There will be live music by the John Santos Quintet, poetry readings by Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop, and demonstrations and lectures on printmaking.
I am excited to go and see all the demonstrations of print making. CCA has a shuttle for students at the Oakland and San Francisco campus, so I hope to see you there. Lucky for me, I can walk to the De Young from my apartment.
Both my art history classes have visual study papers due right after Thanksgiving. But I don’t think I ll be in the writing mood with a belly filled with turkey, so I am trying to work on my papers now.
The modern art history paper is the most serious of th two. Dr. Conner provided four pairs of art from which to choose. The format is basic compare and contrast. I am not stressing too much over the essay, it’s very basic college work, and it’s only 3-5 pages long. But I know Dr. Conner has very high writing standards, so I will need to spend some time on multiple drafts in order to get an A.
Over the pass couple of weeks we have been covering Surrealism, which I love. From the four possible topics, I picked the comparison between Victor Brauner’s painting Fascination and Salvador Dali’s sculpture Surrealist Object Functioning Symbolically.
I spent a couple of hours in the SFMoMA last weekend carefully studying these two works. I even made sketches. Both are obviously about gender and sexuality, but I think Dali’s has more to do with fetishism.
Our latest assignment in 4D was to create a performance peice and either tap it or perform it live in the front of the class. There were very little parameters, we could work in groups or individually, with no time constraints.
The result is this cute little video created by Natalie, Melissa and I. Hope you like it.
Ok. I know this entry is a bit late. Our last project in 3D Visual Dynamics was very challenging.
Everyone was split up into groups of four. Each group picked a recycled object to work with, stipulations being it must be either serial planes, spatial cells, or linear volumes.
From these objects we create a landscape, either natural, urban, or mixed. The landscapes must be illustrated using gradation of form and/or color.
Each student works on a 11×11 inch base, which must fit together to form a 22×22 inch final sculpture. Each student must also build up at least one part of their panel to 22 inches.
My group decided to work with old film transparency slides. We also asked if to build our base for the sculpture out of clear acrylic to up-light our slides.
Looking back on our choice, none of us knew how labor intensive it would be to building slides up to 22 inches. Over the past 3 and half weeks my group worked almost daily. Mostly we used industrial adhesive to glue the slides together. I know know the photos don’t show, but I think I logged more than 40 hours on this project, just on my section. That is probably the worst part, my group busted their asses, and you’d never know by looking at the final sculpture.
Professor Lee was very helpful through the entire process. About half way through we realized we didn’t have enough slides, and she called around to different places and managed to get us enough slides to build a basic pyramid like form. This for was possible because we reused cuttings from the bottom of the pyramid to make the top.
Last weeks critique of the project went well. Professor Lee recognized the extraordinary amount of work we put in, as well as the craftsmanship need to cut such small gradations into the slides. The other students had very little to say. I don’t have my persona grade for my section of the project, but I ll make an update next week when I have it.
The vise president of student affairs sent out an email to all students recently. The CCA will be holding open forums to find out what students feedback about the school. They also promise desert and drinks.
If it is anything like orientation than drinks will be coke, and desert will be hostess cupcakes.
What is the administration trying to do with these meetings? Do they really think they will get honest words from young people in a public forum in front of all their professors and peers? I don’t think the administration is stupid, they probably know they won’t.
So prove them wrong, and go speak your mind.
The first meeting is at the 3-4:30, November 7 at the Oakland Campus. The second meeting is at 3-4:30, November 14 at the San Francisco Campus.
I personally don’t have anything to say, I’ve only been at CCA a few months. But I might go just to see what other people say.
