Monday, April 30, 2012

Reviving Ophelia - Performance Piece

I am intrigued and fascinated by work that artists do while working in collaboration, this project is no exception. My friends and classmates worked tirelessly for over a week in a room with no windows and all white walls, including the ceiling and floor. Then they transformed the place into an installation and performance piece called:

 Reviving Ophelia

I have not asked them yet, but my guess is that it has some connection to the very popular book  
Reviving Ophelia - I have not read the book but maybe now I will. http://www.amazon.com/Reviving-Ophelia-Adolescent-Ballantine-Readers/dp/0345392825
Close-up of Crystal Erlendson's Legs as well as the live fish and flowers.

Tree House Collaboration Project


A Forest Through a Tree House
This exhibit is on display at Claremont Graduate University this week only April 30-May 4 2012. It is a collaborative installment art piece initiated by Nate Little, MFA 2012. Collaborations yield extraordinary results and this project is no exception.


Tree House Display

Nate Little created the bases for tiny tree houses. The base consisted of a log and two or three branches. He asked his artist friends to create any type of tree house that we wanted to as long as it was to the scale of the base that he gave us to use. Following are the photographs of the creations.


Matchsticks on Tree House Base. I wonder how many?

So many variations of houses.



Contributors Listed Here:


Re-use of found items.

You cannot imagine how amazing this looks with the 3D glasses!

I thank Nate Little for a fun and imaginative collaborative exhibit. Come by to visit at 251 E. 10th Street, Claremont, CA if you can.

Food Works – Rice on Canvas

For about the past five months I have been painting with food. Yes food as the medium not the subject. Here is a little bit about my process.

The photograph below is rice on canvas with about 5 to 6 layers of clear gesso used to archive the rice as a painting material. Then I wrapped the edges with twine and thin wire. The green string is then interwoven with the twine and wire. This represents the first time I made a rice painting I used about 2 cups of rice – enough for eight servings, if cooked.
Brown Rice, String, and Wire on Canvas

I grew up in Mexico and Brazil. I ate a lot of rice as a child. We went to outdoor markets to buy our food. Nothing was packaged. After the first rice painting I have continued to paint with food – rice, lentils, noodles – it is real food not as processed as so much food is these days.Except I am processing it aren't I?
Noodles, Canvas and String on Canvas
I go to the grocery store instead of the art store to purchase what I need. I will be asking the viewer to interact with what is real but it is not real anymore because it is archived on canvas with gesso, varnishes and bees wax – the food I use can never be cooked or eaten – in a way it is archived.

Yellow Peas and Wild Rice Well Organized in Clear Gesso on Panel

Museum Morsbroich has a show of Michael Schmidt’s photographed food – in production, processing, packaging and presentation (http://www.museum-morsbroich.de/). In my mind, a photograph removes the viewer from reality because it is a presentation of a moment in time captured on film.Yet he too is fascinated by food.
Michael Schmidt, “Untitled, # 22,” from: “Lebensmittel,” 2006–2010. Photography, 54,1 x 81,8 cm. © Michael Schmidt
Instead of using photography I have food either organized or in chaos on canvas with string and wire layered at times to “anchor” the piece or give the food structure – much like the fields it was grown in – and much like the societal structures we endure. 
Yellow Peas and Wild Rice in Encaustic on Panel
At first I hated myself for painting with rice. Like I was wasting food. yet I felt compelled to keep going and make more food paintings.  I don’t know how to explain the works.  I keep hoping the idea will come; about why am I painting with food. 

Picasso's famous statement: “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up,”  comes to mind when I look at my own food painting. Viewers have asked me if I teach children – I have. I taught Pre-K - 8th grade art for 15 years. I guess the food paintings I make has my viewers thinking about the elementary school food craft projects that children bring home. That's ok with me.
Pop Corn in Encaustic
There is not a simple answer for my works in food. Picasso says, “The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web. ” Maybe food can be added to his list. Painting in food allows me to see each grain as special and loaded with potential.

Mixed Lentils, String and Wire on Canvas
This piece makes me think of what crowds of people would look like if viewed from above in a single moment in time. Do food paintings strike you as useful or a waste?

Sunday, April 29, 2012

MFA Graduate Group Show at CGU

My classmates will be graduating soon, it feels like I just met them. The amazing variety of work can be seen below. It was made while they attended Claremont Graduate University see link at: http://www.cgu.edu/art.

