Meeting with Isabel - December 17, 2010

I had a productive final meeting of the semester with Isabel.
We looked at a range of pieces that I had created in the last few months and decided which were the strongest to show in my space at AIB in January:

1) The latest piece
a) Isabel liked that the piece included the florescent light by the fact that yellow material was situated below and above it. Unfortunately, at night and in the photos, the overhead part can't be seen. The optimal condition for my pieces is with both natural and florescent light.
b) I need to attach the piece (loosely) in areas so that it still looks fresh, but so it can be transported

2) The horizon piece
a) needs some tweeking - with the scrim and with the poles
b) needs to be mounted in its own space - not crowded by its adjacency to new piece

3) The 2 light boxes
a) need to crop and hang the layers of fabric - on dowels

The other work I've done needs to be presented with large photos.

sun on mount and semester summary

This is my last large piece. I wanted to see how freely I could use the silk - how unfettered it could be- how much like a child's drawing it could express the idea of dawn, which I am equating to a child's drawing already with it's accent on the horizon line and silhouetted shapes.


Salley Knight
Professor Deb Todd Wheeler
Summary – Semester 3
December, 2010

Summary

This has been a particularly rich semester for me. Not only do I feel that I have found some truly inspirational artists, but I am feeling more on target in my own work. I started off with two ideas in mind: to see how to allow the silk itself to express more in my work, and to find armature that helped support the silk. The pieces that I began with were pure play – with the material and colors. I used old frames to build awkward boxes and used flagpoles to support hanging material. I was working loosely with the idea of dawn and the idea of falling/happenstance. I constructed several more pieces that played on the flat v. 3D theme that came up in this first piece. I experimented with light boxes. I explored adding different kinds of lighting and ended up using fluorescents with my larger pieces. In November, I ended up deconstructing one of my larger works and reassembling the parts into a piece that was inspired by the Ann Hamilton talk and the book on Spencer Finch. Thanks to them, I began asking what it was that really intrigued me about dawn. I realized that it was not just the light, or the invisible becoming visible, but it was the simplicity of it: it was the one time of day when the horizon line was so highlighted. The lack of sun made everything appear 2D. Like a children’s drawing, my art dealing with dawn became the chance to play with the “first” ideas: line as horizon, sun as round, and flat color, a world that momentarily is split between light and dark.

traditional dyed piece

In the last while I had done some more traditional dyeing - still working with the idea of how light penetrates or doesn't at dawn. I worked on some translucent material and not. I'm not sure what I think of what I've gotten so far -

horizon line

thinking about how I/we/ children's drawings/ dawn organize around that horizon line...

Sunrise

I am enjoying this piece because all the color is in the stick/line v. in the round shape (the expected shape of the sun). The lighting does add some color and dimension to the background, too. The ideas that are floating in my head are around: expected/ ideas v. actual, and children's drawings as a baseline for how we still think visually...

responding to Ann Hamilton

Last night I had the pleasure of hearing Ann Hamilton talk at Lesley.

It was inspirational in the way that looking at Spencer Finch was for me. Prior to hearing Ann or reading the book on Finch, I now would say that perhaps one of my primary responses to any piece of art was a judgment of its “beauty” – similar to what I gather Dave Hickey or Peter Schjeldahl describe. But what I got from the talk and from the Finch book was the delight in the question. The question was the lure and lived on in the work itself .

When I came back to look at my work, I thought about the question(s) that live in my work, that I constantly strive to answer, and then find more to question. I have always known that my questions center around how something becomes visible. This morning when I took my camera out to photo the light at dawn, what struck me was the there is no 3D at dawn. It is like a children’s drawing- the “horizon line” defined by the coming light, and then the flat shapes against it. A little pink in the sky brought out green in the grass.

When I returned to my studio where I had disassembled my installation piece, I put it back together in a completely different way. What is it that I first see at any dawn? The children's drawing assembling itself begins with the horizon line. Even all fuzzy – blurred by undifferentiated houses and trees – but a dark distinction between air and matter.

talk with Deb- Nov. 7

We talked about my work
1. To take detailed photos of the finished piece for purposes of reassembly
2. To look up Spencer Finch and Christo
3. My next piece - fences (?) - to look up Julie Levesque

And my thesis outline due soon:
Work on 2 forms
A. the personal review/testimonial
B. theoretical
- what am I doing?
- basis for it : process, color, intention
(set up for interesting discoveries)
- look back at mentors/advisors - what they were pointing at