artwordz

[artwordz]

A Day

The sound of laughter and a lawnmower

A blurry memory of a montage of events

Sticky eyes

3 Missed calls, no new messages

The smell of breakfast meat

Deciding to not be vegan

The ugly pink tiles on the bathroom walls

Thinking about drowning in the tub

Drawing on the foggy medicine cabinet mirror

Forgetting to put on deodorant

Checking the time

Not running late

2 Missed calls, an email from Adobe

Mixing dirty clothes with clean ones

The sound of the dog running across the hardwood floor

Having to say goodbye to sad eyes

Locking the door

The sound of the radio when the car starts

Realizing something was forgotten

A deep breath

Thinking about car accidents

Speeding through time and space

Bumpy roads in Baltimore

Saying hi to strangers with familiar faces

Laughing at jokes that aren’t funny

Pretending to check phone

Sneezing too loud

Overhearing fragments of an intense conversation

Leaving

3 Retweets

Tired legs at the end of the day

Shuffling through public radio

Stories about immigrants responding to Trump and black folks getting shot

Heavy traffic

Heavier eyes

The street lights flickering on

Opening the jammed screen door

Small talk with unloved family

Staring into an empty refrigerator  

A self-diagnosis from WebMD

Examining breasts for lumps

Remembering when mom had cancer but didn’t talk about it

Being too young for some things and too old for others

Watching reality television on a laptop

Finding lost lip balms in pant pockets  

Stuffing clean clothes in the hamper

Waiting until the middle of the night to eat dinner

Notifications from CNN about explosions and famine

Counting blessings

Falling asleep to the smell of lavender incents

#list #daily routine

[artwordz]

Stephen Towns: Rumination and Recognition at the BMA

14 March 2018

Stephen Towns is a mixed-media artist whose work reflects stifling issues in African-American culture. For Rumination and a Reckoning, an installation in the Baltimore Museum of Art, Towns uses the American folk-art of quilting to paint the narration of the life of American slave rebellion leader, Nat Turner.

Quilting, sewing or patching together worn blankets, was historically done by people who could not afford to replace blankets. The patching was not thought of artistically but as a necessary means of keeping warm. Quilting has evolved to become a complex storytelling art form that pieces together carefully selected patterns and textures to create a functioning material.

Like giant plush pages of a children’s book, six quilts hang stiffly on adjacent walls while the largest quilt, Birth of a Nation, hangs on the wall between them above a neat pile of dirt. The six quilts on the walls tell stories from Nat Turner learned to read to his baptism and his freedom of many slaves. Tucked in a narrow walkway leading to a gallery of paintings and furniture from 18th century slave owners, hangs the only two quilts with detailed faces. Nat Turner and his wife rest in portrait postures next to each other on their own quilts protected by glass. Birth of a Nation, placed in the center of the exhibition, imitates the image of the Madonna and Child as a black woman nurses a white infant in front of the Betsy Ross Flag. The circles in the stars of the flag create a halo behind the woman’s head ennobling the caricature of Mammy while her worn clothes stained from the dirt below her grounds her role during the time of slavery.  

Quilting is a collage of fabrics and Towns uses colored mesh over textured fabrics to create highlights. Quilting is a potent medium to use to tell the story of an African American slave because present day decedents of slaves pieces together their identities from bits of history learned at home, school, church and the internet.

#stephen towns #nat turner #BMA

[artwordz]

Our Land, Our People, Our Image at UMBC Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery

8 March 2018

For most of America’s history Native Americans have been represented by White people as inadequate, unintelligent, violent and savage beings. This false representation paints an image of a stereotypical Native American (mostly naked with a feathered headdress and elaborate face paint) as is inferior without government control. Our Land, Our People is an exhibition in the Kuhn Library Gallery featuring photography of Native Americans produced by Native Americans. The Curatorial Statement at the entrance of the exhibition highlights the theme of representation of Native Americans by colonizers and the significance of having Native American culture presented by Native American artists.

One photograph that struck me was an image of three people in large bird hats and costumes. The figures, presumably participating in a ritual dance, lunge forward on their left knees with their arms, covered in feathers, spread wide. The ground below their feet is smooth as they travel at an angle across the image. The aerial perspective of birds flying in the sky morphs into men dancing low on the ground.

