Fragile Vessels: Julio Fine Art

          Last night, I attended the presentation Fragile Vessels by Cheryl Derricotte and Nate Lewis in the Julio Fine Arts Gallery. There were two types of art present, glass pieces and paper pieces. Despite their different mediums, the stories behind their work is similar: they did not plan out their work, they just went with it. 

          Cheryl talked about how she took a glass blasting class. In this class she created a ship and thought that it looked "ghostly": this is where her inspiration came from. With this idea in mind, she searched "ghost ship" in the thousands of pictures that the British Library had just released and found images of the global slave trade. She etched these images into glass and created her exhibit using multiple images in a row to tell a story. Her work is going to go on display in the Museum of the African Diaspora where she was recognized as a new Emerging Artist. 

          Nate started his story by telling us how he was a nurse in the ICU. As he continued, he said that he started off using the electrocardiograms from his patients as his medium and inspiration. From there he was inspired from the idea of multi cellular living that was present in all of his patients. He took this idea to plain paper and a pen and drew simple designs. He then switched to a knife and made cut outs, lines and scratches. The marks he made with the knife were intimate, just like the relationships that he had with his patients and he wanted that to be clearly represented. As he became more comfortable he moved onto ink cut outs of people. On the cutouts he would make patterns that looked like a real human. In three images next to each other, there is a slow decline in the amount of black present, which represents life slowly slipping away from inside someone. Moving forward Nate said he hopes to add more movement to the figures in his pieces and focus in on the injustice of the lack of health care for African Americans. 

          Hearing both of the artists talk was very intriguing. Hearing their stories and inspirations first hand made the art come alive and made me more connected to the story behind the pieces. Overall I enjoyed both displays and the history behind how they came about. 

Post Modernism Visual Analysis

          For this Post Modernism Project, I combined digital image cut outs, Bristol cut outs, gouache paint and black ink to form my work. Of the gouache paints, I used green, yellow, blue and purple which make up a compound color scheme. I used this color scheme because many of the colors were already seen in the planet located at the center of the piece. The colors would also be a good contrast to the black and grey background that I used. I painted the background piece of Bristol with black ink: two inches from the edge I painted a thick black line and slowly faded the ink towards the center. In the blank two inches, I put streaked purple paint and splattered paint from my color scheme. On top of the background, I glued three pieces of black Bristol cutouts. Each piece has a digital image pasted on it, a man painted green with a question mark on his face, a purple and yellow planet, and a TV with color bars on it. By placing one piece to the left, right and the center, I display the rule of thirds in my composition. In between the three black cutouts, there are smaller white Bristol cutouts with a yellow, green or purple border. Six of the fourteen white shapes have an alien head on them. Splattered paint is also found all over the fourteen white shapes. In the four corners of the background ink, there are words, two of them are crossed out. 

          Mystery is the first connotative meaning that pops into my head when looking at this piece. The colors used are an odd set that are not really seen together anywhere besides space movies. The aliens in a movie are usually always green or purple, and they come from a planet that is grey or black. Placing these brighter colors against the grey background adds even more mystery to the piece because they are not always paired together.  Another emotion that comes up when looking at this piece is confusion. The man is looking and listening towards the other planet and the TV, but why? The white shapes in between the black cut outs, cut up the flow of the image, making your eye jump around. This makes the piece confusing and hard to decipher. The words Foreign and Far Out are written in opposite corners of the background and are crossed out. By crossing these words out, the viewer is confused because to them, aliens are foreign and far out, but the piece of art is telling them otherwise, or is it? Using a TV that does not have an actual image on it adds to both the mystery and confusion of this piece. Everyone knows that when these bars of color come up the channel is not working which makes you confused and wonder why it isn't working. The white shapes in the middle of the piece are not connected which makes me think that these shapes are orbiting around the center planet, like its moons. From this idea, you can also see the other two black pieces of Bristol as planets, making the piece a whole similar to a galaxy or solar system. The general idea of a solar system and space can also be seen as zoning out or daydreaming. 

          Zoning out can be used to describe the ideological meaning of this piece. People in everyday life zone out, but where do they go or what do they think about during this time? The answer is simple: it is a mystery to us. Nobody knows where they go, including the person that zones out. This is one of the few examples in which what we are thinking about is a complete mystery. Another ideological meaning could be that we as humans piece together small bits of information in order to understand a grander concept. Many planets make up a solar system in space, just like how there are many different parts of an idea. If you only understand some parts of the idea, the idea remains a mystery. Overall, people need to understand every piece of an idea in order to fully understand it, unless the person is zoning out which still remains a mystery to everyone (except for the aliens).