Brigitte+Seeley-Messick

I intend to major in biology and I am on the pre-med track. I have not done a lot of art using computers, but I have used photoshop on a few occasions, I can navigate iMovie well, and I generally catch on quickly. I have been drawing and painting since I was very little, which almost made me decide to go to LaGuardia high school. I didn't go there because I wanted art to be an escape from my studies, not the other way around. My high school was not focused on the arts, so fitting art classes into my schedule was difficult. I have never taken a sculpture class before so I am excited to try this dimension of visual art. I tend to like and make art that is graphic and bold with thoughtful lines.
 * -ABOUT ME-**

The artist I chose to focus on is Sandy Skoglund. There are a couple common themes throughout her work. She seems to work a lot with everyday items, repetition, grouping, perception, and scale. In a number of her pieces she picks an every day item and uses it to such a great extent that it is difficult to identify it. She does not actually alter the item itself but its overuse makes it look different from how one would normally identify it. She repeats the same item over and over, often covering surfaces and therefore creating new surfaces. She never uses the item in an expected way. This may be because of the sheer quantity of the item or because the item seems out of place. For example, she uses items of food in a number of her pieces. These pieces are composed nearly entirely of that food, or are nearly entirely covered in that food, but they do not relate to the food item itself in any clear way.
 * -500 WORD ESSAY DUE TUESDAY OCTOBER 7TH, 2014-**

In terms of elements of design, she seems to play with space primarily. The spacing of the item is crucial to how the piece is perceived and understood. It seems that in some of her pieces even though she doesn’t manipulate the item itself, she lets it become unrecognizable, while in other pieces the item maintains its integrity and individuality despite repetition. She chooses to what extent the viewer can perceive and recognize the item by determining how densely packed the item is, how the item is arranged, how the item interacts with the surrounding negative space, and by selecting what scale each piece is on. In the two pieces above it is clear that the item she is using in one piece is a hanger and in the other is a sock. These pieces contrast with the two pieces below in which is less clear what item she is focused on. She also experiments with a middle ground. In the piece below there are some parts of the image where it is not so clear what item she used while in others it is clearer. This is explained by the spacing of the items. When the cheese puffs are not as dense it is easier to make out what they are. In the above piece it is difficult to tell that the surfaces are entirely covered with and surrounded by ground beef whereas in the picture below, it is clear that the surfaces are covered in bacon. In the image below the walls and floors are entirely made out of pipecleaners. She doesn’t alter them beyond trimming them to her desired length and yet she managed to arrange them in a way that they are not instantly recognizable. This is because it is so unusual to see such a large quantity of pipecleaners that one would assume that the walls and floors were made of something different. Another element of design that she clearly likes to explore is color. In all of the pieces above there are limited color pallets. Most of the pieces do not have more than a few colors that do not range very much in shade.

All images are from: http://www.sandyskoglund.com/pages/imagelist/imagelist%20home.html

Even though I’ve been making art for the majority of my life, I look at art differently now that I’ve made some pieces for this class. On a basic level, I used to do mostly 2D art and so when I would look at art I would look more closely at 2D work because I could relate my work and my processes to that more easily. Now that I’ve made some sculptures of my own, I focus on 3D artwork as well. I think that your perception of art is always changing but it particularly changes when you are learning. Before I had made my own sculptures when I looked at sculpture in museums I didn’t feel as connected to it. I think this is because as I learn more and more about different materials and techniques that are used in sculpture I can understand more and more about the process of constructing a piece and what it took to make it. If I read that a piece is made out of plaster I have some idea of the weight of that and of how they might have gone about using it, now having used it myself. Additionally, now that I am aware of the sculpture-specific and terms used to describe art, used by artists, these terms are in my mind and I can use them readily and think in terms of them. For example, I didn’t know about the principles of design before this class. Now knowing them, not only do am I conscious of them within my own work but when I see art they are already being applied. I now see pieces, particularly sculptures, with a new vocabulary that allows me to notice things that I may not have noticed before. Similarly, once we arrived to the Hirshhorn museum and the terms scale and proportion were introduced, all of the sculptures that I looked at were framed in my mind and understood through those terms.
 * -HOW I SEE ART NOW AS AN ARTIST-**


 * -PICTURES FROM THE HIRSHHORN- **