Wk10 – Activity – Game Design

This activity has been my favorite so far. It was Thursday night; I have two midterms on Monday and Halloween is this Saturday, so I wanted to get the activity out of the way. It was 9:30 pm when my brother and I decided to go geocaching. The first THREE spots we went to there was NOTHING. I don’t know if we just couldn’t find it because it was late or if someone stole it, but we couldn’t find ANYTHING. I was just going to go home and say that I didn’t find anything, but we decided to try one last spot. We drove to the GPS location and started looking for it and after 15 min of using our phones as flashlights we found it. Most of the stuff in there was trash, but it was still cool that I found one. I didn’t take anything out because I didn’t like anything, but I did put bunch of stuff in there. Afterwards  I just set up my geocache and submitted it online.

I think this was my favorite activity because it felt like an adventure. Our first location was right next to the LA river, so my brother and I were looking through the shrubs in the pitch dark looking for something that we couldn’t even say what it looked like. All in all I had fun and loved this activity.

Wk10 – Artist Interview – Thomas Cressman

This week I interviewed Thomas Cressman. His art was located on the gallery Gatov East and was titled “Living Forms”. He is currently a 5th year student here at CSULB that was born and raised in Seal Beach.

When I first walked in I noticed that all the pieces seemed to be metal. There were no big pieces. The focus seemed to be on the process of how the pieces are made and the details rather than the size. The two pieces that stood out to me were the ones set up on the two manikins’ torso. Another thing that stood out was that a lot of the pieces seemed to have a nice flow to them, kind of like jello or a splash of water.

Each of the pieces took Thomas anywhere from a week to a month to finish. His inspiration comes from the ocean and other things ocean related, so it’s normal that his favorite animal is an octopus.

I picked this gallery because I liked how simple it was. The art work he had displayed almost reminded me of jewelry. Shinny colorful things in an otherwise dull space. Probably more so because I was focused on the manikins.

IG: https://instagram.com/thom_cress6/

Wk10 – Classmate Conversation – Kahlia Cadle

This week I talked to Kahlia Cadle. She is a second year Accounting major which is cool because I’m also a second year accounting major. Kahlia likes to make music and is actually in the process of making an album. As for the question of the week: “If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would it be and why?”, she says that if she could travel anywhere in the world it would be London. She’s already been to London and she loved it and wants to move there in the future.

Wk9 – Artist Interview – Juan Martin

This week I interviewed Juan Martin. He is attending CSULB and is majoring in Art, he started by working with ceramics and then started doing more sculptures. His work was on Gatov East gallery.

When I walked in I noticed that this gallery i noticed that there was only 3 pieces. A big black box, what looked like a casting of a deer, and a headless manikin sitting on a mirror. The man looked like it was molded concrete in parts (arms, abdomen, legs) then put together (it was grey and rough). The deer almost looked like it was carved out of wood and painted black. The pattern on the side almost looks like how termites leave trees so I thought the artist took a tree that had been eaten by termites and carved the deer out of it. Then painted it black. The black box was the simplest one. It was a big black box covered in clear wrap it kind of looked like Kaaba, the Muslim’s sacred site located in Mecca where a lot of them go atleast once in their lifetime to pray.

Juan said that he got his inspiration from Tony Smith’s Sculpture, Die from 1962.He also said that the deer and man took him a few weeks each to finish. He also wanted us to know that the manikin was really heavy.

The manikin without a head sitting on a mirror so far has been my favorite piece of the semester. The fact that it’s a heavy cement body sitting on a thin mirror was kind of cool, and I also like the simplicity of it, I usually don’t like art pieces that are really busy with a lot of things going on. The deer was also cool. I just thought of it being a piece of nature (tree) that was destroyed into an animal of nature. I know that it’s not a carving out of a tree and that termites didn’t eat it, and that he didn’t mean it to be seen that way, but that’s the way I see it.

Wk9 – Activity – Transmedia & Character Analysis

Character Analysis:

Spider Pig, whose actual name is Chris P. Bacon used to be a regular pet pig. He used to live with a regular family until war broke out. In the year 1961, during the invasion of Bay of Pigs in Cuba went bad everything spiraled out of control. Khrushchev(the USSR) went in swiftly to protect Cuba and president Nixon, not wanting to look weak, launched a full on attack. This led to both superpowers detonating their nuclear bombs and creating a wasteland. After this happened,a spider that had ingested the nuclear waste, bit a monkey and a pig. They then gained super powers and thus, became Spider Monkey and Spider Pig. Their master (the farmer) got killer by a gang of cannibal car salesmen, so the monkey and pig decided to dedicate their life to fight evil. Spider Monkey and Spider Pig became best friends and would fight crime against the Soviets, who were the only people to survive the nukes because 1) they had shovel technology so they were able to emulate gophers and dig holes to protect themselves 2) limited exposure to the Chernobyl caused their DNA to change which allowed them to be unaffected by the nuclear fallout and toxic aftermath of it all. After much time of fighting power, Spider Pig didn’t want to be just partners, he wanted to be the leader, so one night after huffing nuclear gas, smoking out of turtle shells, and drinking from the toxic lake, he killed Spider Monkey to become the leader of the group. The next day, when all the drugs wore off Spider Pig realized what happened and regretted it. Now he is a drug-addicted super hero with a crushed spirit who doesn’t care about anything and is always thinking about offing himself.

This is his Twitter:  @Spider_Pig_110

This is his Website:  spiderpig110.wordpress.com

This is a picture of him before everything happened, of him playing with his farmer’s mentally challenged friend. (left) And another one of him now. (right). You can tell how happy he was before hand and how devastated he is now.