Standing around an ice cream cart that plays music in the East Gallery.

These stand 5 and 9 feet tall.

See the little work on the back wall?

Lovely constructions.

More variety in Peggy Phelps Gallery.

Random visitors milling about.

More works.

This one had a performance portion. https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=519459649535&set=a.519459644545.11888.299400105&type=1&theater  

Draw on Me!




Draw On Me! Is a collaborative drawing project created by 7 Claremont Graduate University students for the 2012 Open Studio Event. Sally Bruno, Clayton Ehman, Kristin Frost, Suzanne Utaski Gibbs, Stephanie Meredith, Dominique Ovalle, Leslie Love Stone.
The drawing the morning before the event. CGU Students had already found it!
Basic Rules: 1. Draw on the paper 2.Start your drawing from other drawings
The table where our participants picked up their drawing tool.
Engaged Random Participants

Immediately following the last group two more people came in to draw.



OPEN STUDIO PREPARATION

OPEN STUDIOS
Full Studio view with 5 new panels on left that I just started. 24 x 60 inches each.
Claremont Graduate University Art Department is happy to open it's doors to the public on April 29th 2012, from 12-5. Everyone is welcome to come out to meet the artists and see the work. The graduating students will have a group show in the two main galleries. Additional shows will be up in 13 additional spaces. Location: 251 E 10th Street, Claremont, CA. Please stop by!
My Studio is ready! 
Most recent work, 9 panels, gesso, paper, canvas, cardboard, acrylic, and ink. 

Wall of food work. Many use Encaustic - set-up can be seen on work table.

Same wall and some unfinished work on the floor.

Newest work a bit closer up.

My desk and older work and soon to be used panels.

 Thanks for viewing! Hope to see you if at all possible. 
Studio visits can be arranged by appointment too: 707-738-5886.

Saturday, April 28, 2012

Gotta Do It

So, ya wanna be in a top notch gallery or a museum? Very few artists do both. But so what? My thoughts a few weeks went all over the place. Painting got better – check! Talk to teacher about life after grad school – check! Visit to the Long Beach Airport to pick up my son for spring break – check! Took my son to the Museum of Jurassic Technology (http://www.mjt.org/), Nova Color (http://novacolorpaint.com/) - a painters paint store in Culver City, and Venice beach – check! Homework, physical fitness, groceries, laundry, taxes done, meals prepared, reading done, papers to write – check! 
Brown Rice, String, and Wire on Canvas

I started school for one reason and now I am stuck in the quagmire of reality. When my kids, two boys 12 and 14, come home I begin to wonder: am I doing the right thing? Am I in the right place? What you don’t know is that I sent them both off to boarding school so that I could be in graduate school full-time. I really wanted to be at CGU (http://www.cgu.edu). Still do. Then they come home and my emotions go amuck. I signed myself up for this trip into the Art World. I want to make art and I want to bring people together in community with art as the glue. I Gotta Do It.

I am fairly certain I am meant to do this. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line I did not pick up enough self-esteem to believe in myself fully and I am feeling that way right now this week. This feeling of being unsure comes and goes. The feeling worsens when I look around. I have classmates that are taking enormous risks, sharing stories about themselves, stuff I hide and stuff inside. I see artists in our class readings that are asking big questions, presenting what I consider to be really tough topics – topics that have made me question what I hide. 

The work that I have been reading addresses some of the following topics: questions of women’s experience, identity, race, and the “absurdity of existence” (pg.164, Taylor) as well as questions of teenage angst and even childhood. I continue to hide, behind my layer paintings. I am unsure and unready to say more, unless I could become anonymous. That’s not what artists do. Picasso says this in a different way, “Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.” My art is not lying but the whole truth is not yet represented in my work.
These thoughts bring me back to the beginning of this semester when questions presented themselves: What does open and transparent really mean? How about reveal and conceal? Find and hide? Show and tell? Does transparency also mean that one needs to be open to questions and worse, critiques of the self? 

A statement came up in class this week that made me think deeper. Artists try very hard to undo what they know so that they may present from their inner voice. Picasso said this differently, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” I know of no other profession where adults go into the deepest recesses of emotion and pain and curiosity and then work from there only to come up again, as if for air, and try to act like a stable adult in the “real” world. You have recently asked us what is counter-culture today and what is radical? I think about that. Is it radical to be a stay-at-home mom who becomes artist, or do I need to tell more of my story?

