Installation Proposal

I want to make wire birds that will be hung in trees around the pond on the way to the campus center. The trees are very flowery and festive at this time of year. The birds will have different ways of making sounds (wind chime, whistle) to make them sing. I wanted to make them happy or goofy looking by making their shape fat and their little legs spindly but they might not come off as I plan. I might explore using different materials for my birds, or creating a house or cage that they have escaped from. I am going to make at least three birds.

Installation Idea

An idea I have for my installation is making wire birds and hanging them from a tree. I want to put in their bellies wind chimes so that they will "sing" when the wind blows. I was also thinking about putting a pipe perhaps in the birds' beaks so that people can blow through them and make sounds like a whistle. I think this is an uplifting idea that will be nice for the change of seasons to spring. I also like working with my hands and creating things that people can touch and hold. I will probably use copper wire and have not decided how to make the chimes or wind pipes yet (perhaps bamboo, metal, or glass?) An artist who uses wire to make sculptures is Elizabeth Berrien (above leaf and blue heron sculptures). She creates images of animals and plants and seems to be influenced a lot by nature. My project will be different from Berrien's because I do not think my birds will look exactly like a species of birds, it will be more interpretive. I am probably not going to use nice silver wire as she does, but use more hardy copper or a heavier metal since my birds will be hanging outside. I am also using some method of sound in my installation which is unlike Berrien's works.

Colby Caldwell's Last Lecture

In his lecture Colby recalled how music and all its forms have changed over the years of his life, and how it influenced him as a person and his creative mind. He grew up in North Carolina and when he was younger he loved bands like Pink Floyd and other southern rock music. When he went to college he discovered bands like Joy Division and the Cure which completely blew him away. He was going to be a history teacher and at the last minute got interested in photography and art. Colby is fascinated by how technology has affected not only how we create art but how music is created and how we interact with and interpret it. We used to play music on records, cassette tapes. We went from buying cds to downloading music to our ipods in just a few years. Colby has been to concerts where he saw bands perform onstage (as most people's concert experiences are) to watching a musician who created his songs entirely on his computer sit back on a couch on stage and "play" his music by pressing the keys to his computer. Having technology has maybe led people to take for granted their music or how it was created. It may not have as much of an effect on the listener to download a piece of music when in the past they had an entire album to experience where they would listen to it from the beginning to the end and understand the theme or intentions of the musician.

Is it installation?

The theory of installation art seems to encompass many art forms. I think that installation art interacts with its environment and that it is placed in a precise place so that the art and place react with each other. Installation art is also something that people can touch and interact with so that they can get a certain feeling from the artwork. I don't think it is always meant to be a climactic or strong feeling when experiencing it, becuase some installations are only replications of an artist's home. People are allowed to use this space as if it is their own home, or a good friends, it depends on the person how they will react to this space. The fact that they are reacting to this large space and are able to touch the things inside the space make it an installation. To be installation all parts must belong together as a whole which usually leads to an experience of the entire space in which the person is in. It seems that there is no way an installation can be small since it must take up a certain amount of space and there must be more than one part to it. This amuses me because I think that people like to accomplish big things and impress themselves and others. Americans especially like to think "big". This may be where installation art got the reputation of being middle-brow and low-talent as Liam Gillick observed.

Chris Coleman Artist Talk

Chris is an animation teacher at the University of Oregon who is mainly interested in creating animation and installation. His installation "Collusion" is a 20 minute looping video of smokestacks sucking in and breathing out smoke to the sound of unnatural human breathing. It symbolizes that we cannot live taking in more than we put it which includes the act of breathing and the way we pollute the earth. Another installation "Spatiodynamic" interacts with the public who watch through a video screen a rolling landscape. If they turn the corner they see that the image is created by computer fans blowing up a piece of plastic that is suspended from the ceiling. It is a grid form that creates an organic shape. The presence of people in the hallway determines which fans are operated. "Modern Times" is an animation using cartoons found from the government's website on how the public can prepare for terrorism. Chris makes a statement on how the government scares the public into being always scared of what could happen and how we lump things and people into good and evil categories. This makes society as a whole sometimes feel apathy towards others' pain and that we become scared of our own neighbors. Chris' work in progress deals with socioeconomic status, international divides, and other divides between people and cultures. He uses more imagery and cartoons from the idealistic 1950s and 1960s U.S.A. His intent for his work is to make us question conclusions that power figures such as the governemnt have already given us and to come to our own thoughts on important world issues.

Body Sculpture

Hope Chest Project on Display in Campus Center

what is an installation?

An installation gives you the sense that you can interact with it with your body or walk into it. There could be a story that encourages you to look deeper into the installation, which could be created with objects, screens, or video. This installation "Earth Room" by Walter de Maria invites the viewer to interact with the room or imagine walking through the room of dirt. Although you may feel like you can walk into a 2-D artwork, it is not possible, whereas in this installation it is possible although it looks as if it is not allowed.

