Greentopia Aftermath

I nearly forgot to talk about how much fun the Greentopia Festival was and my piece on display!

Case in point me looking like a goober behind my piece in the "gallery" space which was the atrium of a bar/restaurant right in the heart of the festival area. Next to my piece is a work that is supposed to represent a tea pot and behind me is the first place winner. I have forgotten the title of it but over a period of 180 days the artist collected some of the garbage she threw out each day and put it in a jar. Thus, the line of jars on the free standing wall with a braided rope of plastic bags trailing down in front of it in a sort of showing-the-audience-how-much-trash-they-throw-out kinda way.

Here's a detail with patrons standing in front of it. I will say one thing and one thing only about it: after seeing a wall of jars at the Burchfield-Penney Art Museum in 2009 and a rack of them again in 2010 or so, it's safe to say jars are played out by now.

Third place was this coat rack welded together from scrap metals and discarded decorative metal fencing. The artist who did this had just discovered welding and was all excited about it in their artist's statement. In the background is another large scale work made of copper and brass which was 8 feet tall or so.

It was styled after an armillary sphere and rather nice looking, and reminded me my of my goal to make a metal garden statue of some kind for my mother. After this point however, my pictures take a turn for the scenic so here's the falls that gives the High Falls area of Rochester it's name:

All in all its was a fun day, and the rest of the festival was quite interesting too, ranging from food to music to purses made out of old plastic feed bags, plants for sale, and naturally jewelry made from old electronic bits.

Finally, here's a parting shot of my piece on display with the placard that had my artist's statement on it. Luckily I was able to keep it afterwards as a litle souvenir of my "win" in the contest. And that just about wraps up my day at Greentopia and the Recycled Art Competition.

News Roundup

First and foremost in my news of the week is that the contest I talked about entering here came to a result, and I got second place!! Besides $500, I got quite a nice line for the resume, I just don't know whether to file it under awards or exhibitions, since the tiara will be on display the weekend of September 17th as well. and according to the (probably) form email I got the judges were impressed with my work, which is a huge compliment given that the panel consists of an artist, an illustrator, a person from ARTISANworks, the owner of a gallery, and the Memorial Art Gallery's exhibitions director. So overexcited!

Less exciting is what's currently going on in my studio classes. My theme of a walk in the woods went down fairly well in jewelry though it could accidentally make a left turn into the idea of weeds. I still don't know what I am going to do for the chasing repousse project, for which my pitch bowl etc. arrived and I am working on tools for.

This is some of the results from my first attempt at true chemical dying of fabric. I'm particularly fond of the one on the right, as I was not expecting it to turn out at all. There's six other pieces brewing in the fabric studio and some of those I am even less sure about how they will look.

This is the low budget re-creation of what I am doing in  2D design, which is drawing various types of lines on paper that will then be cut out and arranged into a composition on some illustration board. It seems like it's adding an extra step to the process, but I can see the point, being that the professor wants us to be able to rearrange and play with the line elements before we glue them down. Above is one of the lines I came up with that the professor liked. Still, the class is tending towards the boring side and reminding me how middling I am at two dimensional works.

The goal for next week is to be less harried in making a blog post, since between work and classes I don't have enough time to think!