Reference to a Paper Clip

Here is a full album of photos for "Reference to a Paper Clip".  Below are a few shots and a few thoughts about recent critiques:

Spring break has been a good time for thinking and pondering.  There have been a lot of things running through my mind about my current work.  Since my last post I have had a critique from my graduate cohort, another critique with crit group, and a studio visit from Jordan Kantor of California College of Arts painting department.  Each of these critiques have had positive impacts on my thought process throughout this semester and have offered multiple perspectives.  These perspectives have come from pepole who are fresh or familiar to my work.

I think that I managed to “fail” forward in a great way.

Critique with the MFA department went well.  Criticism of my recent experiments was very constructive and drifted towards thoughts of how future installations might be acomplished.  This time I decided to go about presenting a series of experiments that explored the relationship between my glass paper clips and their shadows.  These were presented in a sort of one to one relationship, object to shadow.  Almost right off the bat many of my cohort noticed the lack of displacement in this round of experiments and were critical of the amount of work is such a small space.  This installation needed room to breath to promote content.  I completely agree that there was way too much going on and it didn’t allow for a “poetic” quality to exist.  My intention was to create a relationship between the kinetic nature of my objects and the stillness of the shadows.  My exploration of scintillating colors was exciting to explore in this regard but in the end just made noise and directed the narrative away from where I was in week 5.  There were a few exciting themes that circulated during critique including line, structure, paradox, memory.  I’m starting to come full circle with last semester.

Paradox is an interesting one.  What we have is an object that has an objective existence as a linear abstract sculpture that is sitting across from a seemingly abstract subjective painting that is actually a representation of the object.  I am really happy about this observation.  I think it fits in well with illusion.  This thought has prompted a few similar connections in different critiques to Plato and The Allegory of the Cave.  In short Plato has Socrates describe a gathering of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall from things passing in front of a fire behind them, and they begin to give names to these shadows. The shadows are as close as the prisoners get to viewing reality. He then explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall do not make up reality at all, for he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the mere shadows seen by the prisoners.

The studio visit I had with Jordan Kantor was a good one.  He applauded  my ability to manipulate material and present work that existed esthetically but challenged my approach.  In short he challenged me to not create work that is expected in modern art but to create work that does what modern art does.  He set forth a challenge to further understand the nature of modern art and to use it to create new dialog and vocabulary.  He pointed out artists like Jean Tinguely and Victor Vasarely of the 1920’s kinetic art movement who used their mediums to push the bounds of the trending vernacular.  He saw potential among my technological work with LEDs to work this way.