EXHIBITIONS
Two of the most notable exhibitions I went to were the British/American Pop art show at the Springfield Art Museum in Springfield, MO and Nothing Personal at The Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois.
The Electric Garden of our Minds: British/American Pop
At the pop show my main objective was to see how a show exploring a evolution in art was staged. The show, although small, had some really monumental pieces. There were a lot of artists that could have been on those walls but I was surprised at the spare taste involved with the selection and hanging. I think it provided a nice showcase of the work. Every painting, drawing, and assemblage had it's own space. Some artists featured in this exhibition are Allan D’ Arcangelo, Andy Warhol, Eduardo Paolozzi, Roy Lichtenstein, and Patrick Caufield. Eduardo Paolozzi is mostly a 3D artists, does work in mostly sculpture and collage. In his biography at the museum it said he was a compulsive collector of the printed image, I felt a sort of kinship with that. I really enjoyed how his collages seemed obsessed with American pop culture but being from a different country everything was kind of distorted to the point of satire.
Chicago
One of my main objectives this semester was to travel to Chicago to see an art exhibition. I did some research and found that Cindy Sherman and Lorna Simpson were having a group show at the Institute of Chicago. I have been to Chicago in the past but never in an art related capacity. I was very excited to find out more about the art culture there. I had imagined myself going to Columbia years back when I was in high school. My friend Sarah Hiatt, whom, I graduated MSU with let us stay with her at her apartment in uptown Chicago. She is currently working about her thesis for an MFA at Columbia. Watching her go through the process, there are a lot of emotions she had that I identified with.
* Sarah Hiatt's spring semester work
I've always admired not only her work but her work ethic. She recently transitioned from using black and white film to color film. She said the changed in elements has been drastic because now you are dealing with a whole color field along with contrast, exposure, and tonal range. I think she's done remarkably well, the mood in her overall content is still there if not enhanced in a way.
Her focus was essentially on work while we stayed there but that led to us having to navigate some of the city ourselves which in retrospect was a good thing. I took notes on a obvious differences between the queen city I reside in the metropolitan cityscape I observed in Chicago. We took to walking most places when we could and taking a service called Lyft ( an amazing ride service app for any traveler, one of my trips cost me $0.48) to other places which was very handy during the freak snow storm. It seem like we witnessed all the seasons changing in the 4 days we were there. On the first day we went to a concert consisting of all female performers not that it was promoted that way, but in my obsession it was something I took note of. Everyone was very festive and most of the content they sang and played was politically conscious. I had never heard of any of the performers prior to seeing them, but coming from Springfield I was really amazed at the density of the crowd. People were spilling out of every room, there was a lot of enthusiastic support. There merchandise tables were running over with cds, tapes, albums, small DIY crafts they worked on while on tour, homemade buttons, and zines and leaflets. Needless to say I was very inspired.
The second day we were there we went to breakfast then back to Sarah's apartment. Her roommate had a friend (Robyn Day) who was coming over to photograph her. I watched Day work, They had a very simple set up and the photos were taken digitally, there was a beautiful simplicity and how Robyn generated photographs and carried conversation. You could tell Day had spent a lot of time on this subject matter. In camera, the work was specific but outside everything was very fluid. Robyn asked me also if they could take my photograph. I usually say no to most people who ask me because I find it invasive, selfishly. Given Robyn's specific subject matter I would never say no, it's too important to have any dispositions. Robyn also let me photograph them while they photographed me.
*Link to Robyn Day's current project.
http://www.robyndayphotography.com/women.html
One the 3rd day of the trip we woke up early to look at some open studio work, we pushed it back later in the day so Sarah could work on her thesis. While we were having lunch I got an odd call from my father. He asked where i was and i laughed and said I was in Chicago he sounded really worried an told me he would call me back. I didn't know until later but he was calling me because his mother had passed away. I got the call from my sister later that afternoon, I was just devastated. I think when my father called me he had just found her and I couldn't get the thought out of my mind not being able to be there for him and not getting to see my grandmother. We decided to leave the next day after going to the exhibit at the Institute of Chicago.
