Friday, April 12, 2013

Artist Post

Chris Spooner 
Chris Spooner, born and raised in Sheffield, UK, is a graphic and web designer who got his passion for art by building robots out of cardboard boxes. He chose subjects like Art and Design as his main focus throughout his education and eventually began working in the field as a graphic and web designer. He has created Spoon Graphics, one the most creative web design portfolios out there, and also has two blogs: Blog.SpoonGraphics, which gave him his fame, and Line25, where he continues his documentations of all of his designs. 
Despite his education in Art and Design, most of his works are now based on self-teaching and experimentation. He uses what he learns to write very helpful and creative tutorials on his blogs, which are the majority of his work right now. Spooner's tutorials have become very popular and has created a high demand for more work from him, keeping him very busy. His pieces are very colorful and energetic  which I believe makes him so popular with young designers. 

I find Spooner's works to be very captivating and well designed  He puts a lot of time into making every piece just right and I admire him for that. He says that he will have days where he is feeling really creative and get so much done, and other days where he will get nothing done. In a way, I feel like we have that in common because I know I will put off a project when I can't think of anything creative to do but then I'll have a spurt of inspiration and get a lot done. Overall, I like Spooner's designs and concepts because they are very lively and eye-catching. He has a very quirky and lively personality which can be seen in his pieces and makes them unique and awesome. 

Monday, April 1, 2013

Artist Talk

Natalia Gonzalez 
Natalia Gonzalez is a Bolivian artist currently working in Santa Cruz, Bolivia and Pittsburgh, PA, two extremely different places. She has a licentiate in Fine Arts, a MFA in studio art, and a Certificate in the College Teaching of Art. Her interests are focused on time and space because they are a complex continuum that are interdisciplinary. She says that events exist at a particular time in space, which I believe she tries to capture in her works. Her take on art is not of the traditional type, but instead it can be classified as raw and new because she lets chance and interruptions, boundaries and delimiting, placement and temporality, and improvisational comprise her pieces.
 I found Natalia's works to be refreshing and interesting because they aren't the epitome of what you would think "art" would be, but she makes them pieces of art by allowing the time and space of the surroundings work in harmony. She uses mirrors, video cameras, screens and other everyday objects to create her pieces, which gives it a natural and raw effect. I like how she talked about chance and interruptions because in my opinion, a work of art is really created by chance or by interruption. It just happens. Too much planning can make the piece seem to rigid or boring. So, her commenting on those ideas exemplifies that she allows for them to happen and make her art even better. Even though her art isn't traditional, I still think it deserves its gratification because Gonzalez eliminates physical boundaries and lets time and space work naturally together to make an outstanding and interesting work of art.

Sunday, March 31, 2013

Vito Acconci Reading

I thought Vito Acconci's "Public Space in Private Time" was a very contradictory and confusing reading because the ideas he talked about were bizarre and hard to relate to. In section 12 he states that "public space is an analogue for sex" and that's all people pretty much think about, which is kind of ridiculous to draw conclusions on. Also, just the way he words his sentences creates confusion and they sound repetitive. For example, in section 18, Vito says "the built environment is built because it's been allowed to be built," which kind of over exemplifies what he is trying to say because of the way he worded it. Overall, I thought it was very hard to follow Acconci's piece because it was composed of strange ideas and was hard to relate to  real life.