Graphic Language

Phantom Sightings @ LACMA

My friend Gary Garay will be participating in this exhibition, upcoming at LACMA.

April 6, 2008–September 1, 2008 | Art of the Americas

Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement will be the largest exhibition of cutting-edge Chicano art ever presented at LACMA. Chicano art, traditionally described as work created by Americans of Mexican descent, was established as a politically and culturally inspired movement during the counterculture revolutions of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This exhibition explores the more experimental tendencies within the Chicano art movement—ones oriented less toward painting and declarative polemical assertion than toward conceptual art, performance, film, photo- and media-based art, and "stealthy" artistic interventions in urban spaces. The exhibition includes approximately 125 works in all media, including painting and sculpture as well as installation, conceptual, video, performance art, and intermedia works that incorporate film, digital, and sound art. Artists featured are photographer Christina Fernandez, who documents the poetic and “phantom” in the urban landscape; Mario Ybarra Jr., who creates performances, site-specific installations and intermedia works; the “intermedia synaesthesia” of the seminal conceptual art group Asco; and the New York-based artist Nicola Lopez, who creates dramatic installations with drawings that extend from the wall into the gallery.

The curators are Rita Gonzalez, American Art, LACMA, Howard Fox, Contemporary Art, LACMA, and Chon Noriega, Adjunct Curator of Latino and Chicano Art, LACMA, and Director of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center.

This exhibition was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and was made possible in part by the Peter Norton Family Foundation and LACMA's Art Museum Council.

Additional support was provided by the Contemporary Projects Endowment Fund. Contributors to the fund include Mr. and Mrs. Eric Lidow, Ronnie and Vidal Sassoon, Steve Martin, The Broad Art Foundation, Bob Crewe, Tony and Gail Ganz, Ansley I. Graham Trust, Peter Norton Family Foundation, Barry and Julie Smooke, and Sandra and Jacob Y. Terner.

Moving Forward

More Sketches

This poster needs no introduction, just your participation and a little imagination

Interactive Poster

Click on the poster image to see simulation of public modification.

Fill in the Blanks Part 2

I originally wrote the following for an article title in Martin's class. I found myself hypnotised by the language and thought by writing these out it would give me more clarity.

After the last staement I was going to dive into a hyperactive first person description about anxiety experienced while waiting in line. I chose to leave the five statements without the additional text because I believed the ambiguity would force one to consider the statement as a cyclical paradox or a catalyst to "fill in the blanks". This could however back fire if the viewer is expecting those blanks to be filled, in which case whould the statement would be deemed incomplete and needing further clarification.

more coming soon...

Bottoms Up

Noise equals texture equals pattern equals type. Forced perspective creates illusion. The viewer must reconsider their position in space and in relation to the wall pattern to decode the message. Is the result an interactive space? The repetition of "yeah" echoes the visual noise. What if the repetition was replaced by loose narrative or an even more disjointed assemblage of words for the viewer to construct their own stories?

Fake ID

A hypothetical workshop. Re-identification, re-definition, reality remix.

On the Wall

Before class today I posted what I hope to be an ongoing extension of ideas discussed in and out of our semi private blogsphere. I have chosen to hang the poster outside of the A100 for very particular reasons. There is only one copy of the print, intended for each visual response. Duration of hanging will depend on willingness of the environment as well as other specified variables(tbd). Location will not be limited but for the terms of the current dialogue it will remain outside of the MFA studio.

The poster represents a voice, not specifically defined as a single voice or collective for that matter. The content will dictate the point of view, but it will at times seem purposefully ambiguous.

For this particular poster I have used data gathered from one of my blog posts for the content, nine responses to the question WHAT IS YOUR DESIGN WEAKNESS? IN ONE WORD.

Using a grid loosely based on the layout of the studio, I began to explore visual attitudes in voice, through grammar, placement, contrast, abstraction as a means to express the concept of WEAKNESS. I came up with 6 variations, representing the following typographic attitudes: ORGANIC, AMNIGUOUS, IRREVERENT, DEFENSIVE, DETERMINED AND ORDERLY. For presentation purposes I chose to hang the treatment for DEFENSIVE, not as a census of the participants' attitudes but rather as a point of departure for further dialogue.

The poster is a statement. Our weaknesses now exposed to the student body, faculty and staff, there is no reason to hide behind them. It is an honest relationship. There are no assumptions in the truth.

How will this be percieved? Does it welcome question and response? How will the dialogue progress over time?

Official Brain Dump

ask me about Public Poster Workshop.

-F

Hey Flo,

What about the Public Poster Workshop?

Ok, just kidding. I'll ask you when I see you.

T

This email dialogue is a perfect example of how to activate dialogue.

Maybe it's as simple as telling a person to engage rather than asking them to. But then theres the bait, the assumption that there is something worthwhile begging to be asked about. There's also an ambiguous title, mysterious, sterile...I saw something similar in the art office today. A swiss (style) poster for an art show. Everything within a tight grid, an unassuming sans serif. The perfection of it was too much to handle, I was suddenly in the midst of a mike mills commercial. But it got me through the doors.

Back to the title. The generic is so suspicious. But the vaguer the sexier.

Back to the dialogue. Like Soul II Soul, back to life, back to reality. Power. How do you consider the power of text and images? Is it irresponsible to want to move people in every gesture or is it comforting to help guide them seamlessly along the way, the status quo per se. As was discussed in Cameron's post, subjectivity may or may not always be the case, but if we are not, then are we not flexing our voice to its full potential? Having experimented last semester with unfamiliar methods to generate form, while they all enhance the skills of my practice, there is often little more than the frame work to ingest. The voice is lost.

But what about the PLAY factor? Are we not able to seek honest public interaction for the sake of a social dialogue, as a measure of current cultural behavior? How do older methods of production affect the level of accessibility? Am I stubborn to question the obsolescence of familiar mediums? Another discussion indeed.

In the end it's back to the old game show, "What's my Statement?". Has it gotten any clearer? I'd like to think so.