I could not ever imagine driving in Chicago, it was extremely intimidating for me to think of navigating that city. Upon trying to make it to the Museum we got lost about 3 times. I was still in a kind of haze thinking about everything that was going on back home. I was really worried that I wouldn't be able to focus on the whole experience and I was kicking myself for my bad timing. Upon finally arriving, noting we were in the right spot because of the iconic lions framing the steps, we encountered a line the ran all the way outside into the drizzling rain. I had never seen a line like that for a museum, it seemed like people who traveled from all over the world to see this particular museum. When we finally got in the museum was fanatically crowded. Everyone was talking any looked really excited to be there. It was great being among a huge crown of people soo excited to see art from every era and movement and I can think of. We started walking around and all my worry disappeared. The second I was in there I was focused on see everything even if I had to pay $46 for parking, that just meant every second was precious.
* I took what had to have been over hundreds of pictures, with no shame, everything to document the full experience of being in Chicago as most image obsessed photographers would. Unfortunately upon returning to Springfield my phone was stolen and every picture was erased. There had obviously been some major devastation earlier, I was again devastated. This really speaks to backing up not only your work but the snit bits of information you collect along the way. I now have everything backed up to google drive, it's been a really amazing tool so far. Most of the pictures I've included in my research presentation were photos saved on social media during my trip and ones taken by my travel companion. Another tip for an obviously stolen phone outside of a tracking app is to fake an emergency to the people who have taken the phone and hope they have a conscience enough to return it. It's pretty dirty dealing but it worked. Unfortunately I was not able to recover my files. Lesson well learned, but I'm still full of regret.
Nothing Personal : Zoe Leonard, Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson
The exhibition was presented as three american coming together in a show bout the passage from personhood to persona.
Zoe Leonard
The amount of work she put into achieving the aesthetic of the time period and the historically accurate photo prints was extremely impressive. There were snapshots with rounded edges that looked worn, and glamorous studio shots with soft lighting, and publicity photos the looked like the ran in magazines. The photographs did bring a sense of melancholy, for me that melancholy came from seeing these amazing pictures of a life not lived. It was almost like she was drawing parallels without illustrating it of it's impossibility. For a person like her to live a lifestyle during that time period where she could be open and free about who she was without hiding it. The things that could have been possible, it was like a daydream.
"The 82 photographs that make up The Fae Richards Archive provide a convincing record of a person who never existed. Fae Richards could have been an actress and singer who worked from the 1920s to the 1970s. She was black, gay, and talented, and she achieved success to the degree that circumstances permitted. Zoe Leonard meticulously prepared a mix of publicity shots, film stills, and personal photos to create this fictional archive. She researched historically appropriate photographic papers, and “cast” different printers as well, to guard against a uniform look. The results show happiness tinged with melancholy and ask us to think about what it means to go through life behaving as a credible facsimile."
Cindy Sherman
I was very excited to see these particular prints in person. They were done in 35mm black and white during the 1970s. They weren't high fine art photographs but the concept of what was going on with in the photographs elevated them. I took a photo of Untitled Film Still #35, up very close because I wanted to capture the grain of the photograph.
"The 70 black-and-white photographs in Cindy Sherman’s series Untitled Film Stills constitute a major contribution to contemporary art. At 8 × 10 inches, Sherman’s prints look like ordinary film stills: publicity images that stage scenes from a movie for press and other promotional uses. In fact, Sherman did not re-create any specific character or movie. Her one-person show, modeled mainly on European art-house cinema, features a range of postwar genres and female roles that the artist inhabits like a shadow. “The characters weren’t just airhead actresses,” Sherman has said. “The clothes make them seem a certain way, but then you look at their expression and wonder if maybe ‘they’ are not what the clothes are communicating.”
Lorna Simpson
"Lorna Simpson’s fifth video work, Corridor, compares two historical periods: the mid-19th and the mid-20th centuries. Two characters, each alone in her domestic world, bring these moments to life, moving in parallel or in tandem through their respective daily routines. One appears to be a household servant or freed slave from around 1860, the other a successful homeowner living one century later—yet both are played by a single person, the artist Wangechi Mutu. The soundtrack, composed by John Davis, similarly contrasts a variety of musical sources, including echoes of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Chopinesque piano, New Orleans dirges, and free jazz. Using sounds instead of words, the two characters—who are and are not the same woman—carry on a dialogue across the divide of time and circumstance."