I have been painting with food lately – rice, lentils, noodles – it is real food.
Noodles, Canvas and String on Canvas
I go to the grocery store instead of the art store to purchase what I need. I will be asking the viewer to interact with what is real but it is not real anymore because it is archived on canvas with gesso, varnishes and bees wax – the food I use can never be cooked or eaten – in a way it is archived.
Yellow Peas and Wild Rice Well Organized in Clear Gesso on Panel

Museum Morsbroich has a show of Michael Schmidt’s photographed food – in production, processing, packaging and presentation (http://www.museum-morsbroich.de/). In my mind, a photograph removes the viewer from reality because it is a presentation of a moment in time captured on film.
Michael Schmidt, “Untitled, # 22,” from: “Lebensmittel,” 2006–2010. Photography, 54,1 x 81,8 cm. © Michael Schmidt
Instead I have food either organized or in chaos on canvas with string and wire layered at times to “anchor” the piece or give the food structure – much like the fields it was grown in – and much like the societal structures we endure. The first time I made a rice painting I used about 2 cups of rice – enough for eight servings, when cooked.

I hated myself for painting with rice; yet I felt compelled to keep going and make more food paintings.
Yellow Peas and Wild Rice in Encaustic on Panel
I don’t know how to explain the works. While at Nova Color (http://novacolorpaint.com/) with my son I bought more supplies to make more food paintings. My son thought it was great to hear and see me buy supplies in a place that has a doorbell to get into and that to be taken seriously I had to know what I was talking about to get in and to buy the supplies. I keep hoping the idea will come; about why am I painting with food.
Pop Corn in Encaustic
There is not a simple answer like: I miss cooking for my children, grocery shopping and family dinners. I really don’t – or do I? Picasso says, “The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web. ” Painting in food allows me to buy larger quantities of food like I did when my children lived at home.
Mixed Lentils, String and Wire on Canvas
Obviously there is more to it than that. I hated grocery shopping – still do. I love family dinners. How will I ever talk about the abstract concepts and art historical relationships to my works in food when I cannot figure it out? I am in a prison of my own making, I sent the kids away and now I make art – they come home and I want to make art but I need to go grocery shopping and cook meals. Paul McCarthy said it so well: “the experience of being confronted with my existence was suddenly overwhelming.” (pg. 164, Taylor) The only way to live in the box I created is: I Gotta Do It.
Taylor, Brandon. Contemporary Art: Art Since 1970. Prentice Hall, 2005.  (http://books.google.com/books/about/Contemporary_art.html?id=sH_uAAAAMAAJ)

Thursday, April 26, 2012

A little bit of passion

I am passionate! Working towards my MFA at Claremont Graduate University, teaching art at the university level and still tossing out new darts once in a while to see what sticks in my life. Dart tossing is my new way of thinking about things, give it a try if it works/sticks build on it, if it doesn't let it go/drop. The newest dart is that I am once again attempting to focus on my blog: http://suzanneutaskigibbs.blogspot.com/ Please take a look - oh you are! Ha Ha. My kids are thriving at school - with bumps here and there, as is to be expected. And I will be celebrating 20 years of marriage this September - whew! A lot going on - and in a few weeks I will get to see my newest niece for the first time. The missing link - well I hurt my ankle sometime in January and I will have a second x-ray tomorrow to check on the progress of healing - would love to toss the boot out of my life! Today I got ready for an Open Studio event at school that is happening on Sunday. I will take pictures and post soon.

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Taking things to the next level.

Well, I have decided that I DO want writing to be a key component to my art practice and I am honoring my commitment by taking a class. So here goes:

With a commitment to building a more vibrant blog, I signed up for the 4-week Blog Triage class
with Cynthia Morris and Alyson Stanfield. Today’s assignment is to describe the people I want to
visit and read my blog.
Signed by Suzanne!

Getty Villa - Creating an abstract from a stone wall.
The audience that I expect will be interested in what I blog about will be students, artists and art lovers – especially those who want to hear about what is going on in and around the Los Angeles and Orange County Art Scenes. It helps if you have a passion for contemporary art.

