Ethan's Experiments

     I still have a lot of uncertainty with Rachel Whiteread's art. Some pieces I absolutely love for their odd aesthetic and impenetrability, but some are just so aloof that I don't know where to go with them. I am especially frustrated because as far as I know she hasn't developed her style since the 1990's. While her early work is really exciting because of how it captures emptiness and relates to memory, her later stuff just feels pretty repetitive and uninspired. I hope we get to see some more stuff from her in the future that is more provocative. That being said, I really love her work and would love to see her pieces in person, I feel like in a gallery/museum setting they would be really imposing and off-putting, and people would get more out of them.       I think her work also provokes a lot of thought between what is sculpture and what is installation. I think most people would regard her work as sculpture, I probably would to for most of her...

Orville Peck as The Blue Boy, Andrew Norris, 2021        Andrew Norris' talk was really great, now I really want to go see his show. I love how his art is dealing directly with celebrity culture as well as art history. It is really subversive how he places these queer people into paintings that originally re-inscribed traditional heteronormative viewing/identity. I connected a lot to these paintings because of the celebrities he was using, especially Orville Peck, who is about the only country musician I ever listen too. The style of portraiture Norris is doing is also interesting because of how indebted it is to the old masters. I love the juxtaposition of this very historical, serious style of painting with the uncharacteristic figures he puts in them. These paintings feel like something that traditional academics would hate (I know he mentioned his teachers in school not liking him painting celebrities or comic book characters), which I really like.    ...

A Teenager with Promise, 2017, Alexandra Bell     Alexandra Bell's convocation was really cool, she has an insight into news media that I haven't seen before, and it's cool that Lawrence brought an artist with overtly political work to campus. Her Counternarratives are so interesting because they so clearly show the bias that newspapers have that many people don't see. I love how they are shown first with all the annotations, and then in a redacted and corrected version, so that the artistic process becomes part of the finished piece. That allows a lot of clarity and transparency in the pieces that helps their impact really land. I also just really like how her marginalia looks aesthetically, bright red writing on white background.      Relating to our installation projects, her artwork makes me think a lot about the use of space. Partly from how big they are, which kind of forces you to pay attention to them (and the fact that they used to be pasted onto walls...

     There's still a lot that I don't know for sure, but I have a general idea of what I want to do for my installation. I plan on having it in the back left corner of the Mudd Gallery, but any small room would probably work. I originally wanted to make plaster casts of arms, legs, faces, etc to arrange around the room, but I don't know how to do anything with plaster and I think that would take too long, so I'm planning on using paper mache. This will be a much quicker and cheaper option will give me an idea of what the installation will look like if I ever get to do it with plaster. I am going to arrange these body parts on the floor as well as on a table/chair. I also want to take some black and white pictures of myself and edit them to look ghostly and have pieces missing, these will be hung on the walls on either side of the corner.  Subway, George Segal, 1968 I really like these pieces by George Segal, the loneliness fo the figure in this disconnected space is ...

      I really loved making our installation piece. The freedom we had to do whatever was so liberating. I was so impressed with how we had a bunch of different themes emerge from all the random stuff we brought, and how the piece felt pretty cohesive overall. The piece to me has a feeling of a picnic gone wrong. The front half especially is full of such vibrant colors and flowers, feeling inviting at first glance. Then as you look at it longer and read the writing on the walls, it feels a little more ominous. The back on the other hand takes this aggression further, with the book on the wall yelling at you along with all the 'Not for Sale" signs. It felt very current to make something that also seemed to be commenting on the environment. All the greens in the room and the flowers coming out of the trash definitely added to that, along with the fact that the possible consumerism of our 'store' was aborted by the 'Not For Sale' signs. I think it would be int...