READINGS
In my research for artists working in photo and video I found an article on the brief history of women video artists. You can find the article here. The writer Kat Herriman notes that this particular medium is specifically rich with women artists. She asks “ Why are there so many great women video artists?”, she asks this but doesnt write the article to answer the question. This may have just been a play on the essay question why are there no great women artists?” I wasn’t sure on that since the article mostly read like a brief history. She states, “As conceptual, feminist, and body art movements developed during the 1970s. video represented a powerful new opportunity to resolve and represent the complex issues that were being surfaced by those cross over genres”. Maybe she means it was the right time and place for it. She mentions early video artists like Valerie Export, and Joan Jonas’ work Vertical Roll. In Vertical Roll Jonas disrupts the video signal with scene of her on imagery as a way of disrupting the technology with images of feminine subjectivity.
* Semiotics of the Kitchen, Martha Rosler
The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader titled “Feminist Curating and the return of Feminist Art”. In this essay Amelia Jones does a Q&A with artists/museum directors Maura Reilly Connie Butler. In the Q&A Jones asks these two veterans some difficult questions, one in particular is why feminist art is having a resurgence. They come to a couple of conclusions at what the possibilities might be. One is the younger baby boomer generation has held feminist art at such a high regard and given their position now the world looks to them for the past and present. Another perspective is the reality that more women have been moving into exhibition roles in museum institutions and galleries and are therefore taking on that subject matter more in depth. The conclusion that I found most interesting is the need of the feminist artist to preserve the history of their work, this basically means coming together as artists to take hold of exhibition spaces permanently for their work. A good example of this is Judy Chicago’s work “ The Dinner Party”, it is permanently housed in the Brooklyn Museum. There were so many unique perspectives on that inquiry. I myself would have never asked the question, and you can tell that Reily and Butler were hesitant to even hold a firm answer on it. You can read the essay here.
FILM SCREENINGS
Ms. 45 (1981)
Ms. 45 was a film screening I saw at the Moxie. It was apart of the mondo moxie series where they play cult and art films. This one was a film I had on my radar for quite a while. I was interested in it because of the pathology of revenge films with women as a the protagonist. I had come to the conclusions as with most horror or violent films that the only way you can show as much violence as is being portrayed on the screen is if something very disturbing warrants it. In the case of Ms. 45 the protagonist is involved in 2 violent encounters during the course of one day. She is also mute and an loner/outsider. In one of the violent encounters she shoots and kills the predator . Later in the film she uses the anger and rage of the experience to go on a killing spree of any man in New York she deemed threatening. Her reason and logic without even saying so is that she's actually become a vigilante put on the streets to protect other women. As the film progresses she becomes more exacting with her approach and attempts to lure men with her appearance. In my thesis show " All Dressed Up" I attempted to address this preparation, the pathology around women and their physical preparation and how it related to how society sees them. The act of dressing up implied to me that you assume a sort of persona in public. The transition between the private and public has always fascinated me. This is a darker example of that preparation. I took note of every time the protagonist looks in the mirror and her transition from meek mute to power hungry murderer. Having to keep up this persona actually drove her mad.
The Witch (2016)
Events
Poetry Reading
In thinking of art related events it didn't cross my mind until later to visit another kind of art, poetry. In my work I often use written source material to hint at the psychological undercurrents of the sitters in posture. I scheduled a poetry reading to go to as a change of pace. I'm not very good with poetry, I have a very academic mind when I think about writing. I was absolutely knocked out by the depth of each of the poets writing and how personal and easy it was to relate to their material. I usually have a hard time drawing out themes in poetry but I began to understand it, I was even able to find art in the structure in their writing.Here is an except from the poem AWAY STATUS by Shy Watson.
AWAY STATUS takes place in, around, and away from ex-boyfriends and their bedrooms. It fucks with drugs, dates old men for money, and has mommy issues. In the world it walks the streets of cities where it copes with unwanted advances and symptoms of repressed memories. It tries to utilize its finite youth. It keeps you up at night. You text it when you're drunk.
ARTIST INTERVIEW
I’ve always found curating to be interesting but I don’t know much about it. At the place where I work I’ve been tasked with running the exhibition space. What I do involves staying in contact with the artist, hanging work, creating labels, and write ups for publication of the work. I’ve done this only a handful of times and I’m not sure how successful I’ve been at executing the role of curator. Recently I’ve been contacted about presenting a show, this time I really want to make sure I can execute an exhibition to my full ability. I’ve also been making plans with a small group of artist to present a show of a work in a house turned gallery for an evening. I did an interview with an artist artist and musician from Fayetteville Arkansas, that has been curating art shows and music performances in a space called Lalaland. The small venue has turned successful in only a short time and I would like to know how their venue works and learn unique info about their curating experience.
