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.