A recent post to an art educators list I subscribe to got me thinking about art and action, and when the risks artists take cease to be acceptable modes of expression. The case in question is a Toronto film and video student who carried out the following action:
A 24-year-old student, Thorarinn Ingi Jonsson, at the Ontario Academy of Art and Design built a fake pipe bomb, put it in a bag, labelled it “This is not a bomb” and hid it in the lobby of the Royal Ontario Museum. He called someone (he picked a random extension) at the museum to tell them that he had left something that “was not a bomb.”
Jonsson went to class at 5 p.m. and revealed his project to his class and teachers. He then posted a video on YouTube showing an explosion inside the museum. The video was called “The fake bombing at the ROM, Toronto.”
The writer didn’t disparage the work per se, but seemed to suggest that it might have been the product of a “privileged” upbringing. This got me thinking…
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A few weeks ago I was sent an interesting link from my father about an interesting group in Canada that makes large-scale murals from individual fine-art paintings. The results were striking, and got me thinking about the possibilities of using mosaic techniques for Peace Tiles – online as well as using physical Peace Tiles. I followed up the conversation on Ned.com – a social network aimed at collaboration through social enterprise – where a friend pointed me to the work of Jim Bumgardner, the creative mind behind Coverpop.com. And Jim made a Coverpop for Peace Tiles!
Coverpop is an elegant mosaic-maker that draws images from the photosharing site Flickr and, mapping their source over a customized mosaic of thumbnails, enables users to enlarge the view through a dynamic “fly-out” effect. Its a really fun way to organize – and view – a large number of images. Not sure, given the static nature of the background image, whether it will grow as new tile images are added.
To host the Coverpop, Jim provided an xml database file, a flash file, and a background image which are easily saved to a directory. Everything seems to be working flawlessly – thank you Jim! Why not try the Coverpop for yourself?
[Crossposted from peacetiles.net] A few days ago my father introduced me to a mural process employed by the Canadian arts group NOA Productions, which has developed what they call “Mural Mosaics.” They just completed their most recent project for the Town of Cochrane, which engaged nearly 200 area artists in the creation of as many individual paintings, each 12-inches square. When combined, these many paintings composed a single, coherent image – or “mosaic” – which was permanently installed at the Cochrane Ranch House in Alberta, formerly a center for the preservation of Canada’s Western culture.
In addition to the striking coherence of a “Moral Mosaic,” I was struck by the relatively few number of works needed to produce the mural – which is 12 tiles up by 18 tiles across (216). In my experiments – and in most that I’ve seen online – upwards of 400 works of art – typically a photograph – have been needed to compose a single larger work – the primary reason being, as far as I can tell, that a great variety of color and density is needed to achieve a suitable “palette” – or range – that can be combined into an image. I have written to NOA Productions to get more details about how they have approached this work, for example whether artists are asked to work within certain boundaries (eg limit their palette to certain colors).
This technique naturally got me thinking about the possibility of composing similar “mosaics” from the growing number of Peace Tiles being produced around the world. I am thinking that there are at least two benefits to this kind of curatorial process…
Read the full article at peacetiles.net
In getting ready for a small show I am putting up locally, I’ve been obsessing over the archetypes of journeys – and how any “journey” has a beginning, middle, and an end. Rather Oedipal: four legs, two legs, three legs… Anyway, its all a big swill right now though some gems are beginning to emerge. The first completed works – three of them – take a look at early 20th century exploration – in the form of “lost” diaries of a fictional adventurer. The three archetypes I devised as the central features of the trilogy are a nest (birth), nails (work/life) and a bullet shell (death). I found some old “exotic” postcards to draw from as well, to tighten the connection between the central archetypes and the larger story: the tropical maiden (“mother” – birth – beginning), the young chief (“leader” – life – middle), and the ceremonial funeral hut (“death” – ending).
Each image has also been a wonderful opportunity to explore working with different textures – to find and combine object in various ways, to create “new life” for found objects and discovering the possibility of a story in every thing. Dried grass roots become a nest, nails sifted from my garden on sailcloth discovered on a beach in Nova Scotia, and sand left over from another art project combined with a bullet casing found on the street all become part of an enduring central narrative.
July has gotten me back in the studio after a June’s worth of cleaning. This month also finds me working to develop some study aids – exercises in color, simplicity, texture. Small constructions on wood panel that reflect some principle of good design and technique.
One of the people who is presently inspiring me in this work is an artist whose work I encountered in Dakar, Senegal at a small seaside gallery in an area known as “Almadies.” This is a place by the chopping ocean between the city and airport. In the past it was a slumbering microsuburb of Dakar, where a few die-hard surfers would face the rocky shores and strong tidal surges. A few restaurants, shops and many modest homes lined the coastline. Today it is quiet development for the modest, more adventuresome tourist. Small hotels, artisan shops, and humble restaurants serving up fresh sea fare have filled in much of what were blank spaces in the expaning urban tapestry.
It was among the meandering streets of this calm retreat that the artist I know only as Madou has a second floor gallery (“Galerie Accent Yoff Virage”) in which he shows and sells his works alongside those of his wife Claudia B. Madou, trained as a geologist according to my mother who lives in Dakar, creates wonderfully textured panels of varying sizes in rich, deep tones of orange an blue. These panels are composed of fields of painted cloth, sand and string that are combined into eerily evocative works that conjure associations with scars, tribes, desert canvassas (tents perhaps) and ancient discoveries (“mummies” entombed in desert sands perhaps).
Anyway, over the last few weeks I have been working with some of these and other materials to both reproduce and further develop his effect. More on that as the works emerge. For now, the work shown here is a simple construction of paper, string and bark cloth (Uganda) on painted wood (acrylic).