Jane Kang
"Well, as far as curating an upcoming show, this is probably the least amount of work I've actually had to do. J.N. Ward had this vision but needed a space to show new work in. She contacted someone from LaLaLand and I volunteered to help with her show. This particular show is interesting to me because Ms. Ward, as a white woman from the South, explores her cultural identity--the conservative Christian background she comes from, the combined guilt of her history and the traditions that are a part of the South. To go with the theme and art show etiquette to have food and drink available at a reception, she has reached into her group of friends to hold a bake sale, all proceeds going to the Rape Crisis Center here in Fayetteville.
From both a curator and artist's perspective in the DIY world, I think it is extremely valuable to be able to fully realize the potential and vision of a show. To be capable. The artist must realize that they are prepared to have a show and the curator must realize the limits and potential of the artist. The curator must also understand whether the artist is ready for a show or not. I think a curator within DIY culture should be able to recognize what can be drawn out of the local culture in context to the wider stage of the times and how artists fit within that paradigm.
What I like about Ms. Ward's show is that she has put out her own posters, created her own Facebook event, is providing food/drink in a way that involves the art community to give back to the community at large while being creatively and thematically congruous with her show--most importantly, her show will be powerful and well executed. My role is to simply unlock the door and help hang for this particular show, but I think the best shows are when the artist becomes their own curator. Growth, at its best, is when an artist must manifest a show and thoughtfully place each component just so. I personally enjoy having that command of my own work, and even more exciting to see others do the same."
* flyer for the upcoming show
* excerpt from JN Wards History of the South
ART PRACTICE
Autobiography for Dialogues and Practices 2016
Hello My name is Shon Cele Rainey; I am in the last stages of completing my Master’s degree here at Drury University. I received my BFA in Art and Design with an emphasis in Photography and a minor in Film Studies at Missouri State University. My focus in art practice, in recent years, has been an inquiry into the feminine body and psychology in social culture. Formally I work in photography, video, and archival appropriation (found images). My connection to these things comes out of my love of film, feminist theory, video art and performance art, not to mention my own experiences. I was born and raised in Springfield Missouri. Not being able to travel as much as I would like and the feeling of missing out on a larger space has most considerably spawned my love of film as a means of escapism. I’m very interested in the screen as means of transmission and communication, film and photography have helped me to explore these things an in academic setting. I’ve been a student now for most of my life. I’ve gotten in the habit of wanting information and the need to be in constant dialogue. Art as a career has always been intimidating for me; I’ve never had full confidence as a creative person. But I do know that I can talk about art and culture all day and I love and need to be around it. It’s my mental nourishment. My hope in life after graduating is that I can continue my art practice in academic setting by way of residencies. This in turn will also I believe help me to do the traveling I’ve always dreamed of in effort to become a more rounded and culturally aware person. It’s not a thing that everyone needs to do but I find I learn best through experience. Other fun biographical things, I love music (specifically lo-fi, the kind that anyone can make), I work at an independent movie theater, I like taking pictures of my friends, reading non-fiction, and I am extremely clumsy. I like all kinds of art and can find subjects worth discussing in just about anything made. Jean Michel Basquiat, Jeff Wall, Carrie Mae Weems, and Andy Warhol are all artist I go to for inspiration as well as any and all performance art. I’ve been looking forward to Dialogues and Practices and am eager for the potential experiences I’ll have in it as well as hearing and learning from the experiences of my classmates. I am extremely excited about the travel that everyone will do and how it may transform us as art makers.
Since I've finished my Thesis Exhibition at Drury, I've had a lot of time to reflect on that experience. It was exhausting and rewarding. When I was going through the process I had little time to think and doubt so I had to trust my instinct and follow advice of my instructors. As I've mentioned this class is a valuable course to take between the 2nd and 3rd semester so you have this intense period of research before beginning the steps of your art practice. I found this course to be fundamental in understanding what that process was after I finished it. It helped me to understand my work more and where I wanted to go afterwards with it. My first major show upon completing my thesis was a show in Fayetteville Arkansas in the Bottle Rocket Gallery. This space was on lovely and historical land in Fayetteville. I was apart of a rich tradition of artists and writers who used the separate guest space as a retreat. I mostly worked when I was there, I worked on my printing, and re edits of stills and video from my All Dress Up exhibition. I included with it a video I made my first year at Drury called The Trouble with Women. Where I learned the most during my experience was setting up of the show in the space. That's kind of where I learned that I got the most from curating the space.
