I was exploring some optical effects the other day through video – shooting some random video using various found lenses and glass objects stuck in front of the camera. Have to experiment a bit more with these methods, but here are some glimpses. Subject matter, strangely enough, was Michele playing Katamari and the living room floor.
I like how on the last one here, her face appears now and again out of the swirling colors… or maybe its not that apparent, I can’t really tell anymore from watching it too many times.
couple of weeks ago we headed on down to the NELA artwalk (now that’s North East Los Angeles, often referred to as Highland Park area) to check out a few spaces. We started out at our friend Carol Es’ little studio Moppet, which I had embarrassingly not yet visited.
We got there early, and it was just her hanging out with some cookies and her artwork. She had renovated the space herself, and it sported a sweet stained concrete floor showing off all the hard use the space has gotten under its previous owners. (Architects are suckers for well worn concrete for some reason.) While we chatted, a large gang of cyclists swarmed the place, eating all the cookies and drinking most of the water as they took a cursory look around the place.
Michele and I have known Carol’s work for quite some years now, and I have been interested in its evolution since we got to know her. I think the first show I saw of hers was at Highways in Santa Monica, not sure how many years back. Those were collage and paint works focused on the forms of clothing pattern-making. Seemingly minimal from a distance, they turned into multilayered objects when viewed more closely – I remember one one in particular where the central shape was created from hundreds (at least) of tiny cut out paper strips.
So now her work has taken these shapes and forms (themselves dredged up from childhood experience working in sweatshops) and united them with illustrated moments and scenes from her life, dreams, and dysfunctional family. So, they get pretty personal, but retain a sense of humor and accessibility that keep the viewer from feeling they are invading on someones privacy. On the contrary, they drag you right into her life and experiences and give you some pretty bare, unconnected snippets of reality. Here are some of the works she had on view:
(you can read more from her on her own blog here.)
PS. The illustrated letter at the beginning of the post there is from Daily Drop Cap by Jessica Hische. I think I will use them often.
Here are a couple of short videos I made last week. One, Vinyl Timing, was for a weekend project contest over at Vimeo. I experimented with some time distortion on my record player with a couple of audio and visual indicators of the record time and real time. The other, Yashica Viewfinder, is a test shot through the viewfinder of a borrowed Yashica B twin lens reflex camera. I hope to work on some more video using this technique, and yeah, I will frame that better next time.
So, about a month ago Michele and I went up to the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena to check out their 20th anniversary show, Installations Inside/Out. For the show, they have works in all their spaces as well as in public locations around the city. We had already seen the Bruce Nauman skywriting project, which was a part of the show and was documented in the gallery (and see my video/photos in an earlier post), but we have yet to catch the rest of the works they have scattered around Pasadena. While the title implies it’s a show of installation art, not all the work was installation or site specific, like the Rushca painting greeting you upon entry or the large wall-hung pieces. The Caldwell Gallery show drew from artists from the Armory’s exhibition history and included striking works from Pae White and Kim Abeles with Ken Marchionno.
Abeles and Marchionno presented a room wallpapered with cartoonish trompe l’oeil drawings and inset videos to create room-scapes with views out, detailing how Native Americans are viewed by contemporary culture. The graphics and videos were compellingly integrated to develop mediated rooms, small settings that referred to both an interior and a view beyond. I was really into the technique of integrating the videos as both elements of the wallpaper and images in frames – check the photos to see what I am talking about. The objects in the drawings are life size, and the piece wraps all sides of a small room off the main gallery space.
Pae White’s large tapestry works dominated the central space of the gallery. Facing each other and taking up a whole wall each, their banal subject matter (smoke, and crinkled mylar or tinfoil) became large scale murals. A closer look revealed the weaving technology involved, and the patterns up close are digital/analogue hybrid abstractions literally woven from threads as the process used translated image into weave to create the fabric.
If, like me, you are at home working in your studio today, then I highly recommend you do what I did – make yourself a nice pot of hot chai. We have a great recipe that Nicole brought us back from India. Its very simple, provided you have or are willing to go and get a few great spices.
To paraphrase the recipe:
Use half water and half milk – so if you want to make two mugs of chai, start with a mug full of water. Dump that in a pot.
Add to that:
A quarter sized piece of ginger.
A small handful of cloves (just enough to sit in the bowl of your palm, not yer whole hand).
A small handful of cardamon seeds, if they are in pods, open the pods first.
A small handful of fennel (aka anise).
And two teaspoons loose black tea. Loose tea is getting increasingly difficult to find around here, so if you cant find it maybe use teabags or rip open a couple of teabags?
Boil all that.
Then, when its good and boiling, add another mug of milk (or equal to whatever amount of water you used). We always have 1% milk around so that works fine. I bet heavier would taste ever richer.
Cook that until it ALMOST boils. How do you know its going to boil? The milk gets a bit foamy and you can see the tea coming up to the surface. Got to watch it closely at this point because if you boil it you likely scorched it a bit and while it might still taste OK, your pot will be a pain to clean. Add some cinnamon and take it off the heat. You can use a stick or ground cinnamon, either way.
