Walk of Eurydice from Zelda Velasquez on Vimeo.
Entropy: the general trend of the universe toward death and disorder.
Time: a non-spatial continuum that is measured in terms of events which succeed one another from past through present to future. Eurydice's tale in Greek mythology revolves around Orpheus--but what happened to her? What did she go through before Orpheus failed his task? And after? This video is an attempt at giving a visual medium to the plight of Eurydice and her circling path, with Orpheus's song cycling in the background to show passage of time and the weight of the issue.
0 Comments
Cultural Appropriation: When do art critics stop calling it art and start calling it out?11/27/2017 In the New York Times article, "Coming Face to Face With Jimmie Durham", the article rants and raves about the artistic genius within his works. They talk of self invention and gild him golden with somewhat masturbatory praise that, ultimately, if we looked at the truth of his art, should be shameful.
Jimmie Durham is not Native American. He's not Cherokee. Claiming heritage that is ultimately not yours to claim (and doing it for a long period of time) is not subversive--and calling it "politically charged self invention" is far too floral and far too polite to be acceptable--it's cultural appropriation. Initially I'd chosen Jimmie Durham's work to write on because I found it to be incredibly aesthetically pleasing, but now that I have looked into the context of his work (and the artist himself, really), I find it to be wholly unsettling that not only has this man taken up the assumed "allotted diversity spot" for Native American Fine Artists, but rather than be recognized as being in the wrong, he's praised. Cultural appropriation and bastardization within the art world is not a foreign concept. Big names like Pablo Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh, and Paul Gaugin (to list a few) have all been known to draw from other cultures in order to further their own art (Van Gogh with Japonisme, Gaugin and Picasso with Primitivism), but at least they didn't go as far to claim these cultures as their own (though, an argument against Picasso could be made, what with his lack of giving credit to African Art as his muse). Right now there's a question of whether art should be separate from the artist and I argue that in order to fully understand the piece, one must know the context from which it was created. Sadly, these pieces, compelling and beautiful as they are, are forever marred by their insulting artist, and it's disappointing that the New York Times failed to recognize this. This is quite possibly my least favourite project so far. I'd thought working with Animate and Illustrator was a hellish experience, but Sketchup seems to have taken it as a challenge. While my finished product does look livable and somewhat comfortable (and the program *did* allow me to have a warrior from Castle in the Sky) I felt like the process was mostly a continuous headache of searching for my items, finding that the program rejected saving certain parts of my house (my bathroom didn't survive the trauma), or unknowingly skewing my walls until it's too late to alter them without going back on hours of work.
That said, I do think that if I'd been particularly fond of 3D modeling in general I wouldn't be as harsh to the program. My strong suits lay in illustration and anything 3D is sure to trigger a migraine. Perhaps once I get past this issue, if ever, I'll return to this program and try again. As an animation student, this project was initially a breath of fresh air. Not only was it 90% an illustration, but it was also presented as being easier than frame-by-frame animation cells and hand drawn hell. But then, well, I hadn't realized the sort of pains Animate and Illustrator were going to set upon me.
The creation of the initial image was quite possibly the easiest part of this project. After three doodles in my sketchbook, the first being of a large crow (as my last name means Crow) and the last being my sharpened grip coming out of the grave (I...I'm a rather sickly and dramatic person) they easily melded into the illustration above, and without much tweaking, it was drawn from sketchbook to tablet in under an hour. The sharp fingers of the hand are my resolve, the umbrella a trademark, the feathers symbolic of my last name, and the snake and crunchy grass beneath it representing my home state and general love of reptiles. It's a rather simplistic image, all in all. What wasn't simplistic, however, was the process. For reasons unknown to me, both programs we were supposed to be using to create our projects decided we were to be mortal enemies, and had they decided otherwise I would have had this gif done a week earlier, and not the day before its due date. But alas. Sometimes life revolves around program lags, frozen screens, brush glitches, loading bars, photoshop hacks, and prayer. And sometimes, life is easier hand animated. bookstore bops from Zelda Velasquez on Vimeo.
Every Saturday, from 10 am to 6 pm, I work at a used bookstore called Crazy4Bookz. The majority of my clientele consists of new moms, 60+ senior citizens, and lost philosophy students, so it's kind of a ridiculous situation when the vape store next door starts blasting their music over my liminal beats. Even better when they let their most buzzed employee futz with the sign out front.
