Banjo Transfer

So I just got back from Penland School of Crafts a few weeks ago where I took a collage/photo/paint/transfer class. (I will post that work soon). Wyatt was excited about the work I did there and I guess I am too. So we did a xerox transfer onto his banjo. He is super in love with it. He wants to do transfers on everything now. He keeps saying "it was just a piece of paper!" I guess transfers have some kind of magical quality to them. 

LSO Donation

I am donating this photo transfer to the Lafayette Symphony Orchestra Fundraiser: The Bond Bash, heralding the 50th anniversary of the most famous spy in the world: Bond, James Bond. The event will include an elegant dinner, dancing, a live auction, and 007-themed decor in the transformed setting of the Purdue Memorial Union's North Ballroom. The evening will also feature a VIP pre-party and Art Heist featuring paintings, photographs, pottery, and more from local artists.

Little Head is a photo transfer created by hand using the Dass transfer method onto watercolor paper. It is 11 by 14 inched framed. This photograph was taken with my iPhone and minimally manipulated in photoshop. It is an image of a small cabbage I grew in my garden and then photographed on the kitchen table using window light. It almost makes me laugh to combine a handmade process like a photo transfer with the high-tech capture method using an iPhone. Oh how the photographers methods are always changing, but there will always be something beautiful about a handmade one of a kind print. 

MWSPE

My work has been selected (not sure which ones or how many) for the Midwest Society for Photographic Education (SPE) Members Show in Covington, Kentucky during the month of October 2012. The juror was Catherine Evans, the William and Sarah Ross Soter Curator of Photography at the Columbus Museum of Art in Columbus, Ohio.

The exhibition will be held at The Carnegie Visual and Performing Arts Center in conjuncture with FOTOFOCUS, a city-wide, month-long biennial celebration spotlighting numerous exhibitions of historical and contemporary photography. I’m excited that I will get to see the show in person since I am attending the MWSPE Conference, Continuum: Photography and Education. 

Detached

These constructed self-portraits were shot behind a screen of punctured, cut, slit and ripped velum. These images were shot while coping with overwhelming tragedies and disappointments in my personal life.

My mind is far away; again I'm finding the milk in the oven with my car keys. Routines have collapsed. Waiting for the fog to lift.

IAC Individual Artist Grant

Today I got a congratulatory letter in the mail from the Indiana Arts Commission and Governor Mitch Daniels. I was awarded an Individual Artist Grant in the visual arts category. I was one of 39 artists in Indiana chosen to receive career development assistance through the Individual Artist Program. In August I will attend a workshop at Penland School of Crafts with  Holly Roberts - Solving Problems: Collage & Paint.  I hope the workshop will inspire me to finish a series of prints and then exhibit them. 

Read about the projects here:

http://www.in.gov/arts/2750.htm

Just a side note, I've been experimenting with a mixture of dyes and moonshine. Results are looking like this...

new works on plaster substrate...

I don't know if its all the home improvement projects (drywall?) or reading about the history of plaster in art (think: pyramids, frescoes, Rodin, Cynthia Plaster Caster, etc.) but I just couldn't get the thought of painting on a dry, rough plaster texture out of my mind. The process and the product have some similarities to the excavated screen prints I was working on last year at Kala, the repetition of additive and subtractive application of color.  And not only the hue (colors with a connection to body fluids) but also the subject matter relate to the marbled paper I was working on but never finished. These plaster pieces may or may not be complete either. I've been thinking of adding another layer that contains some sort of image transfer but I'm not sure if a photograph or print would add anything. Maybe all of these bits and pieces will pull together eventually. 

I am loving working with plaster, for me it communicates a sense of fragility and at the same time strength. It is heavy to lug around but can easily be chipped or broken by a fingernail. My undergraduate 3-D teacher (whose artwork I've always admired), Georgia Strange had us create several plaster sculptures from cast blocks that we chiseled away at. Boy, was that intense and difficult. After a few hours of sculpting with a hammer and chisel my hands would be dry & aching and my ears would be ringing. At that point, I learned to really appreciate physically demanding art making. I started to think about not only the object but the effort and strength needed to create it.  What I'm doing now with plaster is much more fluid and easier on my hands. I don't feel like I'm fighting the materials. I've applied a thin layer of plaster to the substrate that I carved into while it was still wet. Then I did several washes and glazes over the textures, filling crevices and wiping the paint away from the high areas.

In the last 4 or 5 years, all of my work has related to biological structures and human reproduction either conceptually or in form. I have always been attracted to the intersections and overlaps of art and science. Circular elements or cells have crept in as a powerful part of my visual language. infinity, cyclical, building blocks of life, unity, clusters, organization, growth...

Intimacy and Voyeurism: The Public/Private Divide in Photography

I will be part of the Society of Photographic Educators(SPE) Women’s Caucus show at the California Institute of Integral Studies on Mission Street in San Francisco. The show is organized in conjunction with the 2012 National Conference, Intimacy and Voyeurism:  The Public/Private Divide in Photography.  The exhibition will be on view March 18 - 31, 2012.  Deirdre Visser, Curator of the ARTS at CIIS, is facilitating the exhibition. The show may  travel to other galleries over the year. The exhibition is part of the SPE conference self guided gallery tour on Friday, March 23. 

Three of my pieces were selected by the jurors Joyce Neimanas and Patrick Nagatani, both SPE Honored Educators. Thirty-six artists were  selected for the exhibition and all selected images are being uploaded here: https://www.spenational.org/members/liz-allen

Joyce Neimanas currently teaches in the photography department at the University of New Mexico.  She taught at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago for 35 years and has received numerous grants and awards including 3 National Endowment for the Arts Awards.  You can view her work at http://joyceneimanasartist.com.

Patrick Nagatani was born in Chicago in 1945, just days after the Enola Gay bomber dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Born to Japanese-American parents that cataclysmic event has resonated throughout Nagatani's life and work, culminating in his series Nuclear Enchantment. Nagatani taught at the University of New Mexico retiring in 2007.  You can view his work athttp://umfa.utah.edu/PatrickNagatani.

Jellies

Went to Shedd Aquarium to see the jellies (with Wyatt, Jessie, Claire, Claire's friends, Nani and Jack). Not a big exhibit but I got some nice images. Might use them as sources pictures for some drawings. I love the lines. The constant movement created a nice exercise in composition. The exhibit was very dark and posed many low light challenges. I shot at a really high ISO. It it hard to tell if I have noise in the images or if it is just the floatie stuff in the water. These are straight from the camera, no manipulation of color. I love the colors they choose for the back of the tanks. It really made the jellies stand out. I tried to get a nice images of a sea horse but that was a total failure. They are really twitchy.