This photograph is a strong representation of the Curatorial Statement because it does not appropriate or fetishize Native American tradition and costume. The figures hold strong and confident postures as they move in synchronicity without context or sound. The color and details of the bird costumes are not visible in this black and white photograph but the shape of the figures and their composition in a straight line brings movement to the image. This is interesting because the illusion of birds flying refocuses the way we look at the performance. In contrast to a head on image of the same performers advertising the details of their costume, this image is about imagination - an essential element of performance.

#Native American Art #Albin O Kuhn #UMBC

[artwordz]

The Poet’s Brush at UMBC

5 February 2018 

The Poet’s Brush is a collection of traditional Chinese paintings by Lo Ch’ing that exhibit various natural worlds existing in multiple dimensions and perspectives. Thick, black and loosely structured brush strokes outline large mountains and icebergs that contrast with the stylistic details of layered hills, cities and cherry blossoms. Within the large frames are smaller mountains that are created with the same thick black outlines. Within these smaller mountains are detailed worlds reveal different perspectives of the traditional and modern world that would not typically exist in one image.

The medium Lo Ch’ing chose to work with is ideal to show introspective worlds that would be flattened and impossible to see in a photograph. The size of each world is given the same amount of space and detail showing the significance of the intersectional balance of the industrial world and the natural world.

In addition to the careful placement of the worlds that create an illusion of space, the paintings have a combination of complex and stylized details that demand the large size of each image. The repetition of small patterns creates cities, neighborhoods, and tree leaves. Neutral and primary colors dominate the series of paintings and create a peaceful experience for the viewers.

Overall the Poet’s Brush is a gentle series that explores the dynamic of nature and human structure. Neither dominates the other but they coexist peacefully through a beautiful medium. The exploration of dimensions within a two dimensional medium is inspiring as it shows a new perspective of different facets that exist in one area.

#Lo ching #traditional chinese painting #umbc #Center for art design and visual culture

[artwordz]

Collage at C Grimaldis Gallery

22 February 2018

Collages, an exhibition hosted at the C. Grimaldis Gallery in Baltimore features the work of seven collage artists including Vivian Fliegel. Fliegel’s work stands out as a montage of structured collages in which the contents of the image can exist on individual planes or holistically as one scene. Most of her images are no more than 25 x 25 inches yet each is only one perspective of an environment. Different color pallets are used to distinguish the background from the foreground but the detail in Fliegel’s placement of images is more complex than that. The illusion of a three dimensional space is created through the use of multiple perspectives in one plane and contrasting colors. These planes with small, detailed and fragmented pieces from multiple sources appear to one large segment but a closer look reveals a world with more detail than any world that exists in the real world.

Fliegel’s colleges are so complex, they have to be viewed up close. Tiny details in flowers, bricks, faces, backgrounds, and even art that she has created within the piece (collage paintings within a collage) are easily missed if viewed from a distance. Her images have a nostalgic remnant of I SPY books because of the visual chaos that is created when looking at small sections of the detailed images. One cannot help but wonder if there are secret objects hidden within her images. Can a collage constructed from hundreds of pieces have a message or is it up to the viewer to find their own?

Fliegel combines fragments of faces of a variety of races and genders to create one being who emulates a real person anomalously. Despite using a variety of images to create one being, Fliegel does not neglect the character emotion demanded by the mood that is created from the wonderland of images around them. Most of the faces that Fliegel has constructed have a futuristic look; they are ambiguous in ethnic identity because no feature is entirely one person. This is an intriguing concept because with the exception of Watering Your Withered Dreams (a tryptic), the racial and gender identity of most of her caricatures collage is obscured. In 2018 where representation is often a topic of conversation, it is interesting to see an artist who strips away the identity of one individual to create an individual comprised of multiple identities.

This particular type of art places a heavy emphasis on the material used (magazines, paper mache, synthetic plants, and more) and the concept rather than a literal translation of the artist’s heart and meaning. The idea of taking pre-existing material and morphing it into collage is not revolutionary but the painterly shapes created by the natural bends and folds within the material as well as the artistic choice to cut here or there to make shapes. Fliegel’s work is unique because she creates extraordinarily detailed yet wonkily atmospheric scenes that inevitably reflect the real because of the origin of the fragments she has taken to use in her collage.

#c grimaldis gallery #baltimore #collage #vivian fliegl #baltimore art