I will blog about current trends and current shows in museums, galleries, open studios and alternative spaces. Occasional private sneak peaks into artists studios will add spice to the mix.

Every once in a while I may just toss in a few extras like new art products that I think are just great and sometimes non-art venues will be looked at. I will also drop notes in when I feel there is a particularly interesting article in an art magazine or in one of my many art books that I am required to read while I pursue my MFA at Claremont Graduate University. Are you ready to join me? I am an emerging artist in Southern California and I will look at what is emerging in today's art world. I'm ready to share some thoughts and provoke some dialog so come along.

More about Cynthia who I am looking forward to meeting during this on-line class:  http://www.originalimpulse.com/blog/

More about Alyson who wrote a great book called I'd rather be in the studio! (it's on my studio desk and I refer to it often):  http://www.artbizblog.com/

Taking things to the next level means for me that for all the events that I go to I will form an opinion and get myself ready to write about what I think and see. It means not just reading books and magazines about art but also digesting them and sharing my personal insights. It is very likely that my own art practice will grow as I take more than a passing look or read at all the opportunities that are available to me in this still-new home base for me called SoCal.


Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Provisional Painting – Part 2



Provisional Painting Part 1 (my essay and blog post) ended on this statement: I’d rather make a living selling the work, but I frustrate myself because why should the energetic somewhat messy work I make sell for the prices I think it deserves if I myself often dismiss other artists’ less-than-well crafted work as careless? I must continue to explore this problematic area. As a way of entering into the topic of energetic expressive work versus neatly crafted work, here are a few of the adjectives Rubinstein’s uses to describe his exploration of what he calls provisional painting: gloriously dumb, endless obliterations, humble beauty, free of touch-ups, impossibility, risking inconsequence, extensive doodling, and abject awkwardness. I personally can relate to all of these adjectives and often have thoughts of this nature – including the desire to show my hand and thinking in my finished works.
As I come to my studio time and set about the goals of creating work – work that matters – to coin the term that caught my eye on the CGU web site before I attended school here; I dig deep to find my thoughts and feelings. I want my work to look hand-made and emotional, but I wonder how that fits in with my preference to view finished work that looks deliberate and well crafted. Last week I visited the work of Máximo González (well crafted) and this week I took a detour to visit Rauschenberg and Motherwell (both worked with what looks like to me as more immediacy) at MOCA. As much as I hated Rauschenberg’s “Bed” painting when I saw it as a child, his work now intrigues me. Sadly it has been a long time since I have been deeply touched by a work of art, for the past six years or so I am always looking at works of art and asking myself, “how was it made?” or “I’ll have to try that.”
How does painting matter? How can I make it matter for me when even other artists freely question painting’s relative importance? Consider this quote from an article on Provisional Painting in response to Rubinstein, June 2, 2009 by Wes Freese: “The idea of impossibility in painting is an effect of the somewhat real fact that painting has no significant role on society, or even culture.” He goes on to discuss why he says this at great length, then turning a 360 or would it be a 180, in his article and stating that painting matters to him very much!
Painting matters to me too, it has been my entry into understanding things in the world. When I was as young as 6 years old, I would spread out on the floor and paint and paint and paint. Then, during middle and high school, my way of dealing with the reality of living in this strange land called the USA (I grew up abroad) was to escape into the art room as much as possible; both at home and at school and I would draw or paint away my time. Even in college, while studying Graphic Design I can remember covering my carpeted dorm room floor with newspaper so that I could paint well into the night, not even for class or a grade – and that's while in college! In my first home, the living room became my studio. I got married and almost lost a part of me; I did not paint for 4 years. The growing of my first child inside my belly re-awakened that part of me that needed to paint. I haven’t stopped since. I paint because I can and because through painting I have found a way to exist in this world. My own painting informs me, regardless of whether it informs anyone else. I can say: painting matters to me. As I finally say that out loud and with courage, while here at CGU, I also am beginning to realize that history is exciting, and the whole world has begun to have a context for me through seeing things through other visual artists attempts at making meaning. This is an exciting time for me.
Still, does it matter to others when the work looks dashed off? Have I really reached into my most deep well of courage to really show how much I care about painting? My teachers are beginning to tell me that they don’t see it – that they hear my passion but that my work does not yet show it. Is this a game too? What if I have already done my best work? Am I attracted to the idea of “Provisional Painting” as an excuse to dash off “inconsequential work” while I really feel that the best painting in the Art World shows a huge amount of care and craft? I don’t think so, I am drawn in by Rubinstein’s thoughtful quote describing painters painting what he coins as provisional painting: “They also harbor a broader concern with multiple forms of imperfection: not merely what is unfinished but also the off-kilter, the overtly offhand, the not-quite-right. The idea is to cast aside the neat but rigid fundamentals learned in art school and embrace everything that seems to lend itself to visual intrigue—including failure.”