Website and Twitter.

My experience:

Me and Leslie partnered up for this, I made the character Spider Pig and she did Spider Monkey. We basically made the story fit our characters. I like history, we decided to do an alternate history, what would of happened if Kennedy lost to Nixon and Nixon caused a Nuclear War with the USSR. Spider Pig would have happened. After we made the story and the characters I just made my character a website and a twitter and pretended to be him. Truthfully, I thought it was a little weird, this seems like a bigger project than something you can do in a week, but I like the idea. I really submerged myself in my character and will probably use his twitter account as a parody account. All in all, I was a little confused on what exactly we were supposed to do, but I did what I thought was the assignment and I had fun.

Wk9 – Classmate Conversation – Leslie Jovel

This week I talked to Leslie Jovel. Leslie is a second year psychology major here at CSULB, she says she likes art because it gives her something to look at and occasionally it relaxes her. Leslie also says that life without art would be too simple, black and white, with art there is more creativity and spaces for creation, there are no rules or limitations.As for the question of the week: After visiting many galleries and seeing the artists different art pieces, what is your favorite type (painting, sculpture, installation, Performance Art, Art Education, Public Art, Social Practice, New Media, etc.) and why? She said that she liked painting because it can be realistic or abstract and that there are a lot more things that can be conveyed compared to the other ones. To top things off, she likes to paint/draw herself, and doesn’t do much of the other types of art.

Wk8 – Artist Interview – Rhiannon Aarons

This week I interviewed and saw Rhiannon Aarons‘ work. The title of her show was Ex Libris, this was located in both Gatov galleries, so I’m going to tag it as Gatov East because Gatov West was partly another exhibition. This is her second year as an MFA student, shehas attended Otis College of Art and Design, and has 17 years of art experience.

Her art pieces were drawings of skeletons. Most of them were black and white, except for one, which was brown with black. First looking at them, they look like fantasy creatures, the skull and rib cage from a human and the rest of the body from a combination of a snake or other creature. One of the paintings with the human skull had wings, which clearly showed that it wasn’t supposed to be an accurate representation of a human.

Aarons was inspired to make these pieces by many different works in literature and anatomical books, which adds on to her interest to obscure and dark things. The Clitoral Truth by Rebecca Chalker is one of the pieces from which she got a lot of inspiration for this piece. Aarons really wants the people who look at her art to think about it and not just gloss over it like you would any random object.

I thought this was pretty neat. I first thought of those fake science or fake history books that have realistic anatomy of things that didn’t exist like dragons. A big part of why I liked them was because they were simple, clean and well done. Interesting art this week.

Wk8 – Activity – Somebody App

This week’s activity was kind of weird, bu the video we saw in class has pretty funny, so I was expecting this to be really quirky and fun. I posted my email on the assigned page on Tuesday and waited until Thursday to add other emails and actually do the activity.

I couldn’t find how to add people on the app. Three of my friends automatically showed up, two from our art class and one friend whom I told to add the app because it might be fun, all of which appeared because I have them on my phone’s contacts (I’m assuming). I couldn’t find a way to add more people, so I just decided to try it out like that. I tried sending messages to all three of my contacts through other classmates and by floating the message, but since it wasn’t during our class time (it was 3:45 pm), NONE of my messages we through. I sent probably 3-5 messages to each of my contacts through different methods and I always go the mission failed message.

I think this would have been cool if there was a ton of people trying it out, and if the people trying it stayed at school during a certain time period to actually use it, because none is going to go far to deliver anything.

                      

Wk8 – Classmate Conversation – Brianna Lopez

Brianna Lopez is a second year health administration major. When she’s not in school, Brianna likes to film, edit videos, visit new places, and upload content to her Instagram. Weekends she likes to watch Netflix and sleep. As for the question “After visiting the galleries and seeing different artwork, how does anything you see in this artwork remind you of something you’ve seen or experienced?”,  Brianna had an interesting response. She saw some art work while visiting the art galleries, whose main theme was being gluten free, and it intrigued her. Although she has never personally experienced going gluten free, she can imagine what it must feel like not being able to have certain foods.

Wk7 – Artist Interview – Jane Weibel

This week I’m interviewing Jane Weibel that had her art in the Gatov West gallery and it was titled “The Extraordinarily Difficult and Impossible Tasks of: Recounting Fading and Altered Memories and Stabilizing Shifting Time”. Jane is a junior here at Long Beach State and is currently majoring in ceramics.

When I first walked in i was surprised, I really wasn’t expecting to see what I saw. I felt like I walked into a coloring book or a cartoon world. Everything was so colorful and felt like they were just outlines of the real world. There was a lot of colorful strings holding things up like ceramics, baby’s clothing and other things. After settling in I noticed that there was a lot of things relating to a house and baby paraphernalia, kind of reminded me of a playground or daycare because of the colorfulness, the swings, baby clothes, and what looked like toys.

Jane said that she got her inspiration from her childhood and her childhood memories. She wanted people to remember their own memories when they saw her gallery because your memories are basically who you are. Jane lost a family member to Alzheimers, so the concept of memories and their value has a little more weight on her.

I felt like I emerged myself into a different world when I walked into her gallery, like a cartoon world or into a coloring book. I think I felt this because the art was all around the people, my self included and I actually had to navigate through it, so I felt more emerged. All in all, I liked this gallery and thought that it was pretty cool.

Jane’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/janemargarette/