Postcards

This project offered me a way to talk about the divide between high art and low art, accessibility, and art as commodity. While I fear that many of my ideas may not have been communicated clearly enough through the piece, I felt a satisfaction from this project that I did not fell from the projects that I completed earlier this semester. I think that this mostly stems from the fact that I chose a medium that is very familiar to me and focused on a tradition that i really value. It forced me to take some of these ideas that I am reading about in Dewey's book and consider them in more specific terms.








Kierstin

Tool Project

I really enjoyed the idea of this project. Utility's relationship to art is something I think about a lot and was interested in further exploring.

Beyond the idea, though, I had a lot of trouble getting into it. Welding was something that I had a really hard time getting comfortable with.

Kierstin

Replication Project

At first, this assignment sort of frustrated me in that it placed so much emphasis on one's ability to imitate. That frustration pushed me to find a material and an object that might create some sort of meaning with their juxtaposition.
The idea to use chocolate came from Cosimo Cavallaro's piece, "My Sweet Jesus," a life size crucifixion cast in chocolate. I started thinking about the connotations that chocolate has and came to thinking about the abundance of information that the average American has readily available to them. While the brain may have been a somewhat literal choice, I didn't feel that I could communicate the idea if knowledge or information without it.
The process of carving the brain out of a two pound block of chocolate posed more problems than I had anticipated. Temperature stability was the largest issue because of it's affect on the way the tools either cut into the material or chipped it away. Another issue was the discoloration that happened after a few hours of carving. after doing some research, I attempted to unify the surface quality by glazing it with vegetable oil, but it didn't make much of a difference.

Kierstin