Briana Carter
9/30/14
Weekly Post

     On 9/23, Megan Garner came to talk to our class about supporting services. These services are free to all UNC Charlotte students and she basically told us that it would benefit our learning if we attended some of them. Some of the advantages include tutoring, and the Writing resource center. I knew about these two, but I did not know about the counseling center. I did not even know that we had something like that. It benefit me form listening to her speak because I now know that if I have problems in any subject or area of my life, I can get help with it. After Megan had left, we had a class discussion on Andy Goldsworthy. His work was very beautiful and I got a couple of ideas from his work that may make mine more prosperous. Once we got an idea of what our projects were supposed to be about more effectively, we all got a slip of paper and it had a site on campus where we had to walk around and list what senses we were feeling. My slip said to walk around the Rowe art building. These were my senses. Sounds: Generator, Leaves, Keys, Cars, Construction, Fountain, Talking, Footsteps, and Leaf Blower. Smells: Rain, Trash, and Fish. Touch: Wind, Rain, Gravel Under Feet, and Cold. Sights: Plants, People, Buildings, Machines, Tools, Trash, Art, Cars, Bikes, and Flyers. We also had to take pictures of interesting object that we saw along the way.

   When we got back into the classroom, our teacher asked us to create a memory map. Although I did not finish, this is what one looks like.

 
     On 9/25 we took a field trip to the McColl Center in downtown Charlotte. Seeing the outside building, you would believe that it was a church and in fact, it was a church once that had been burnt down, but they redone the inside and has now made it an art show. It was very interesting because one of the faculty members here at UNC Charlotte had an exhibit up at the McColl center, so that was exciting. Also, it was the first thing that we saw when we walked in. It was a huge gold material folded in all direction and had bags of shredded fake money holding it down at the bottom of the piece. This thing was as tall as the building itself. It had little white fuzzy balls everywhere sticking to the gold. It was such a large scale piece and I was interested in how he did it. My favorite exhibit was the quilts. These quilts were all kinds of different colors and sizes and I am a sucker for color. It absolutely amazed me because they were all so beautiful. It looked like a lot of fun. One of the exhibits that I did not like as much and thought to be a little strange was the underwear hanging from a clothes line. This artist promoted sex and youth. Overall, I liked the exhibit and it was a wonderful experience. It is always fun to get out of the classroom sometimes.

 

Briana Carter
9/25/14
Project

My three ideas for ecology
-Bees create honey and basically make the world go round. So, I am visualizing me taking pictures of bees sucking on flowers, and going to a bee farm so I can get real close and personal with the bees. Taking pictures of their homes and honey and everything about their lives. Bees are the main reason that we have flowers or any kind of plant really, because of pollination. Without them, we would not have plant,s which would leave us with no vegetables and fruits to eat.
-My second idea is something that somebody has to think about really hard. I think that I could take some really good photographs of old and abandoned buildings. One of the artist that was in the art 21 videos reminded me that the dead can give life to the living. That is where my abandoned buildings come in. They are old and nobody is keeping them up, but they have life growing all around them, and their is always room for something new to be built or created from the old if anybody wanted to rebuild it.
-I do not really have any other ideas, but if I had to choose, I was thinking about making a huge bird feeder, so that all the bird can gather around and be as one. One big happy community of birds.

Briana Carter
9/23/14
Text

     Goldin has photographs of the 1970's. This was a time when everybody was going through hardships. Since most people was affected by this era, nobody really got any good photographs of what anyone was going through in that time; except Goldin. Her photographs open a new section up in this project because I never thought about people being a organism in a environment. Only animals. I could always find a different kind of religion or somebody who has a different style of living other than the norm. My only issue with this is that most people who have different life styles usually do not live in the United States. Goldin's pictures play off of the photographs taken by Neshat. The difference with Neshat though is the fact that she has to blend in with her surroundings before she is allowed to take these pictures. She has to go to the extent of dressing the way that she usually does not, even though that is her real religion and background.

Briana Carter
9/23/14
Art 21

     Mark Dion's work is really interesting. Especially the dead tar rats. Something that really caught my attention was the part where he said that the tree he had found was dead, but it was still giving off life. That opened up my mind to so many new passageways. I was thinking about death, and how death gives room in this world for the new. Maybe a possibility of tomb stones? It also comes back to my other thought about the abandoned buildings. It is something dead, but things are growing on it and it is giving room for people to replace them.
     Intigo Mangiano-Ovalle's work really confused me. He is talking about black wholes and his one piece was a man standing on water surrounded  by plants. Trapped. But when he started speaking about his large painting with the script, it hit me that it was kind of like cancer. How you are kind of stuck in this body and can never get out or away from the cancer if it can not be cured.

