Summer II / 2021

Practices and Techniques in Studio Art - Professor Patricia Dye

This blog post will cover the entire period of Summer II. It includes some notes from the class, as well as ongoing work that I am making that is not part of any assignment other than that it is work I will present in the fall for critique.  We have worked on the artist statements for our current work... Here is mine for the installation, e/Mergence, that I am making:

"My work is about the poorly understood effects of the many systems & structures that represent the hidden aspects of racism baked into our society; many of which have affected my life in post-Civil Rights Act America.

The dialects of art, or mediums and methods, that I have found most inspiring at this time are video, sculpture, and contemporary technologies.  

​Using these mediums, I am making artwork that is sometimes self-portraiture or other-times is work that shines light onto the divisiveness of status quo governmental politics, and the ugliness of racism."

---

Still working on the actual ceramic face for the Ascendant, to replace the study piece.  I am continuing to learn more about clay, with the help of my cohorts, and some really good books.  Im reading The Craft and Art of Clay, by Susan Peterson; learning as best I can from a book, some of the fundamentals of working with clay.. The executed piece will compensate for shrinkage, color changes that will come in firing, and some changes that will capture more of a semblance of the subject in the video (the artist).  I am not aiming for realism, but the form I've created is overly disparate from my own face. The face seen below is not the final face, it's a study, and my first clay work:

August 2, 2021

---

Continuing to work on Deferred Hopes (referred to in last month's post...as well as work on a new idea.  The new idea centers upon exploring making wall hanging sculptures out of flat materials such as sheets of cast acrylic sheets, plywood, and others.  I'd love to make this out of steel, however, I do not believe our Glowforge cuts through metal...I will investigate.   These will be cut and then layered sort of the way that Marisol Escobar created her flat-faced sculptures in wood. This is the cutting template.  Blue lines cut & red lines engraved.  24 white pyramids, and another smaller set of black pyramids which will be combined to create a piece I am titling Integration.