http://wfreese.wordpress.com/2009/06/02/provisional-painting/
http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/features/provisional-painting-part-2/
http://www.twocoatsofpaint.com/2012/02/raphael-rubenstein-revisits-provisional.html
http://www.twocoatsofpaint.com/2011/06/new-casualists.html

Thursday, April 12, 2012

Provisional Painting - What's all the fuss about?

In Chapter 5, In and Beyond the Museum: 1984-1998 of Contemporary Art, Taylor, the topic of conceptualizing against the idea of fine art seems to be glorified and exaulted. With chapter subheadings like: Art as the Subject Itself, Installation as Decay, and Some Counter-Monuments the topic seems to be to make Art that does not belong in a gallery or museum, but then to be overwhelmed by joy when a museum or history book does pick up the work, especially if it is properly understood. Earlier this week, I was talking to Pagel about a painting of mine that has faces of young boys on it with bright red lips and I said, “The lips are bright red just to make fun of Pop-art.” Pagel did not like this comment and all but asked me to retract it – I couldn’t. Then in this chapter, I read: “Duchampian readymade joke, a Warholian play with the banal, and often a Beuysian fascination for the atavistic.” I wonder, am I not to have a little fun until I am written up in a book?
For some reason, the topic and idea of pushing against the institution made me want to look up the biographies of some of the artists in the chapter as well as some of the biographies of my current teachers. I suppose I became curious because many artists that are rebelling against institutions are educated in institutions; then institutions themselves evolve to accommodate the perceived rebellion, for example re-designed museums. I stumbled upon Artfacts.net as I looked for biographies. What a surprise to me! As artists work towards freedom from commercialization, commoditization and being misunderstood they are simultaneously being commercialized as objects themselves in an online ranking format. Artfacts.net I am sure has a sophisticated system of gathering data from across wide art market platforms to rank artists from one to a hundred and beyond. What is the art world if exhibition statistics, auction results, age, and sex are made available publicly and on-line? Are even the artists themselves a commodity to be counted and ranked like stock prices based on company performance? Is the whole world like this? Makes me want my Mom job back! At least the kids would instantly tell me when I was liked or hated and nothing was an “industry standard” in my days and hours with them. Not to mention the fact that I am not dead – the entire Artist ranking system exists in it’s entirety dead or alive!

I ended my last essay with a question: The next level of contemporary what? Now I ask: will the contemporary art market keep paying extraordinary prices for works of art that are not well crafted? This is a subject that came up for me when I visited the Craft and Folk Art Museum (CAFAM) this week. Normally I would not have visited this museum* because it is a “craft” or “folk art” museum not a “fine art” museum, but now I wonder why do we settle for so many pieces of fine art works that are not finely crafted? Several examples can be found in current exhibits down the street from the CAFAM in slick galleries. Why is it ok to go through an MFA program that requires no drawing skills or attention to craft? So much of what is talked about is conceptual this and that.
For two weeks now I have been reading and re-reading an article by Raphael Rubinstein about Provisional Painting; it is his second article on this topic the first was written in 2009, which I have also be reading and re-reading. There exists inside of me an extreme – on the one hand I appreciate finely crafted items and take them to be more serious, and on the other hand I tend to dash out my work depending on the mood or idea of the day wishing for my energy and enthusiasm and emotion to show through in the finality of the work. Often my desire for this burst of energy to show through conflicts with my desire for myself to have work that looks polished, finished, and well thought out. The conflict becomes problematic in what I can feel proud to say it is my work. Every piece whether fully planned or energetically created takes work, time, energy and passion. The question is what will be taken more seriously or what will sell. I realize that some of my peers have the goal of history books for their practice. I’d rather make a living selling the work, but I frustrate myself because why should the energetic work I make sell for the prices I think it deserves if I myself often dismiss other artists’ less-than-well crafted work as careless?