On the 20th (of last month...yikes this is late), we heard from Sasha Waters Freyer, who makes short films and documentaries. After getting a BFA in photography and an MFA in documentaries in film, she joined the faculty of the University of Iowa to teach filmmaking. She has collaborated with other filmmakers for her documentaries, but her short films are done more personally. While she is a slow filmmaker and editor (by her own measurements), she allows herself to be very experimental with her shorter films.
Even though I have never had a desire to go into filmmaking, I thought her talk was fairly interesting. I was especially interested in the financial aspect - if she is as slow a filmmaker and editor as she says she is, and the stipends she gets are wildly varied, how does she make any money from making films? Or, more to the point, how would one support oneself by making films this way? I suppose that point really isn't what the lecture was about, but the question still exists in my mind. I did like that she told us the use of majoring in art, as I had never really considered the skills you learn from being an art major - greater independence and working both solo and with other people (that last one especially is one I could use more skill with myself). Again, I have no plans to major in art, but this information is still useful to know. In my own work, while I don't plan to incorporate film into my paintings anytime soon, I ought to allow myself more room to experiment the way she does.
0 Comments
No pictures (they all got deleted for some reason), but two months ago we went to the Visual Arts Center to see what I considered to be a fairly unique exhibition. It was put on by three women - Emmy Bright, Jessica Heikes, and Leigh Suggs - who, although they all lived apart, were close friends, and had joined forces to showcase their art in a shared space. I loved that they shared such a connection, and I think this would be a nice thing to do someday (although I don't think that will actually happen).
In terms of the art itself, I was drawn to the ones with patterns and/or words. Three of the pieces I drew were three pieces in a series that consisted of striped squares with geometric shapes on top, and one piece I didn't draw but liked anyway included the words "THINGS AS IF THEY WERE OTHERWISE". I enjoyed these the most because they reminded me the most of my own work. At the time, I had been meaning to put text into my work, and since then I have made two pieces ("Shame" and "Enough") that include text and I am working on a third (not in the same series, but my home project will have text as well). It's finished! I love it even more than I loved Shame when I was done with it (although, as with Shame, I have to add dropped shadows). The rainbow of flowers makes me so happy; I didn't even plan that part until I started trying to figure out where to place the flowers and realized I had a full rainbow, counting the green of the stems, but I love it. For my next project, I may continue with this theme, but I have to figure out the word and I have to figure out what flowers to do. Here's hoping I come up with something soon (or at least before I have to come back from break)!
Sources:
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-these-20-female-artists-are-pushing-figurative-painting-forward https://www.cfhill.com/la-dreams-becky-kolsrud http://www.jttnyc.com/6953,266301,6961,6973 Note: I could not find her website or her official CV but I did find a long list of her credentials that seemed to be her CV despite not being titled as a CV
Sources:
Randy Kennedy, "Outside the Citadel, Social Practice Art Is Intended to Nurture," 2013 Carolina A. Miranda, "How the Art of Social Practice Is Changing the World, One Row House at a Time," 2014 My second project of the quarter is getting off to a very nice start. I am continuing my theme from my last project - a painting with a black background, big white block capital letters, and bright flowers twining around those letters. This time, however, I have mostly abandoned my content about other women (although I suppose one could interpret the content as "women are enough," that would also fit); in light of the events that inspired my last painting, I felt like it was necessary to make art for myself, supporting myself. The title, "Enough," is as in "I am enough," and at the beginning it also meant "I have had enough" but I wanted to focus more on the first one so I could make more progress with moving on.
Here it is (finally)! After weeks of work and having to bring this one home (I'm starting to sense a pattern here, and my next project is even bigger...oh boy), it's finally finished, and it's my favorite piece I've made all year. I think that's partially to do with the beginning of it - I typically have a lot of trouble coming up with ideas for my next project, but for some reason the idea for this one (women are shamed both for being virgins and for having sex lives, thus the title of "Shame") came to me easily. I still took a while to do it, but I blame that on my slower process rather than any lack of inspiration.
While I was in the planning stages, I added onto my main content of shaming women. I had wanted to make my art more personal (my last few projects had been focused on sexual assault, a fate I have fortunately never experienced, and I wanted to make art about my own experience to some extent), and an opportunity had presented itself the Friday before we started working on this project: I began dating someone. Being the romantic that I am, I put little details into the piece that showed, at the time, my excitement at this new experience. However, before I had even put paint on the canvas, the relationship ended, and while I kept the original content of shaming women for their sex lives, the romantic content changed. This project still ended up being my favorite piece of the year (as I said previously); ironically all the time I spent with a piece that represented a very painful experience seems to have been cathartic. My next project will be similar, but more personal. While the outer content that accompanied "Shame" will no longer be there, it will look very much the same and it will be more about finding emotional peace for myself. I debated about focusing on the breakup, but I decided it would be much healthier for all involved if I stopped focusing on how I had been hurt and started focusing on appreciating myself for the present and the future. (Cheesy? Perhaps. True? Definitely.) |
AuthorMolly Goodman Archives
May 2019
Categories |