So for this project, I took a fuzzed out version of Mr. Brightside by the Killers, made a recording of the somewhat terrifying wiring under my desk, doubled it, recorded my hands messing with books, either by turning pages or hastily flipping through them, and finally, I took a sample of the sound of cars passing by. Because my store isn't exactly popular. Most of our books are mystery and romance, and we don't carry any of the current authors, because our stock depends on whatever the community has donated. Which leaves us with an ungodly amount of harlequin romance novels, true crime, children's books galore, and incredibly dated sci-fi. Anyway, I think the process wasn't the hard part. Putting everything together wasn't an issue--I like to think I'm quite able when it comes to sound illustration. No, the issue I had was finding time to record the sounds. Namely, timing my recordings with the slow parts of the day. Where I wouldn't have customers muddying up my sound--because I wasn't going for the busy times. I was looking for the slow, crawling, homework inducing times... Liu Bolin is a chinese artist who's most known for being The Invisible Man. In his pieces are mundane areas in which he has been painted to fit the background and, for all intents and purposes, blend in to his surroundings. They are typically talking about his country and the issues of labor, food safety, and political climate--though he has also been known to branch out into other topics and areas, such as climate change, historical landmarks, and art for art's sake. In the Ted Talk, Bolin talks mostly about the process of his art and the topics he's chosen, though doesn't really delve into his own past as an artist. Part of this I think stems on the fact that his talk was being actively translated as he spoke, which was a bit nerve wracking as they didn't include all of his translator's audio in the video and left me distracted: did Bolin pause to allow his translator time to speak, or did he forget he was there and simply spitball? It was hard to tell.
What I can say was that his art definitely was worth the seven minutes of anxiety. I chose Bolin's video because its thumbnail was interesting--initially I though maybe he and his translator were an artist duo--but stayed because his art was just as gripping as his colleague Ai Wei-Wei's. I don't know that I was inspired to do anything similar to his art--I hate makeup being on me, I'd hate paint even more--but I did think his pieces were strong in their delivery of his concepts. Definitely an artist to keep an eye on. It's detrimental to think of "talent" as some God given gift. Talent, like taste, is slowly cultivated through care and interest and time. My grandparents, like many grandparents, boast about my accomplishments to anyone who might listen, and for the first half of the conversation it's wonderful...and then, like a raspberry seed, turns bitter the further on we chew. You're so talented, my grandparents and their friends/audience might say...always say... I could never draw. I can't even draw a stick figure. But God--
And my stomach roils and it's the same conversation I've had since I first picked up a pencil. Talent. As though I don't draw til my hands ache and my fingers tremble and I ask myself, watching my hand shake ever so slightly, if I should stop or...or if I should draw just a little longer? Just a little bit. Shouldn't hurt, right? Grit can be so hard to control sometimes. Either you have too little and nothing progresses, or you have too much and your body falls to pieces. A perfect balance is necessary for both profit and health, and for an artist, triple-y so. After all, frustration comes naturally to our kind. If it isn't perfect, it isn't good, and if it isn't good, well, why bother? Of course, the natural response to anyone with a future in this industry is a gutteral, Why not?, followed by furious scribbling. At least, that'd be my response. Grit, I think, is something that comes naturally to those who are the more stubborn sort. If my original mode of attack didn't work, well, try it again. No, nothing? Let's do it again. Hands hurt? No problem, but that dang thing didn't work either and the piece isn't finished and well, you're not giving up, are you? It's in this that you cultivate talent, that you progress in your style, that you hone your skills and continue on to bigger and better things. I don't believe that there are any gifts when it comes to the metaphysical. My mother gave me hazel eyes and my father gave me my Aguirre bump and neither gave me the muscle memory necessary to draw like I do. My brothers didn't inherit their musical ability, they calloused their fingers on their own just as I have, and none of it has anything to any kind of divinity. Our art may mingle with the divine in topic, but in application? My bones creak because of me. With that said, I think the article's description of optimism is a little out of my realm. My shade of optimism is much the same as my grandmother's: You're not dead yet. Get off the ground. If you're not doing anything with yourself, if you're not working for something or seeking out something or anything--then why bother? And if you ever find yourself asking why bother and not finding an answer, then an acknowledgement of what went wrong needs to be had, followed by another