Alfredo Jaar

Alfredo Jaar is a architect and film maker and his work has been shown extensively around the globe. Jaar is now NY based but was born in Santiago de Chile 1956.

I was I'll during this weekend so I'm not sure the lecture took place, also I assume you meant Alfredo Jaar and not Alfred Jaar as it said in the e-mail.

What I can see on Alfredo Jaar is if his lecture was confirmed I really missed something. On his website there are mostly photos and some short films, also a lot of poetic content, kind of melancholic. I am really interested in his "this is not America" in the project "lights in the city" which is shown on a large LED sign. This project has references to geography and global relations.

Jaar's Rwanda project is very strong, you should go into his website and have a look, the texts on the site is protected so I couldn't attach it to this blog

click here for source

Hares

I am finally finished with my hares, here is a picture.

Slow Loris.

Cutiepie, eller som jag skulle saga, GULLVERT!

David Kassan

David Kassan is a very talented artist. He is a realist painter that takes inspiration from his surroundings, as a NY based artist street art is one of his influences also he takes inspiration from artist like Rembrandt, DaVinci and Mark Rothko.

Here

Blaise Drummond

Liverpudlian Blaise Drummond is a very talented artist, I'm very happy to find a local painter, as Liverpool, no offence seems more of a conceptual, digital media and installation art kind of place, I feel that painting hasn't got the platform it really should have. I think that painting could be just as inventive and contemporary as any other art form. (this actually makes me quite upset.)

Anywho the subject in Drummond's experimental and visionary paintings is the relationship between culture and nature. He uses the architecture of le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe among others as reference points for a non-sentimental outlook into the future via the past.

Picture Source Google

Os Gemeos

Os Gemeos (the twins) are in the top of my favourite street artists, these guys travel around the world exhibiting their work in galleries. Os Gemeno's is also I think the undisputed kings of street art in South America. Inside the galleries they produce fantastic installations and on the street they have fun with the local people and paint relevant and also amazing street art. As I now work with a installation I take a lot of inspiration from their installation work.

Here are some pics;

Source Google

I killed my world and I killed my time.

I want to paint, but for the minute I don't feel I got any time for such pleasure.

I'm going to post some pictures from the painter Mark Ryden, which is just to fantastic to be true in my opinion.

Mark Ryden

(click link)

Sanjeev Shankar

Sanjeev Shankar held a lecture the 24th of march, The lecture was very inspiring and Sanjeev seems to be a wonderful person. I really liked his will and determination to keep the Indian cultural identity.

Shankar's motivation and engagement to work with the people who still have a "primitive" surroundings, still produce these traditional Indian footwear. Shankar travelled to these villages and lived with the people; together they produced shoes with inspiration taken from modern trainers mixed with the traditional kolhapuri slippers made with the non-powered traditional technique.

Shankar has a background in design, craft and architecture. He comes from Bombay India and his work deals with cultural differences and interacting with people, creating together with others that beholds a special traditional crafts knowledge mixed with his contemporary thinking creates very interesting objects. Also Shankar are working with the "common" people for example his project Jugaad in New Delhi where he worked with the local people to create something out of used cooking oil-tins. This is what the local people and Shankar achieved during his time in New Delhi;

You can find Sanjeev Shankar's work

here

Helen Beningson

I just found this amazing artist Helen Beningson. Her art is political, feminist and kitsch.

Here (klick for link)

Uni work.

I am neglecting this blogg. I have so much to do my head is going to explode soon. At the moment I'm writing a essay about glocal artists, "cultural diversity" and white dominant institutions. I have my last review tomorrow morning and I'm nervous. It is probably going to be ok. Also I'm volunteer working at the A foundation, though I can't be there as much as I would like to because of the uni work, which is more important this close to the end of the semester.

I'm sorry blogg and practice discourse I'm going to make a better effort from now on. I hope.

X

Afro Modern

Hiya.

A few weeks ago I went to see the ongoing tate exhibition Afro Modern. I found the experice very giving, it is a very broad view of black culture from the early twentieth-century to today. The exhibition takes inspiration from Paul Gilroys influential book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness 1993. It features over 140 works by more than 60 artists.

"Gilroy used the term 'The Black Atlantic' to describe the transmission of black cultures around the Atlantic, and the instances of cultural hybridity, that occurred as a result of transatlantic slavery and its legacy. Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic reflects Gilroy's idea of the Atlantic Ocean as a 'continent in negative', offering a network connecting Africa, North and South America, the Caribbean and Europe. It traces both real and imagined routes taken across the Atlantic, and highlights artistic links and dialogues from the early twentieth-century to today." - Tate

I couldn't have written it any different myself, maybe less informative. Anywho it was a very good exhibition, I was very happy to see a painting of one of my favourite modern artists Jean-Michel Basquiat. Well I think everyone that haven't been to see it should go before it ends.

x

Ian Whittlesea

Ian Whittlesea is holding our wednesday visiting lecture and I have been looking him up in advance. I have been looking at various works of his and finding him quite interesting, though I feel the same as with Adam Chodzko that I can't really get a grip around Whittlesea's work.

