Leonardo Davinci

Over spring break I visited the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia PA. This was a frequent school field trip when I lived there, but my boyfriend, a budding mechanical engineer, got to see it for the first time. The Franklin Institute is a Natural Science and History Museum that celebrates active learning through play. Summed up, it's fun AND educational.

They had just opened a new exhibit called Leonardo Davinci's Workshop. They had digitized all his notebooks, and created huge computer screens that you could flip through. They even added animated models of his sketches and how they might have worked if they had been built. They took many of his models, like a spring powered moving cart and elaborate flying machines, and built life sized scale models.

The prolific amount of work and huge variation of applications that Davinci created is astonishing. A famous painter and engineer, Davinci took knowledge from all areas of academia and integrated them into innovative ideas. His work is an example of creativity and intellect working elegantly as cohesive elements. I highly recommend this new exhibit at the Franklin Institute. It is an inspiration that pushes perceived limitations of man's ability.

Under the Dome

Imagine a group of children holding a magnifying glass on a sunny day over a colony of ants. Watching for amusement as they burn. Now imagine a group of beings from another world trapping an entire group of humans and performing the same practice. This is the concept of Stephen King's book, Under the Dome. A large impenetrable dome appears over the town of Chester Mills, and what follows is the devolution of community into a panic stricken, desperate and savage group of individuals who struggle for power and resources.

I really enjoy Stephen King, and this is by no means a review or a critique. Instead I'd like to talk about one of the themes that seems apparent in all his books: good and evil in humanity. More specifically, the corruption of what was once good.

As a psychology major I am very interested in understanding the series of events that create a person. So naturally, the degradation of society in Under the Dome, made me drool a little. They way people are slowly and subtly shaped and manipulated by others and the environment around them is so cool. King's rendering of the human condition is tangible and raw. It's real and evil.

I feel my own work is inspired by this human trend toward fallacy. Instead of relishing it and celebrating it like King does, I try to cover it up with excuses and hide it under explanations. It appears my work and I are in denial about our pessimistic view of society. Maybe I should spend sometime making work that explores my frustrations instead of my denials.

My Clothing Diet.

This past summer I moved out of my parent's house and took all of my possessions along with me. There is something about packing up over 50 shirts and 20 pairs of pants that makes you think... "I have too many clothes." And after lugging boxes full of clothes to Rochester, I decided that I wanted to restructure my wardrobe.

Now, this did not entail buying new clothes. I owned heaps of clothes I never wore. This was the time to stop being so picky and unsatiable and learn to be happy with what I already had.

I promised myself to stop buying clothes for a whole year. With the exception of socks and underwear.

That was last August. It's been eight months.

I feel like my priorities have changed drastically. My body image is no longer about what I wear, but how my body looks and feels. I am less concerned with appearance, thus more comfortable and happy with it. Little oddities that I once noticed in my clothes are gone. The back of my closet, where clothes went untouched for small nuances is slowly being integrated back into my wardrobe.

I'm really proud of this promise. And recommend it. When you don't have the option to buy new clothes, you are forced to reevaluate what you have and realize it was enough all along.

Wes Peden

Wes Peden grew up in Rochester, and learned how to juggle when he was very young. Today he has become one of the most inspiring and innovative performing artists in the juggling world. Follow his blog at http://papermacheanimals.tumblr.com/. For more information, check out his website, wespeden.com.

I first saw Wes perform when he was 14 years old at a juggling festival in Buffalo NY. This was six years ago, and even then his style was beginning to evolve into a unique and creative brand of manipulation. I had the pleasure of seeing him perform twice this past week and his skill at performing has become even more refined.

His success is in his balance between skill, performance, and humor. He combines thought provoking sound and content, with the subtle humors of humanity and impressive skill. His artistry is not above his audience, a flaw of many circus performers. He is easy to relate to and expressive on stage. At 21 years old, he has so much more to offer the world.

If you even see just one juggler, you should watch Wes perform.

Upcoming Events.

The official postcard for my show! As a novice photo shop user I'm excited about how much I learned and how well they came out. The show consists of a great group of talented artists and is definitely worth checking out!

Film is not my Medium

Today was the official release of The Strong Jugglers trailer! Check it out!

The Strong Jugglers Go Bananas!

A Tribute to Childhood

When I was very young and living in Pennsylvania I found myself exploring the beautiful indoor/outdoor gardens that make up Long Wood Gardens. I would go for school trips, to see light displays, fountain shows, and fire works. One of my fondest memories, is of their children's garden. Here there were hedges that created mazes and passage ways with water features that you could play in. Simply put, it was awesome!

Last week, I had the pleasure of returning for the first time as an adult. The childrens' garden has been renovated, and certainly did not disappoint! The designers and artists that created it, inspired that same awe in my adult self as they did years ago.Everything was made to scale. We had to duck through passageways to get to secret parts of the garden.