plan. And so the cycle continues. I'm not sure that grit or talent require optimism, but I'm sure as hell that it requires a healthy dose of stubbornness and confidence. I think, a lot of times, street art is expected to say more than it needs to. With this project I created a creature that was both grotesque and beautiful in the hopes of giving the campus a figure who could be both a simple beauty or an omen. Campuses, like many dwellings, have urban legends. The lights in McEwen flicker because it's haunted. Houghton is closed because the basement floor is housing Something created by the science department by complete accident. There is a Hag who lives in the forest, and only the track team is safe from her clutches. I thought perhaps illustrating a creature of my own would only add to the familiarity and flavor of Fred life, and so, I created this guardian. They could be used to start conversations on how we should treat the earth better because it will affect us, etc etc, but I think the main point of this creature was to give the campus a beauty that might allow them to pay more attention to their surroundings. The toadstools in their hair, pastel as they are, could easily be recognizable as their brown brethren in the forest. The dandelions are common and pulled to a ridiculous portion to stress their intricacies--things we might miss by simply walking past their buds on the sidewalk. Their bark is reminiscent of birch trees, not the stoney white of their winter skins, but the fresh, wetted green of their spring appearance. And there's a hole, because what is a guardian to do if those they're to be in charge of are being so easily forgotten?
That said, I think what I'd mostly like for viewers to do is to enjoy the creature. To enjoy the mystery it proposes and seek out answers where often there are none. I like the thought of seeing a figure, tall and monstrous and fae, outside of Williams Center because that bland and concrete building needs flavor, and why not give it some kick? I think the hardest bit of this process was not picking the spot or applying the figure--or really having to create the figure at all--but to make myself believe that the image I was creating was real. After a certain amount of hours spent on a project, ones eyes start to deceive and the mind begins to doubt and oh no, it's not good enough. But I think, coming back to it this morning, they look right at home with those pretty little bushes at their feet. Journey's are interesting to document...but sometimes, posting a morning commute online is enough to trigger paranoia. For this project, I documented my commute not from my home 45 min away from Fredonia, but from my friend Ashley's dorm in the village. This move was partially influenced by concern of giving away my home address, but mostly caused by time crunches, practicality, and ease of shooting. My typical commute is a car ride, long and boring, through corn fields and grapevines. There's very little building to utilize for a mural, and ironically, those that would qualify are already covered in paint. So rather than choose the side of a barn and break trespasser laws, I decided this was probably my best bet.
Outside of practicality and paranoia, this project wasn't entirely gripping. That's not because it's a bad project, but because of my own sort of...animation haze leftover from last night's bullet hell of frames and coloring and corrections and so many frames. So I can't accurately say how this project made me feel. I took photos because it was required, and where these photos were taken doesn't entirely matter to me because, well, autopilot has been on since midnight last night. That said, I think they came out alright--dramatic and angular and reaching in form... I think when approaching this project the hardest part was to come up with doable ideas. Figuring out what looked good came second after deciding what image, where, and when. As a commuting student, these are often the hardest bits to fulfill. For instance, my first idea for the bird's eye photo was to climb the recycled goods art piece in front of McEwen and take a picture of my roomie down below. Of course, this wasn't the ultimate choice, but it was a good idea. A different one involving a framed person was of me laying down on the floor of the elevator and take a picture of the reflection. Again, not executed, mostly because of the public humiliation aspect, but...I would argue it would've looked cool. On the other side of that, there was one photo that didn't come out as expected. The movement photo is actually a screenshot of a slo-mo video I took of a paper airplane...but because I was taking it with my phone and zoomed in a little, it's...smaller than I'd have liked it to be. In fact, it looks like one of those "CRYPTID, SPOTTED" memes. Just add in a red circle around it and some exclamation points, and it could end up on Weekly World News.
In the end, I find my photo's are more aesthetically pleasing and..possibly even a little bit more creative when I'm just taking them for funsies. That's not to say that the photos above aren't good. A lot of the ones I took of my roommate were really nice--my favourite being the Nine Inch Nails-esq photo (captioned, Close Up) of her looking upwards, her hair and eye scratch being rather gripping in the whole of it. |
CategoriesArchives |