5/20/2016 0 Comments Bust or Bust! Vlog (May 10)To start off my final project blog, I made a little vlog. I feel a little guilty starting off with clay instead of app building because I already love clay so much, and it's just degrees of knowledge at this point... but I have a really good reason. I have been through some rough spots this past year, mainly because of my health not being the greatest. To top it off, I stress my body by overworking until I have nothing left to give; I have trouble saying "NO" which makes it hard to bring balance into my life. I always pretend like everything is hunky dory, and share very little of my personal life with others. I feel everyone has enough negativity in their lives, and I want to be a source of positive energy and feelings. I want to make people feel better, and not the other way around -- which you could probably analyse in a thousand different ways, none of which paint me in a very positive light, but that's pretty much where I am stuck at the moment. A couple of weeks ago, the stress that mounted on me became too much to bear, and I started doing small ceramics sculptures to relax in between classes. This brought such novel relief to my soul, like swimming through a cool pool of Jell-O; students asked me what I was working on, and then they asked me if it was a sample for a class -- and I felt such pride in answering that I was doing this just for my own enjoyment and pleasure. As I played with the soft, pliable matter, I realized that I had never actually built a human bust; in fact, I never have built a truly large sculpture before. All my sculptures are tiny, and even the drums I have made are not that big (and fairly simple to do). So, I decided to focus right now on something that will bring me immediate joy, and help me live through the last of this semester without completely burning out; something that I have always wanted to learn just for the simple pleasure of it. I want to make a large bust made of clay! Watch the vlog below to check out how things are turning out so far. I made this vlog last week, and I just got two boxes of clay delivered to the school today, so... more is coming soon!
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5/18/2016 0 Comments The Birth of Modern CultureI have just watched a Ted Talk with Lawrence Lessig about the dangers of over-regulation in regards to creativity. The presentation was not only informative, but had me laughing out loud in several instances -- who would have thought Jesus had that much sass? All joking aside, this is something I happen to be very passionate about. I am an artist, and had the privilege of going to Art College twenty years ago at a progressive school in Portland, Oregon; they acknowledged the difference between using source material and blatantly copying a piece of artwork, and they taught us to see the difference. They drilled into us that since the beginning of time, nothing is a brand new idea, and no idea comes from nowhere; in fact, it is a matter of pride for artists to cite their influences, the masters they took ideas and inspiration from. We were taught how we could grab photos from magazines -- no matter if they were copyrighted or not -- and use it as source for our paintings, as long as we modified it and added something of our own. We didn't have online searches at that time, and relied heavily on high end magazines and periodicals, most of all National Geographic. I remember our professor giving us a simple example: she had been hired to illustrate a children's book about elephants. Thanks to pictures from National Geographic, she was able to make beautiful, unique watercolours of elephants, with proper anatomy and movement; who would ever consider this copyright infringement? Well, as it turns out, a lot has happened in the past 20 years, and not everything has been positive. As more and more creative content became available in the internet, the people controlling the flow of content became more and more possessive of this content. The message they sent youth for the past few years was, "you are doing something bad by sharing and using other's content" -- which, considering creativity and art, is a heavy blanket statement. As I started my first job as an art teacher last year, I was flabbergasted by the directive the art department held regarding copyright. The kids were supposed to use only their photos as source material to avoid copyright infringement; every material had to come from their own mind, and every idea was encouraged to be original, or it could fall under plagiarism. I was faced with a group of young artists who had no real concept of what an art movement really was; they knew the basic history of Renaissance, for instance, but never connected the dots to see that the reason everyone was painting a certain way during a certain period of time, in a certain region, was because they were **gasp** copying from each other. Almost every single student from our senior class wanted to find their own unique voice. Every student thought they could only use their own photo as source, and only if they couldn't find something, they could go into a creative commons site; some students thought that they should be able to draw everything from memory. That may sound fantastic and great to someone who is not passionate about art, but to me, it was incredibly troubling. The stress these kids were under, and the reluctance to even look at artwork from other people -- lest they be influenced by their brushstroke and start using their techniques subconsciously -- were initially a source of concern for me. While in their private lives, they copied and shared content from other people, and modified things to their heart's content, they wanted to present a much different facade to me, and wanted to ensure they were seen as "proper artists" according to what they had been led to believe. This clash of cultures was not pretty to see. One of the photos above used a source. Can you tell the difference? Luckily, I had changed the policy to define plagiarism as a slightly different animal, and gently drilled this new notion that looking at others' artwork and finding your voice -- as it fits within art history and its context -- was a process akin to self-discovery, in an artistic sense.
I posed to them a simple question: are you willing to visit every corner of the world, and take every single photo from every angle, of everything that you will ever need? If they had been my professor, how would they go about completing her project -- with canned photos from creative commons? With their imagination only? Students started to understand what I was saying, but I could sense their skepticism about "crazy pirate Mrs. J" and her ideas. As luck would have it, a new exhibit came to the Vancouver Art Gallery this year: Mash Up, the birth of Modern Culture. The four floors of the Gallery were transformed into a celebration of appropriation culture. Picasso's collages, Warhol's prints from photos, Duchamp's bicycle wheel-turned-art, and much, much more examples of changing or expanding upon an idea to make it your own, or simply putting an everyday thing under a different light. I took the opportunity to bring all three of my grade 11-12 classes to the exhibit, and every group asked me in the beginning how was that allowed, or some version of the same question. It took just a few minutes for them to understand that what they do hidden away from the artroom should be embraced; that their voices may already be there, just waiting between the waves of Instagram, Youtube and Pinterest, for an opportunity to pop out. This oppressive mentality regarding copyright is not sustainable in the long run; it is fear-based and not open, and sends the wrong message to our kids. I am looking forward to seeing the next twenty years, to see how the pendulum will swing; I have great hopes for the future of the art world, and can't wait to find out how our youth today will shape it. |
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