Alternative Workshop: Encaustics Photography

Alternative Workshop: Final

 

iPhone 4s pinhole stopmotion

Photographers: Benaiah Gagne, Abram Gagne, Karen Mawikere

Music by: Rilo Kiley

Artist Lecture: Joo Lee Kang

Image source: www.jooleekang.blogspot.com

I was interested in Joo Lee Kang ‘s work because I thought it was really neat that the only thing she used in her art (at least the ones that are in the museum) is ballpoint pens. She started her presentation by telling her audience about her inspirations for the art that’s hanging up and how she began drawing in her certain style.

She conducts a lot of research for her drawings of animals because she wants them to be accurate, but she uses these studies to turn them in surrealist scenes that show the interaction between the creatures and the plants. She also likes to incorporate the human to have an interaction with the scenes, which is the reason she prints these images large so it feels like the scenes are life-size. I think it’s neat that even though she does practice drawings through researching her creatures, she still adds her own style by turning her creatures into characters in her art big drawings and sets them in different poses.

Joo Lee told us that she likes to draw with ballpoint pens because that’s the utensil she normally has on her. The ballpoint pen is also easy to transport so she can take it around anywhere she goes. She enjoys the “grayness” it holds which makes it easy for her to build up her value through more and more layers, as opposed to hard charcoal where adding layers isn’t as subtle. If it’s not a ballpoint pen that she has on her, she uses pencils or highlighters or really anything. I liked that she shared this with us because it gave us an insight into her personal preferences for how she works and she didn’t try to cover up that the ballpoint pen drawings was just something she did in her daily life and it worked out for the kinds of drawings she wanted to do.

One thing that I thought was interesting was when she said that she always needs to be at the gallery when they are installing for an exhibition of her work. She wants to be able to have a say in how people experience her work, and there is no set blue print that fits all museums. For example, the UNH MoA has a big window at the entrance so when people walk by, they have a straight-shot view of what’s going on at one specific part of the balcony wall. For this reason, she chose to hang up her 3-D installation of practice sketches so that it catches the viewers’ eyes as soon as they walk by the entrance.

After listening to her talk, I was a little disappointed to know that some of her pieces were scanned in and then printed larger because I was really intrigued at first at how someone can make a big pen drawing so perfectly with no mistakes. I also wished that the wallpaper was all hand-drawn even though I know it would have taken forever.

Artist Lecture: Kyle Saver

Image source: www.kylestaver.com

I know you’re not supposed to judge something by its cover, but that’s exactly what I did going into Kyle Staver’s talk. I saw the posters around the PCAC that announced her talk and I wasn’t really interested just by looking at the photograph of her painting that was on the poster.

She began her presentation with an “artist statement”-- it’s not really an artist statement but it is the writing piece that she submitted in her application for a grant. The statement was not talking about her work, but rather talked about what painting meant to her. I thought it was a good way to start because the fact that she didn’t write an artist statement like she was supposed to made me interested in her personality.

The slideshows she had up were not in chronological order, nor were they grouped into series, which was a little bit confusing. When people asked her about her work, I liked that she took some time to think about her answers and gave us a raw response, meaning it did not sound like she rehearsed it 500 times. She seemed scatter-brained, which put me at ease because I’m pretty scatter-brained myself when it comes to talking about my work-- and still, UNH faculty invited her to come speak.

Throughout the talk, I became more interested about her process as a painter and about her personality, and those two things together made her paintings more interesting to me.

Artist Lecture: Eric Adjetey Anang

Image source: www.ghanacoffin.com

Going into this talk, I was interested to find out what exactly this person did. I had heard that he was a “fantasy coffin maker”, but I wasn’t one hundred percent sure as to what that meant. Regardless, I wanted to find out more.

Eric started his presentation with a video that someone made about his work. I thought this was a good way to hook the audience into the talk because generally people are more interested in watching videos rather than listening to a talk. He continued with the rest of his presentation with a slideshow of his work, organized chronologically. His first slideshows showed us the history of his business to help us understand how he got into the business that he’s in today.

I enjoyed the fact that he told the audience the difference between coffins that he makes for people in Ghana and the fantasy coffins that he made usually for people outside of his home country. He explained that “fantasy coffins” are ones that are in the shape of beer bottles, soda cans, and candy bars-- ones that are intended to be “fun”, not to be shown in a burial ceremony. But Eric primarily builds coffins that symbolize a great aspect of the deceased’s life: a chicken with chicks representing a mother with many children, a fish representing a person’s influence in the market, a hammer representing a carpenter, etc. These non-traditional shapes would not fall under the idea of fantasy because they are meaningful to the family of the deceased and are symbolic to that person’s life.

I also connected with the latter end of the slideshow because he told us that he really tries to make his way into school systems so that children would be able to expand their career options by seeing what he does for a living. Being in the art education program here at UNH, it was nice to hear what someone outside of this country thought about educating children in the arts.

At the end of the talk, I wanted to see all of his coffins in person especially since the art he makes is life-size (obviously). It’s crazier to think that he doesn’t plan out his work the way most woodworkers do around here. Rather, he just eyeballs and works on the vision inside his head.