Whittlesea's Judo project is interesting he has translated the book 'Le fonduments du Judo' by french artist Yves Klien. No one has ever translated this book into English before, also while doing this Whittlesea worked to get a black belt in Judo as well, this took him 5 years to do. Whittlesea is a member of Europe's oldest Judo club the budokwai in London.

Whittlesea is working alot with typography in different kind of ways, as I have seen from one of his exhibitions that leaflets with a text taken of of it's original context forms a relation on it's own. These sentences are from text's other artists has written.

here

Hello

Hi, At the moment I'm trying to research Steven Connor, last weeks wednesday lecture which I couldn't attend. I'm waiting to borrow my friends dictaphone to listen to the lecture so hang on tight, soon I can properly write about Steven Connor. What I have heard about the lecture was that he is a very funny character.

I am also writing my Bluecoat gallery proposal (one person or a group of people in fine art lvl2 will be picked to have an exhibition at the bluecoat in may), I finding it quite hard to get started. I feel that my current project might not be as relevant to the theme of the exhibition wich should be reflecting the changing nature of artists studios and practices. I will do my best. I'm also planning to apply for volunteer work at the bluecoat when my work isn't stressing me out so much. everything is piling up as we get closer to the assesments. (I am once agian angry at myself and my relaxed view of what needs to be done and my time optimism)

Have a wonderful day.

Adam Chodzko

Before the lecure I researched Chodzko, I found that I couldn't grasp really what his art was about from the still pictures from his video art and was intrigued by the lecture where I hoped we would going to see some of his videos.

I read about Chodzko's video work "Hole" which I found very interesting, the way the artist is creating an imagined future in which an museum mount a LED sign outside an art museum to connect with a women that transmit it's thoughts on this sign. The reason that the sign is put up is that the art museum felt it being obsessed with the crowd and then wanted a relation with an individual, an outsider.

However potentially an unexpected situation occurred by the influence the relation put on the individual involved and the women terminates the relationship. What's left is then these holes in the wall of the museum where the LED sign was mounted, a kind of ruin.

"The holes exist in the present as a trace of something that is imagined to occur in the future."

a futuristic love story. I love the was Chodzko investigates interactions of human behaviour and the way he creates feelings in his video art, mostly it was an uncomfortable feeling of something i couldn't put my finger on. This is also quite weird as I would describe his way of filming style as documentary. In the video piece "yet" I noticed the way he used language in his video art was very interesting and gave almost a surreal tone to the works, as in one of his videos I believed it was Finnish, Chinese (actually it was Cantonese) and English. I'm going to quote the description of this work, I really like this text.

“ It was only early summer… but all the plants were already dying,…

Time had accelerated again.
A small group of IKEA employees go to the local landfill site to try and retrieve some data they had accidentally thrown away.
Instead they found some bags of documents which recorded the history of a place where people met and showed things to each other…Distracted from their original search they took the archive to the editing station in order to look for its questions. But…something bad happened…a disagreement …well, anyway… they fell out…They split up the information in various, but particular ways, each to take it to a separate place for safe-keeping, agreeing to reunite its parts only when they themselves had resolved their differences.
One took it to the ark where everything precious had been stored…
Another chose to entrust it to strangers, offering it to the chalkpit people… And the other took it to the comparison house….And so because of ‘and yet despite all this’ the plants slowly began to recover …..and time….. stood …..still.”

I could go on and on about Adam Chodzko's work but I'm not, I have heard that pictures says more than a thousand words so I'm posting a couple of pictures of his works.

Here

Practise Discours 2

Hello again.

I have had regrets by not starting sooner but we still haven't had any lectures in the course yet apart from the 15 min lec that Richard Gant had. I went to the WoW organisation awearness lecture that was mainly for the students in collaboration option module.

Though I got to know more about WoW than I did for the whole last semester, it making me think that I missed loads of sessions. I was a bit upset because I did the WoW self awareness thing and was under the impression that I didn't have to do more than that, we did have to print it out and submit it with my blogg. I missed that. I feel a bit sorry for it.

Well, today I have been working on my sculptures. I am working one two quit bigscale hares in my livingroom. They are done in about a weeks time. Im so happy that im might post a pic. Right now I am making a sculpture out of sellotejp and I got the idea from Mark Jenkins - I first came across Jenkins in 2004 in a art magazine and his art just got stuck in my mind for some reason. I really like his way of working, he is originally an street artist but now also has exhibitions. He got a current exhibition in LA at the moment - Meaning is overrated.

Some pics of his art-

here