press play print

Hello All -

This is my first foray into writing for our blog. It is actually tied in to my first art related foray since having Jericho. The boy wonder will be eight weeks old in a few days - crazy to think.

Okay back to the topic at hand...the IPCNY Summer Exhibit. I must be honest and upfront from the beginning - I went to see the show because I had a piece in it and because I had relatives in town and I thought visiting a gallery might be a fun NYC thing to do. I have to say, I was delightfully surprised by the high quality of work on display at the IPCNY. For those that don't know, the IPCNY is the International Print Center of New York. It is located in Chelsea in one of the buildings that has a million galleries in it. The IPCNY usually does an open call for new prints four times a year - it is a free call - open to all printmakers and printshops. The quality of the work on display there is consistently high.

This brings me back to the exhibit - I should have known it was going to be good because the gallery always shows interesting prints. I really responded to the way the exhibit was curated - it was loosely based on social themes/political concerns. When you walked in, you were immediately confronted with themes of death and contemporary demise. I loved Michael Kruger's piece that featured Evil Kneivel on a motorcycle going off a jump. It was printed on acid tabs. Please forgive my lack of titles - I forgot to bring home the title sheet - instead bringing home the juror's statement. Yes, I am a dork. Oh, and I need to give Micheal a shout out for having his print featured on the postcard for the exhibit - it was a different piece, but a cool one as well.

Another piece that I adored was Jeff Wetzig's diptych prints commenting on birth and death. They featured a Xerox Machine/fax machine and a shredder. Very humorous - I think the Bush administration took these two prints to heart.

Actually humor was a big part of the show. For a theme exhibit that dealt with some pretty dark topics, there was a lot of humor on display. Eileen Foti's piece made me laugh out loud. It featured a gouache painting of Dick Cheney in all his gun toting glory. The image was atop of a litho printed McDonald's french fry box. The box was assembled into it's true form. The whole piece was framed in a gulded shadow box with beautiful red fabric encapsulating the carton.

I also enjoyed the humor in Randy Bolton's piece commenting on global warming. Also a diptych - he had a silkscreen of two snowmen, a four color separation silkscreen - showing one snowman intact and the other just a puddle on the ground. I apologize because my description does not do the piece justice. The strength of the piece comes from the cartoonish drawing - stylized like a New Yorker cover (not like the Obama cover controversy). It is through the simplistic style that creates the oomph.

There were a bunch of other pieces that left an impact on me - Desiree Alvarez's delicate funerary scarfs with machine guns printed on the surface, Jonathan Thomas's etching of a house under siege by flooding waters, and Glen Ligon's neon inspired etching that reads "Negro Sunshine" - I also love Ligon's "Me We" neon piece at the Studio Museum in Harlem, but that's another topic.

I must sign off from Brooklyn for now - Jericho is awake and in need of attention.

Traci

Years ago, as part of a local Girlfest celebration in Honolulu, I attended a presentation by stop-motion artist Emily Hubley (http://www.emilyhubley.com/).  Many of you may recognize the animations she created for now the cult-classic movie Hedwig and the Angry Inch.  The concept of adding time and motion to my traditional prints and drawings became irresistible, and I purchased my first portable light table with every intention of immediately creating my own animations. 

Since that moment of inspiration, animation and video have influenced the work of both my fiancé Rob Molyneux and myself.  For his thesis work in grad school, Rob created three-minute long digital video loops of natural occurrences that were translated from original video to frame-by-frame Xeroxes and then printed via lithographic gum transfer before being transposed back into video.

Now, as a 2D, photo, & digital imaging teacher myself, I have been working on projects that utilize stop motion animation in the hope that my students will find this type of work as inspiring and motivational as I have.

For a three-day workshop at the Contemporary Museum, Rob and I had students create identification flipbooks using a series of twelve 4”x7” cards. Following our walk through the gallery, we handed out three cards and a maximum of four colored pencils to each student (a limited color pallet would prove useful later), instructing them to draw an image on each card, one depicting their personal symbol (made up or preexisting), an animal whose characteristics they shared or that embodied characteristics they would like to have, and their alter ego, respectively.  The alter ego could be a superhero with powers the kids desired, demonstrate skills they would like to showcase, embody a future career, or a include a combination of these.

After kids finished these initial drawings, we handed out nine additional cards and showed them our demo flipbooks.  We discussed the process of metamorphosis and talked about how to change their 1^st image into their 2^nd, 2^nd into their 3^rd, and 3^rd back into their 1^st slowly through a sequence of three cards between each pair.  We encouraged kids to do their metamorphosis in pencil line work first and add colors later.  We demonstrated three options for metamorphosis: 1) shape morphing (images slowly shift in shape & placement into the next image), 2) shape explosion (images explode into their major shape components & are reassembled as the next image), and 3) storyline (images morph but more through a logical story, (e.g. zoom in on an image of the earth to find the animal image). 

In my past experience, this has been a difficult lesson for young ones to grasp; however, I believe the availability of multiple visual examples, slowly flipping from image to image while simultaneously asking questions and explaining how the image is changing, limiting the color scheme (less metamorphosis with color), and working with a smaller class size helped even the youngest students achieve success.  At the end of the class, I photographed each image before we taught students how to bind their cards into a book and trim a corner for easier flipping with their thumbs.  I then edited these images into digital video loops and placed them all on a dvd, one for each participant. I even added a looped sample of each artist’s chosen song for the artwork to the final videos. Students were very enthusiastic about learning this type of stop-animation, because it introduced a new way of thinking about two-dimensional imagery by adding the element of change over the dimension of time.  This was a low-tech way of introducing the artistic media of animation and video to a young audience (Instructors' work above, & student work below).