End of the Semester Critique(s)!

I am finishing up the semester this week. It's been a great semester and I think I made a lot of progress and completed a good amount of work. I thought I'd post the pictures of how my work was installed for my critiques. In addition to my final critique I also had a critique in my Critique Seminar class which is taught by the Director of the Renaissance Society at University of Chicago. Both went better than I could have imagined and I got some great feedback and comments to use for future work. I really enjoyed the final critique. Critiques in the Spring semester are interdisciplinary, so I had a professor from Painting and Drawing, Performance, Art & Technology, Photo, and Design. It was a great mix and I really enjoyed their suggestions. 

The work that I chose to show goes together in an installation (for the most part). I think in the ideal situation, certain elements would be best suited in separate rooms. I'll just go through all the parts and then you can look at the pictures at the bottom. There were four main wall elements. On the one wall is an exhaust system that I cut out of aluminum foil, it is flat. It is a 1:1 scale so should be true to life. On the adjacent wall is a "drawing." It is a car seat, but it is made of paper and I hand stitched the lines. The color was added using watercolor. This is also about lifesize and measured between 5 and 6 feet in length. I sprayed it with coconut auto cleaning spray to give it a car scent. Hanging about the seat is a coconut air freshener tree. You can see it in the installation view. On the opposite wall is a truck grille cut out of aluminum foil. It is also close to lifesize about 4 feet in length. On the final wall is the truck I had out of my low-fire translucent clay. I think it's about 7 feet or so in length, maybe a little longer displayed like this. All the color is glaze or underglaze. I'm not sure the truck works in the same space as these other objects, or even with them at all, but I felt it important to include this as it led to the other works. The lighting was weird down there so the color on the truck is probably somewhere between the two I've shown.  

SAIC Spring Semester So Far...

This is what I've been up to in Spring semester. I am taking an advanced litho class which has been great. We've been doing aluminum plate, photo litho and experimenting with pronto plates and paper plate. I'm also in a critique seminar with Hamza Walker which has been a great learning experience and an opportunity to get feedback on my work from some different perspectives. My art history class has been great as well. It is a history of prints since 1950 and these are my favorite artists (Rauschenberg, Johns, Polke, Roth, etc.). I've also wandered back to ceramics this semester and I will be adding more pictures of that as I finish that up! I feel like I've put in a lot of work and I'm happy with what I've produced so far.
This is my ceramics piece right before I put it in the kiln. This is my thin, low-fire, self-glazing, translucent clay. I wasn't happy with how the first firing went so I just went wild on it. Length is about 7 feet give or take. I will find out how it turned out tomorrow. These are underglazes and some stains. The next images are several variations using two hand litho plates. Trying different ink combinations and even used a gray paper on the lighter rainbow one.


This next image is aluminum foil, sort of a sculptural image using the diagram for a car exhaust system. These are photo litho plates I made from a drawing and then I write in whatever I want on the signs. The saying so far are coming from a party story that is down the road from my home in Michigan. I have many different variations and plan to end up with a ton of these.
More of my interest in what I guess you would call the "low brow" culture using the beer stuff. These are just a couple things I had to do to see what they look like. I don't know if I will ever actually do anything with these. The first is a marker drawing 30 x 22 and the second is a painting on canvas with sharpie about 5 feet by 3 feet. This last one I did yesterday. It's a monotype using litho ink. I'm not sure yet what I'm going to do with it. I may add some more elements.

Work From Fall Semester 2011

This is a large laser print 6 feet by 12 feet that I colored with prismacolor marker. I'm surprised at how different this reads in different spaces. It actually seems bigger when it's in a larger space.

I have been behind on updating this so I am going to post a ton of pictures to make up for it! I will try to explain as much as possible to give a context for the work, but I will mostly just put up the images. There are many things that I've done that I'm not posting, but this should give a good idea of what I was working on last semester!
Here are a couple studio shots to give you a sense of scale. This was the setup for my fall critique.
Documentation of a project I did with a truck that is on our property back home in Michigan. The cardboard is what I used to block out the door for the spray paint.

A few shots of the Lite Brite that I put this collage on and then filled in the shapes of the cars with the pegs. I think I would like about 30 of these filling a corner or wall in a room, with maybe one car on each one. I really enjoy the absurdity of this.
A couple of collages the first is about 10 x 12 inches or so using cars I cut out of a car magazine which were newsprint and I colored them with Prismacolor marker. The second is much larger collage, I can't remember the paper size, I think it is about 50 inches on the longest side. These are laser prints colored like the other collage. I don't think I like this second one that much.

Archival inkjet print that I altered with scraffito and prismacolor marker. Not too big maybe 10 x 17. This is from a photo I took during deer hunting season.

The first two are laser prints that I colored on the back side, the paper on the bottom is the bleed through from the marker. The third image is a paper cut collage that was scanned and inkjet printed. The last image is the same with spray paint on top that I scratched through. about 10 x 17 on this as well.