Briana Carter
8/23/14
Weekly Post

     9/16, all we did was present our projects for time. I really liked the Frankenstein one because it was just an amazing animation and so different. It stood out to me more than any of the other ones. One that I was really interested in was the animation of aliens because I love a good comedy. I was really nervous while I presented, but I am sure glad that nothing messed up electronically. Everyone was seeming to have so many computer problems, but I am glad that I did not have any because I did not need any more stress. We also had to give insight to our group members on their project presentations also.

     9/18, we had a discussion on our tours of the different studios this week. As a student in a beginner classes, we all have to go and see different studios so that we know what it is going to be like in the future. We also had to give our teacher insight on what we like and what we dislike about group discussions and if we wanted to change groups. After that, we received our peer responses from our group members. I had some really good and insightful advise and comments. One of them discussed how my images were cropped very strange, but I did discuss how it messed up in giff when I was talking through my power point. The rest of the comments were very positive and it made me feel much better about my project because I did not like it at all. It gave me a confidence booster. We also discussed our new project topic which is ecology. We looked at a couple of artist who showed this through their work. Ones that really stood out to me were Andy Goldsworthy and Casto and Jeanne Claude. Andy made me think of photographing maybe a used car lot, construction site, or maybe even old building sites that have been their for a really long time while Casto and Jeanne Claude makes me think of building something in nature like a huge bird feeder or a dragon that wraps around trees to guard the woods. I'm not sure where all of these ideas are taking me, but I am going to keep brainstorming.

Briana Carter
9/18/14
Project

     What I have done was decide to use makeup to show time. Here is my link if you would like to watch my video.

http://makeagif.com/i/1RqBHd

My idea was to have the viewer feel like makeup makes people a feel certain ways depending upon their age, but as my time trying to put this video together pulled through, I could not get the feeling from the video that I wanted. I originally wanted the pictures of my niece and grandmother to take much longer time so that everybody could see the pictures, but giff would only allow me to upload one copy of the same picture, so this made the transition way too fast and sloppy. Also, I wanted my whole face to be visible within the screen, but once I uploaded it to giff, it immediately cropped all of my photos down so that they were the same size and it cropped in way to much on my face. I wish I would have known more about stop motion media, but I will definitely know what I am getting myself into next time. Over all, I am not that happy with the outcome, but I did full fill most of my goals of the project. I did my best and that's all I could ask of myself.

Briana Carter
9/16/14
Weekly post

     On 9/9, we discussed the art 21 videos, reading, and got into our groups for discussion of these topics. Our group discussed Kara walker. We listened in on what other groups had to say and we discussed how we felt Kara Walker portrayed time through her pieces. I used the example where she had the projector in front of her silhouette and it made her audience feel like they are really there. Our homework was then to come up with three ideas for our time project. I came up with two because I believed that they were two really good ideas.  My ideas were having myself doing my own make up and the other one was of silhouette dancers dancing across a building from my home town. On 9/11, we watched the video on the sugar baby by Kara Walker. It was absolutely amazing and I think that it stunned so many people because there are artist in this world that do not particularly do their own artwork; but how could she on such a large scale. After that, we walked around to comment on everybody's ideas. I saw a lot of really good ideas and some not so good ones because she clearly stated that it could not be cliché like an hour glass or seasons changing and I saw plenty of those. The feedback that I got on my project was that it needed to be different in some way than make up commercials and it needed to become open to a wider audience. So, my idea was to incorporate a child and an older adult. I want the child to open up the video by her smiling and happy and then she puts on make up and she is still happy. Women my age have to wear make up to be happy and older people just wear it as habit, but do not particularly see themselves as being more beautiful. This is the kind of transition I am hoping to make.

Project
Briana Carter
9/11/14
Ideas about time project
    
     I have two ideas for my time project and I would really love some insight on what anybody thinks is a better idea.