The fountains and statues in the garden created a magical atmosphere.
There was a great balance of aesthetic beauty and playfulness.
These birds blew bubbles into the fountain. Imagine walking through stone passage ways and finding quaint gardens filled with jovial fountains and small nooks to play hide and seek. This is all while experiencing a strong enveloping smell of roses and greenery no matter what season.

Magic.

My Most Recent Artist Statement

This is my most recent copy of my Artist Statement. Feedback is always appreciated about the statement and the title. "Quiet Conflict" is my Senior Thesis Exhibition. It opens April 1st, 7-10pm at the Hungerford building located on the corner of Goodman and Main.

Quiet Conflict explores my frustration and, consequently, the defense mechanisms I have developed to maintain a positive view of society, while focusing on the fragility of character. People are unbalanced, malleable, and contradictory. They are twisted and warped, but maintain the delicate and cherished qualities of personality. While beautiful, they are contorted by their environment.

I try not to see people in a negative light, but the situations they’ve experienced as mediators of who they have become. Unfortunately, people have selfish tendencies and take comfort in their confined perspective of the world. This fills society with conflict, pain, and tragedy that we put upon ourselves. This is a perspective that I struggle with everyday. As a student of psychology, I use predisposition, aversive environments and psychopathology to pardon people of blame. In doing so I explain away the awful actions of both myself and everyone else.

My images are created with a collection of dyed paper, pen, paint, and thread. I use abstract figurative forms to cultivate the nostalgic confusion that society provokes. The handwriting represents my personal process of reaffirmation by repeating phrases on paper that I replay in my mind. The thread is a controlled medium that attempts to bind and control, with limited success, while the paper is subject to the whim of wine, tea, and bleeding ink. Together these represent my internal conflict and struggle to understand, appreciate, and maintain faith in myself and others.

Circumnavigating the Chesapeake

Photos by Courtney Voss

A Medieval Triumph

We could all use a little more dressing up and dancing around in our lives. It's not everyday you get to battle a cardboard dragon with a balloon sword in front of several hundred people.

Check out the recording of our performance here!
Boar's Head Juggling Performance 2011

I Like them a Little Under Ripe

Samuli Heimonen

Website

Samuli Heimonen is an artist from Finland. His paintings really call out to me because they are so sad and heavy. The subjects in his work have complex relationships that are easily understood and empathized by the viewer. His imagery is sometimes very playful in concept, but visually they are so forlorn and crushing to look at. This makes them incredibly endearing and heart wrenching. I can't think of a way to describe his work, other than sad. But this is not the misery type of sad. This is the crushing deep reality that life is hard, and we all only have so much control. Very bittersweet.

James Turrell

Image found here.

It's like he had a sky sticker and stuck it on the ceiling. The sky is this big expansive thing, but when you see it through a confined space, it becomes something else. It becomes integrated with the living space. The sky seems to be part of the room, like a giant peeled part of the ceiling off and there was a some old wall paper from the previous owners.

That's kind of a cool metaphor. I'll leave you with that.

Actually Pretty Accurate

Sigmund Freud

I've just realized that this is my artist statement dumbed down. Yikes.

"People suck. Everyone has been betrayed, over looked, or just generally frustrated with others. Life sucks. It’s not fair. It makes people more sucky and gives me a complex."

Not Another Zombie Book

I put this in my Scrapbook over six years ago as a junior in high school, and now as a senior in college its concept is at the core of my art.

"I majored in English, but as a young man I read a great deal of psychology," the Head told them. "I began with Freud, of course, everyone begins with Freud... then Jung...Adler... worked my way around the whole ball field from there. Lurking behind all theories of how the minds works is a greater theory: Darwin's. In Freud's vocabulary, the idea of survival as the prime directive is expressed by the concept of the id. In Jung's, by the rather grander idea of blood conscious thought, all memory, all rational ability, were to be stripped from a human mind in a moment, what would remain would be pure and terrible."
He paused, looking around for comment. None of them said anything. The Head nodded as if satisfied and resumed.
"Although neither the Freudians nor the Jungians come right out and say it, they strongly suggest that we may have a core, a single basic carrier wave, or- to use language with which Jordan is comfortable- a single line of written code which cannot be stripped."
"The PD," Jordan said. "The prime directive."
"Yes," the Head agreed. "At bottom, you see, we are not Homo sapiens at all. Our core is madness. The prime directive is murder. What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends, is that we came to rule the earth not because we were the smartest, or even the meanest, but because we have always been the craziest, most murderous motherfuckers in the jungle. And that is what the Pulse exposed five days ago."

-Cell, A Novel by Stephen King

Well this will change how I write Art History Papers

Google just unveiled The Art Project. A site with you can look at masterpieces from your own computer. You can zoom in, and move around. A google map for art, if you will.

Awesome.