Now strain it into some mugs, sweeten with some honey to taste – Yeah, honey is better for it than sugar trust me – and put on some old Pink Floyd (uh, because that’s what I would do) and relax while updating your website or whatever it is you are doing over there.
Oh, and its best drunk out of a classic Greg Surman mug as pictured below, but unless you went to school with him and he made you one, you don’t likely have one of those now do you?
This past weekend Michele and I headed down to Long Beach to install her video and check out this years crop of sound works installed for their annual audio-art festival. The show was bigger this year, and a good crowd showed up, but I didn’t find much work I found interesting this time around. Last years show was a real stand-out to me, got to see if I have photos lying around of that I can post later. There were a few things this year that grabbed my attention of course, notably D. Jean Hester’s field recording style audio tour of the SoundWalk (which made me want to carry a mic and headphones around everywhere I go), and Flora Kao’s sound sculptures. Michele’s video installation too of course, but I may be a bit biased towards that one.
Down there we met up with Rise member Mike Feldman and some others friends in the music industry, and talked a little about what failed to capture our attention this time around. We came to the conclusions that there was a bunch of work that had some technical things going on, but failed to bring any conceptual drive to it, and a bunch of work that was more traditionally “fine art” with sound added as an afterthought or not really bringing anything to the work. That and the usual sprinkling of works that either are rehashing of older artworks (when is an homage merely a copy?) and stuff that just didn’t work out at all. The event is so large that we may have missed a third of it altogether, so perhaps there was more out there which would have impressed us. I really wish it could extend to two days, as now its getting a bit large to take in during the course of one evening. Criticism aside, it really is a fantastic event every year – pretty amazing to see/hear sound art taking over a whole neighborhood for a night, and to run into little projects in every little nook and street corner. If anyone else was there and has some other project to point out that I missed, leave it in the comments please.
A couple of video clips from Osborn’s Park(ing) day park last week.
I made a little ambient soundtrack of cow noises and crickets and birds so everyone could get a feel for the pasture. I the first video here you can hear it a little bit.
And a few photos for good measure. We had a great time out there, telling people about parking day, and giving out the cow balloons and flowers at the end of the day. The only problem for me was that I didn’t get to bike around LA to check out all the other parks around town. I will have to be satisfied with the summary of this years event on their web site.
Friday Sept, 18th PARK(ing)* Day LA happens once again around Los Angeles. At Osborn we will set up a park on Brand Blvd. in Glendale to dream of a Bucolic Tomorrow – complete with hammock, meadow and cows. Sort of. If you have the time, explore the various parks scattered around town (It makes a great bike excursion) and stop by ours to say hello. Check PARK(ing) day LA’s website and map for more information and locations.
*I do not understand why designers need to break up words with brackets or parenthesis or inappropriate capitalization and I think it’s gotten out of hand.
There is a great critique of the recent work of local Los Angeles architectural institution SCI-Arc (the Southern California Institute of Architecture, my alma mater) over at Drowning in Culture. Its a critique I didn’t bother to write, though I had considered it Sunday night, as I felt that my heaping more negativity on the place wasn’t going to do anyone any good. Luckily, over at DIC they are a bit more thoughtful and well-spoken than I and make some excellent points about the direction of work at SCI-Arc as well as contextualizing the situation they have gotten into a bit. They also don’t really pull any punches or shy away from placing blame either.
Over the past few years the work has been exceptionally questionable in both its mission and educational scope, leaving behind any kind of critical discourse in favor of the droll world of affect and computational representation…
When architecture reaches this level of mindless digital twiddling it is no longer playing any productive role in the development of modern society and is leaving itself to be exploited purely as a slave to capital…
There isn’t much hope for the school so as long as it’s director, Eric Owen Moss is still at the helm. Moss has made a mockery of the long-touted revolutionary philosophy once present at the school by first alienating it’s more competent instructors to the point where all but the most dedicated faculty left for other institutions, and then by appointing a succession of supplicants who appear unwilling to make provocative decisions with regard to its curriculum.
While I was again disappointed by the Graduate level thesis presentations, I also attended the undergrad level thesis earlier this year, and at the time was actually impressed with the fact that those students were proposing viable buildings and delivering plans, sections, and models actually descriptive of the architectural features of the project at hand. The work was well crafted to boot. The trend toward digital/computational form and embellishment was still there, but it was starting to be applied towards the creation of spaces that had a semblance of use, structure, and service reminiscent of the requirements of building. I am not sure what is generating this schism between the two programs (where their end products used to be indistinguishable from each other) but perhaps those mentoring the graduates should take note of their peers ability to develop more holistic proposals, moving beyond the merely digital and bringing it back towards the physical realities of building.
Some guy named Max took the Beastie Boys album Check Your Head (historically important to my youth around that high school time period), jammed two or more tracks together in a blender, worked some magic with timing and duration and editing, and spat out Doublecheck Your Head. Its a worthy update of the original, and that’s saying alot.
rss feed
couple of weeks ago we headed on down to the 