1. I was thinking about taking a picture of a building with no writing or doors on it in my home town. Just a big black wall that lies in the middle of my town with old falling out bricks in it and a little bit of my actual town in the background. I wanted to take that picture and print it out fairly big on regular paper and not the lusty kind so that when I photograph the photograph, it does not shine. I want to cut out three sets of silhouettes dancers. I want the first one to be two dancers holding hands and the girl have a poufy dress. They will waltz across the wall. The second one, I would like a guy holding a big radio on his shoulder coming through while another guy starts break dancing. For the last one, I am still not sure what I would want to do for todays dance culture, so ideas would be great help. And the reason this is important to me is because we used to have town dances where everyone would come out and dance to the different styles of music played. I wanted to show time through each era of dance.

2. My second idea was to take pictures of my own face evolving from having no make up on to having a lot of make up on. How I would do this was by slowly, one section at a time, putting on makeup to my face and taking a picture of it. This is important to me because I grew up with no make up as a child and I felt okay with that, but once I got older, I felt as if make up was a main necessity in my life. This shows time through the way girls evolve into these women that we know today through make up.

Briana Carter
9/9/14
Review
    
     The difference between William Kentridge and Chris Oflili if the fact that Oflili is all about heritage and bright elaborate colors while Kentridge always has a very bland sense to his work. It sometimes is black and white which does not stand out much while Oflili has work that is asking to stand out. He uses glitter and paint and collage. Both have very powerful messages, but two totally different styles. I do not particularly like Kentridges work because I like work that is going to catch my eye, but he is a brilliant man.
     While watching the art 21 videos, I got a little confused because I really didn't understand how time plays into these artist, but as I dug a little deeper, I started understanding it more and more even though that our project is necessarily not like their work at all.
      Paryear built things. He built things that did not quite make sense to anybody who walked into a room and saw his piece, but he knew exactly what he wanted to say in each one of his pieces. There was some long story he went through talking about the brick wall for example. I would never have known that it was a wall separating a larger and more masculine figure from a smaller figure.
     Walker's silhouette's were absolutely amazing. I loved her meaning behind every single piece that she did. A lot of them were very strange and horrifying, but slavery was a horrible and tragic state. Everybody is choosing to let go of the past when she is just elaborating it. I am really interested in doing a silhouette for my time project. She has inspired me.
     The last artist was Sally Mann. Her photographs were different. I have never seen anybody take so many nude photographs of their children before. And it was strange because she felt as if it was so normal. Her kids were even in the video expressing how they felt about their childhood. "It was like they didn't even have a mother anymore." They said that she judges everything in the world as if it art. I just didn't even know how to take it when she showed the photographs of her nude children. Even when they got older, she still took nudes of them. Her photographs are a example of time because it is nudes of her children as they grow up. Their changing bodies.

 

Briana Carter

9/4/14

Documentation

 

 

 

 

Questions:

1)Do you personally like the competitive kind of "play?"

yes

It depends on the reward/outcome.

yes

yes

No, did not get candy.

2)How was round one different from round two?

S was harder to make.

We could talk/communicate in round two.

Not very. We didn't talk either round.

We didn't really communicate.

We were confused with communicating because it was upside down.

3)Did this feel like "play" to you?

yes

yes

yes

yes

Sort of. 

 

 Images

-Click on images for better quality!

 

Briana Carter
9/4/14
Reflection and peer critiques

Reflection

     Today in class, everyone went around and either showed us their pieces of play or interacted with the class with their form of play. I thought that this was a real eye opener for a lot of people in the class because we were all very confused about what we were really supposed to be doing. It was a great project to start with. Also, even though we all had totally different ideas, we all did very well I thought. I saw a coule things that I could of done different, like I probably should not have showed them the people laying down making letters. Our professor even pointed out that it was like I was doing two projects instead of one. I now understand that I should just forget about the laying people and only think about the project with the beans. I really felt good about my project afterwards though because it actually had a meaning behind it and a lot of my peers liked my short essay assignment afterwards. They said they wish they had thought about that.

 

Critique

 

     Ryan Scott- I really liked your project and I thought it had a great meaning. It is something I done as a kid, but with a bit of a twist. The black ball of string represents not being able to communicate. Instead of all the string being attached to one another like a usual can phone, the black ball of string separates it all to where nobody will ever be able to really communicate. I think it is a very successful project and I can see clearly where play is represented. I would have liked to actually play with the can phone, so everyone could feel the way it felt to not be able to communicate and be cut off from the world around them.

     Jayne Dinh- I like the thought process that you took and I understand where you are going, but I did not understand anything other than maybe bored people play and interact with things.  I am sure you put a lot of work into it at home and you have a lot of pictures of your process, but it just was not that strong. What I think could make it better is if you made the class interact with the paint and splat in on a big canvas or something like that.