Bright!Loud!

I was playing with the idea that pop culture can infiltrate even the most spontaneous gestures. With some books reflecting our celebrity culture (Life compendiums, fashion guides, products of fan followings, etc.) sitting in front of me, I dragged out my brightest pastels and worked on top of a torn up oil painting on paper. when I became overwhelmed, I started digging at the surface of the paper, uncovering the white, with metal clay-working tools.

preview chunks

snippets and hints all zoomed in. about how loud everything seems.

postcard jazz

Here are some details of the first postcard-sized work in a series I will be working about the human act of making.








I'm not trying to pretend the subject hasn't been done, but today, playing around with a collage that wasn't working, I became very interested in art-making as a subject in itself. So I started over with that in mind.










Contained in this work: sketch called "freshly cut grass all over my feet", cut out smithsonian pages (this issue featured painted patterns from iranian architecture), oil pastel, tangled string from the floor, national geographic image (cropped) of a snake, pieces of a box of flatbread crackers, masking tape, and ballpoint pen.

Cabinet

I just started a subscription to Cabinet, a non profit quarterly based in Brooklyn that you should really check out. Its about EVERYTHING; I haven't encountered this degree of well-written eclectic-ness (does ecelctic have a noun-form?) before in a periodical. The only thing that holds one issue together is a broad, one-word theme and four columns that are not necessarily related to that theme. The summer issue's theme is Deception (Spring was Fire). The columns are called "inventory", "ingestion", "colors", and "leftovers", and always relate to their titles. And every issue has a tear-out postcard or bookmark.
In Deception, I just learned about some of Kubrick's obsessive directions in The Shining, a history of the relationship between cops and robbers, a history of card tricks, and an exploration of the difference between real and counterfeit money, with context in America and NIgeria and input from Derrida and Lenin. And I've only read about a quarter of the quarterly.

http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/index.php

happy exploring,
Jackie

Studio work

things I've learned at art school (sophomore year, Moore College of Art and Design)

Urbal

Urbal. A Sixteen-Panel Abstract Drawing. The whole process of making this work yielded an efflux of thoughts, streams of consciousness, rhythms, and discussions all surrounding issues of home and creativity. Because I was raised in Maine, moving to Philadelphia was quite the leap. I have experienced all sorts of tensions and contradictions that result from creating in such a foreign, busy, regulated, stimulating, and often overwhelming environment. With these drawings, I was asking myself these questions:

Why do I find myself at my creative peak in the midst of such a non-organic environment? How is this possible? Is it possible for an organic aesthetic to harmonize with that of the city? How can I slow down in this fast new world? How is my creativity affected when I get bogged down in the fast rigidity of the city? What life exists in the city? What structure exists in the country? What gets lost in the city, the country? How have both environments shaped and contributed to my artwork? My life?

While I did not find answers to all above questions through the creation of this series, I did make progress, and my art was much changed. Layers of work in the same space became the perfect method of feeling out my conflicts and never getting stuck in one mode of thought or a single answer/solution. I've found that my heart really lies in the process of layering drawings and materials in my art, and I've been exploring this direction since.

Edited First Post

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