PANEL REVIEW!!!!

my panel Members included Jeffery Allison, Gordon Stettinius, Jon Henley and Frncis Thompson. Things got off to a bit of a wet start however this worked out as Gordon Stettinius and I both stumbled through our first meetings. He expressed that he had never been on that side of the table before and we worked our way though my portfolio. He like myself is a closet/beginner graphic design geek and we spent a fair amount of the time getting through the technical parts of my previous semester's work. His critique was far more technically focused than the rest of the meetings I would have for the day. It was helpful to have someone go over my images with a sharp eye and help give me ideas for tightening the post work even further. Other than that we spoke quite a bit about what i would be doing next and about the possible complications to health that can sometimes be a part of shooting documentary/ editorial work.

My next meeting was with Jon Henley who I had met previously through the professional practices class I took from last semester. Being that he also recognized me it seemed tat he was pleased to finally see some of my work. For the first seven minutes or so of the meeting we discussed the work I was presenting, spending a great amount of that time on the various ways the series could be interpreted. We spoke about the way work is valued and looked at by our society and some of the other connotations of class. He was pleased to hear about the process of shooting and how the choices were made in wardrobe and model selection. The rest of the time was spent on discussing how the industry was changing and what kinds of technical knowledge I should be getting up on to stay competitive.

The time I spent in my 3rd meeting with Francis Thompson the Capital One Art Buyer was the most stressful and nerve wracking of the meetings not because he had negative things to say about the work but because he had such an amazing poker face. He wanted to as much as I could say about the work in front of him without offering too many of his own questions. I tried to fill the time as best as I could but felt pretty insecure talking to a guy who's face wasn't telling me anything about what he was hearing. When he did respond it was generally in a clarifying manner or with a very specific question about the concept or execution.

The final meeting of my day was also the most successful, by having my meetings back to back with only a few minutes to pause in between I was able to catch a flow of ideas and adapt quickly to the challenges of each meeting all the while revising my presentation and making my comments more concise. The last meeting was with Jeffery Allison from the VMFA. He laughed at the work and was visibly enthusiastic about what he was seeing. He seemed to get every little reference i had thrown into the series from the title of the series right down to little details others had been uninterested in or had missed entirely.

I truly enjoyed the experience and feel that the comments made by my panel members were all good to positive. While some of them pointed out technical errors all were considered to be small and simply a matter of tightening up the post production. The concept was well received by all and none of them found it to be uninteresting or some about which they had nothing to respond with. All of my meetings were engaging and even the most difficult of them ran full with discussion up to or past the allotted time.

Monday ARTIST // Walker Evans (Makeup for missed)

Bud fields and his family, Hale County alabama (1941) from the book below
The first publishing of Let Us Now Praise Famous men came out in 1941. Taken on in 1936 the book grew out of a magazine assignment about white sharecroppers in the southern United States. Exploring the quality and conditions of life for some of the poorest members of society during the New Deal Era Walker Evans shot some of the most iconic photographs of the time if not in US history. The subject of work, the hardest kind, in the most dire of circumstances was not only a matter of journalistic human interest. The work explores life at losing end of the economic latter.

In my project the central question between the photographs "is what are they selling?". In the work of Evans the answer is that these poorest segments are selling their very lives. I am attempting to create work that asks the viewer to examine their own relationships to each of my characters, are they buying the image, protection, or salvation temporary and otherwise. In contrast to Evans' stark portrayals I choose to construct images slick and magazine ready, with clear sunny days overhead. the kind of image we are used to seeing in the visual lexicon of our advertising environment.

COntest Entry #2 04/14/2010

http://www.stacarts.org/exhibits/show/38
Mills Pond House Gallery Exhibition 2010 entry

contest Entry #1 04/14/2010

http://www.collegeart.org/opportunities/listing/4552/
EYA National Juried Competition 2010 application

Lecture Matthew Crawford 040510

Put on by a joint effort between the Craft/Material Studies and Sculpture and Extended Media departments, this unique lecture was unlike the kind I've regularly attended during my time at VCU. Matthew B. Crawford the author of Shop Class as Soul Craft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, is also a Research Fellow at UVA and a Contributing Writer with The New Atlantis Magazine.

When showing his work there were photos of engines and engine troubles along with a could shots of the kind of motorcycles pictured above. After abandoning the world of political think tanks and corporate desk jobs Crawford has found intellectual satisfaction, physically rewarding work and the want to spread the word by learning the art of motorcycle restoration and maintenance and with it running his own shop.

Lecturing on the value of the labor arts, as mentally and physically demanding as any of the fine arts I've worked in, Crawford made a strong argument for the preservation of such skills. In the world of skilled manual labor there is a level of craft seen just as easily in the works of master painters as can be observed in the careful hand of an auto-mechanic or carpenter.

Crawford also expressed the idea that wrapped into the practices he described there are moral and ethical decisions as well. I very much agree that there is a responsibility social and otherwise within the world of any art, and appreciated his thoughts on the matter.

Thursday Idea blog #10

placeholder

Thursday Idea blog // what wasn't working

As titled this post is about what isn't working at this point. I think it's entirely helpful to hone down what wasn't working in forming how to move forward. The immediate problems with the above images are that two of the three have characters (billy mays and sarah palin ) that are far too recognizable. The third image falls down by attempting to go toward religious imagery simply for the sake of playing off of it with a jesus skateboarder (a person who sacrifices their safety for the sake of others entertainment) and pursues it without actually getting far enough to make it work.