, AZ, two black-and-white 1872 photographs by William Bell are seamlessly inserted into a contemporary digital color image of the scene. The road through the sun-bleached desert eerily disappears in the old photographs and humans sitting on the ground are dwarfed by dramatic rock formations. In the present day, a camper chugs out of the past in a terrain that has barely changed in one hundred and thirty years, save for that stretch of blacktop.

Klett has expanded the range of historic images he uses to embrace classic modernist photographs from the 1930s by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, vintage postcards, and historic drawings and sketches. However, he continues to meld old and new, creating a sense of past and present co-existing.

Klett’s work has been exhibited and published nationally and internationally for more than three decades and is part of the collection of more than eighty museums worldwide, including the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. He has received fellowships from Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Japan/US Friendship Commission. He is the author of thirteen books, including Saguaros (2007); Yosemite in Time (2005); and Third Views, Second Sights (2005), a follow-up to Second View: The Rephotographic Survey Project (1984). Klett is Regents Professor of Art at Arizona State University in Tempe." from UK Art Museum website

To find out more, click HERE.

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

This just in....make some money by selling your art

Call to artists for Holiday Art Sale @ the SCAC November 12 - December 17, 2011

more please

Here are a few photos from our time with Black and Jones last week, and if you missed their engaging and entertaining talk, don't fret.  They'll be back later this month to please you even more.  Look for details in coming posts and be sure to immerse yourself into "Please Call Stella" in the Anne Wright Wilson Fine Art Gallery.
Artist Barry Jones during "Please Call Stella" installation.



Artist Kell Black speaking with Portia Watson at the Opening Reception.