Patrick Kelley Lecture

Patrick Kelley grew up in a suburb of Minnesota where he was influenced by his somewhat empty and still natural environment. His father let him play with his 35 mm camera where he became interested in the process of photography which included print process and how you frame a composition. He became even more interested in art in college where he took a ceramics class and many photography classes. Kelley went for walks in nature around Lake Superior where he focused on pristine and untouched objects like rocks, snow, and tiny sticks and placed them compositionally so that you could not tell their scale. He was somewhat influenced by Ansel Adams print proces and nature scenes. Later Kelley started to break this pristine environment by adding things and making his own marks to the scene such as throwing rocks on a frozen lake and breaking the ice. In his senior year of college he created pictures where he wanted the audience to not be sure of whether he had altered the pictures or if they were just unique setups in nature. After college he became interested in digital imaging and created videos that he used in installations and made into small flipbooks. One of his installations was a collaboration between him and another artistDave Ryan which was titled the "Engine Room". They used a working lab to create screens full of flashing colors with a persons silhouette in each. Random digitalized voices filled the room to create an eerie ambience. Right now Kelley is working on videogame maps where you can travel around the digital space and as you move towards some objects notes of music that were assigned to that object become more pronounced.

Jasper Johns and Rauschenberg Box

I was more interested in the love relationship that the two artists had, regardless if they are gay or straight. They were very close and secretive about their love affair and were in a world all to themselves. Johns has said, "Our world was very limited, I think we were very dependent on one another". They probably kept their relationship a secret to protect them from others opinions which would have most likely been negative or perhaps violent. The inside of my box is a somewhat barren and simple landscape that depicts the two artists own world that is separate from society and others. The outside of the box is a labyrinth that leads onto the lid where you enter the small environment. My idea for the maze came from a poem by Hart Crane who Rauschenberg admired and related to who influenced his art. A quote from the poem is "a labryinth submersed where each sees only his dim past reversed". This could allude to Rauschenbergs old feelings towards his relationship with Johns and how it is hard to reach back and remember past experiences or relationships.

Hope Chest

I want my box to show Rauschenberg and Johns' secretive relationship and how they interacted with society. The outside of the box will act as a "cage" through the images of tall buildings, trees, or silhouttes people making bars along the outside. On the inside will be a dreamy landscape or image such as a mountain or ocean scene. I will use found objects such as perhaps an old key, sea glass, or other "calm" objects. The box itself will be in an organic shape and it has to have a big opening so that people can interact with the items inside. I want it to have a lid so that the viewers will be suprised at the difference between the "cold" exterior and the more soothing interior. Along with the readings I was also influenced by the Bjork song "hyperballad" about a couple that hide at the top of a mountain to feel safe. I think that Rauschenberg and Johns felt pressured to not share their relationship and that they perceived themselves as outsideres, whether their peers would have accepted them or not.

Lance Winn on January 28, 2007

Lance thinks and comes up with ideas easier when he is actively working in his studio. He thinks of art as generative; in hopes of finding something new he works with the same material or a same idea over and over. He is influenced by Jasper Johns who has broken up his canvas to think of other things besides what is the content and subject. For example his famous painting of the American flag is what he started out with but he found things that he wanted to change within his painting because he was not distracted by the pattern. Lance also seems to be influenced by media images and words to begin his works of art.

Lance describes his own artwork as illusions which have a quick breakdown into what they really are. One of his pieces that compiles his interests into one is called "Just A Thought". It is based off of a photograph of a woman who jumped off the Empire State Building in the 1950's. There are many panels with the image of the woman in silkscreen on plexiglass. The plexiglass has been warped to form the raised letters within the image that spell "just a thought". The images are hard to make out at first due to the use of bright colors and the words did not stand out until he showed us a diagonal view of his piece.

He uses the basic colors of red, yellow, and blue to create many different colors by overlapping the short strokes. In his piece "Atomic Clock" the layers of color are revealed with the ticking of the minute, hour, and second hands to create an image of an atomic bomb. He also began to experiment with dipping a brush into ink to outline a word until it creates a form. Using this technique he has created other images of abstract nature scenes with trees and words intertwined.

Lance's vivid imagination, humor, and societal views has influenced his art throughout the years.

Melissa Dean

Melissa creates installations and other artworks based on her relationship and interpretation of consumerism in the United States. She seems to be especially fascinated by how certain objects are advertised as being just right for every different person and that we must have it, although they are mass produced. She uses Target and Ikea catalogs to find images to use in her artwork. She sometimes traces the outline of the images and will create stencils to cut out and make distinct shapes to be overlapped or create installations. She has also had people circle every object they would like to buy if they could in a catalog and then compiled the outlines to create an abstract form. The more things the person circled the more distinct their shape would be. The shapes would be formed from crazy frenetic lines overlapping each other. In her stenciled images Melissa often used busy wallpaper prints to give the sense that the consumer products were overwhelming and "too much". Her guilt in being a consumer and buying too much stuff shows in her work through her artistic choices such as the use of the same colored wallpaper on the shape of many different objects. Melissa describes herself as neurotic when creating her artwork and is fascinated by how focused people are when they go shopping and how much physical objects mean to people.

"Extended and Prosthetic Bodies"

I liked Matthew Barney's "Blind Perineum" because I think that the meaning behind his work is something that we are dealing with more than ever as our technology is growing. He shows how strong that his body can be when he scales the walls with all the climbing technology he is wearing. Though it empowers him it also has harmed him when an ice pick penetrates him. Though technology has made our lives better in some ways there is usually some disturbing side to how it has added to our lives and made us "less human". It is possible now to put tiny defibulators inside peoples chests to fix their heartrates when having a heart attack, but when the deceased passes away it has been known to make the body jump and twitch which upsets family and friends who witness it. Using technology can threaten us bodily and emotionally especially when we become to proud of what we accomplished and too trusting of its abilities.