Pocket Shrine

Independent Project in Gallery

SuttonBeresCuller

SuttonBeresCuller is a collaboration of three of Cornish's alumni, and location for them is very important for their work. Together they make sculptures and installations. They showed us examples of what they have donee. They did an interactive work called "Trailer Park" where they towed a park and bench around by a car, completed with living vegetation. They drove this around, to more industrial areas without nature and parked it, so people could sit on the bench. Another project they worked on was "Island" where they created a floating island and put it in the water. Their intention was spend a week on this island, shipwrecked, but problems with the anchor made their week endeavor to 24 hours. This was just two of the projects they told us about. But with all of the works they did, it completely involved location, site effected how they did the work, what the work meant, and how people interacted with the work. They also said that  they never really see their work until they see how the viewer interact with the work.
Something that I can take from their work, even though I am not an installation artist, is seeing how people react to your work, so you know what to do for next time or to modify. I can also take the fact of how locations could easily change the concept of the work.

Jeremy Mangan

Jeremy Mangan quickly became a favorite among the art freshmen. His work is playful, narrative, and very well crafted. He started his lecture with his coffee drawings. He explained that drawing with coffee was a way for him to have less control over his art, after doing realistic work for a long time. The subject matter of these were houses on stilts, for working with coffee and wanting a lot less control over his art, they still seem very structured to me. After doing these coffee drawings of houses for awhile he slowly starts to add local color to his houses, whites and grays. His houses start to look more realistic, adding some landscape to them to make them feel more real. He then adds more color to them, to then painting really colorful strips on the houses to collapsed houses. He then starts to present paintings that don't have houses as the main subject matter. He showed more landscape paintings where his background of realism really starts to show. He did paintings of a Hotel and Bar, Tents, Tent City. In all of these he really kept to them being narrative. The story wasn't clear in them, but left to the viewer to make up their own story to the works. Even though his painting seemed very closely related, he made it very clear that he wasn't interested in making the same kind of work all of the time, that he was all for some of his paintings sticking out from the rest.

Artist Statement

My Individual Project is a painting created with layers of plexiglass. I’ve been interested in layering for a while, and I wanted to experiment with plexiglass because I thought that would help my layering be more important in my work. So far I’ve mostly done my layering with just paints, and it was exciting to do a painting where the layers are more prominent in the piece. To me, a human figure is perfect for this kind of project because with painting a figure, it’s naturally not 2D and not static. So I thought it would be interesting to see a figure have more depth to it in the painting.

            Through making this piece, it’s been interesting seeing what works and what doesn’t. Every person has layers to them, it takes time to break through those layers and really know someone completely.  

Etsuko Ichikawa

Etsuko Ichikawa's main work was all about drawing with fire on large scale paper. I enjoyed these drawings the most out of everything she showed us. The process of these drawings was impressive, and it's something that will defiantly grab people's attention. But the process of glass blowing and rubbing them onto paper to make burn marks to make abstract designs. She also worked in installation and video, and performance art. She does a lot of collaboration with other artist and researches with others to advance her art work. I understand why she would want to make a video to show her art practices, because it is so experimental, but I don't believe she went about it the right way. She collaborated with a dancer to make this performance, but it didn't come in an intriguing way. If I would change anything about the video, I would like to see it just be her and not a production with a dancer and trying to make it more dramatic than it actually is. I would also would have liked it to have different music to it. I think that it turned into a bigger production than necessary, it should have been more about the practice. But her work as a whole was impressive to me, I really loved the big drawings, but not just because of how she did them or the scale.

Independent Project Progress