Friday, September 30

a big painting

this experiment with blogging #3 hasn't turned out quite as successful. i was uploading images directly from flickr and could only do one at a time - so the order is backwards and every photo is listed under a different entry. from this image down to "you're not the boss of me" represent photos of one artwork i built exactly one week ago from friday night til 4 in the morning saturday.

DSC_0031.JPG, originally uploaded by jared loving care.

see more shots at my flickr account (jared loving care)

kenny and cat


DSC_0033.JPG, originally uploaded by jared loving care.

backity back back


DSC_0016.JPG, originally uploaded by jared loving care.

the backside


DSC_0013.JPG, originally uploaded by jared loving care.

multiplication


DSC_0080.JPG, originally uploaded by jared loving care.

the U


DSC_0063.JPG, originally uploaded by jared loving care.

off the wall


DSC_0027.JPG, originally uploaded by jared loving care.

Michael Jackson, that is

borg.JPG


borg.JPG, originally uploaded by jared loving care.

you'renotthebossofme.JPG

you're not the boss of me


DSC_0004.JPG, originally uploaded by jared loving care.

subtitle
How to build a painting as a first year grad student:
1. paint what you know
2. don't forget your roots
3. get out of your comfort zone

Saturday, September 10

one million sculptings

i bet you thought you were in a brash new gallery in chelsea when you saw these photos, didn't you? well, they might as well be fresh new york art stars because i give you the cream of the crop, the tops in their studios, the daring dozen who out-scored the throngs of sculptor grad hopefuls, indeed, the very future of art: the graduate sculptors of virginia commonwealth! while they guard our strong foundations on the sturdy ground floor here on 1000 broadstreet far from where we painters stray to the lofty third floor, we can still catch a strain of the sculptor cheerleaders' chant seeping through the concrete architecture from below, "we're number one, we're number one, we're number one, WE'RE NUMBER ONE!" and so it is with great pride and prejudice that i present the cultural pride of richmond. i may even re-edit this post to name artists with artworks someday. but for now, since i don't know their names, they are "THE sculptors."
so, cool show huh?
my initial thoughts on the show are that they hold to a contemporary pattern of young art - a sort of low-fi pattern. wether it be banal everyday materials or rudimentary mechanical devices or a studied throw-away careless manner of construction. and the attitude is pretty fun or even sinister, after all, not-serious is the new serioius. anyway, i'm a fan of the show and i am now a blogger so i took these pictures.

i don't know what's going on with this one but that thing inside revolves...and look how low-fi it is! it's just in an ordinary cardboard box like no one even cares!

another basic kinetic guy, this time a surfboard which dips down and up down and up down probably about infinity times

if you're like me and one of those painters who can't seem to fight off the urge to draw these sort of geometric lines this sculpture will at once attract you and fill you with self-loathing for your trite visual addictions. this is an elegantly welded version and i heard that the choices of point and line are dictated by a map of richmond shopping. diagramming weeks of purchases by studying receipts. way to bring in some content to muddy up that pure form.

batroscope. i know what you're thinking - scary - but this isn't even the most sinister piece in the show.
THIS IS

that's real money they've sanded into ziplocked oblivion!!! sick.

this one may look sinister at first glance to the naive eye influenced by socially constructed notions of thorns and horns , but it's not. it's a pretty stringed instrument like a pretty medieval bard would play for the lords and ladies (i saw and heard so myself)


now i pegged this one as sort of a functional looking yet clearly non-functional excersize system. boy was i wrong. i happened to be passing the gallery during a group critique and the artist was WEARING it! it was on like a jet pack with those dangling white straps fitting perfectly around the head and those grips in perfect position for the hands and the belt thing securely around the waist...moving parts and lights too. everyone seemed so jovial as the artist maneuvered around the room with his delightful art equipment that i realized that it DOES have a function: it's a fun maker.

careful, lest you get bored looking at this "i don't care how it looks" art. wait til i tell you that this frankenstein's ironing board has a motion detector that makes it jerk around when you approach it. (don't go to this show if you've seen that new exorcism movie) (i will not see that new exorcism movie)


i'm going to have to procrastinate a statement on this one until i learn if it moves around or lights up.


i have to admit this could give the sanded dollar bill a run for it's "most sinister sculpture at VCU 2005" title. it is indeed a giant rag dolly. can you read the letter she wrote? its a rhyme inviting you to put a pin in her body. at the risk of what a psychosexual analysis would uncover i will confess to putting a pin in the dolly's left big toe area.


ahhh. an artist after my own heart, hearkening directly to the indivisble donald judd. there's that "whatever" attitude again. man, i need to loosen up in my piety of my art heroes.

nice tape ball. it's like a geode made of paper




if you're scared of multitudes of glowing orange eyeballs bursting at you, you might be tempted to label this one the most sinister. but i'm scared of it because it's like a giant spawn of frog eggs. gross!


this is the only piece in the show that my roommates would immediately recognize as sculpture. it's a bird. it's a plane. it's the 4th anniversary of 9-11 yesterday....coincidence?!?


look at all these circular forms! i didn't withstand the critique that surely discussed this so i confess i did not pause to form my own connections between circular braided hair, circularly stacked egg shells, and a circularly packaged roll of tape - except the circular part, but i took the detail photo to try and show that the tape is balanced on pins stuck along the central ring. i thought that was neat.


But wait, there's more!
these Sculptors are prolific! uncontent to rest on the laurels of the show posted above, which is obviously fantastic and worthy of resting on, the sculptors have banded together again to make a set of diminuitive sculptures fashioined to fit in an undergrad locker up here on the third floor.
the show is called Scurvey Picnic and just might outdo the fun of the debut show posted above. they had mini chocolates at the opening, spoke in 'yaar', told pirate jokes (...yaaar, and it's drivin' me nuts!") and sang selections from the pirates of penzance and everything. doesn't get much better than that!

i mean, it has it all. a light set off by a motion detector that clicks on when you bend down to peer inside. a red button which, when pressed, activates a miniature rocking chair, and all the great themes of young art within a pirate dioramma!

but this is the best part. see that pie the size of a quarter??? oh, yes. it IS real. down to the filling and baked pie crust woven in milliminal strips. and those are mini teeth in the jar on the right and mini severed hands in the foreground but i don't think they're as real as that pie.

Tuesday, September 6

one million miles

believe it or not, this web log is my first assignment in grad school. along with joining del.icio.us and flickr. everyone should probably stop reading for a moment to join those two sites. judging from my addictions to these sort of narcissistic internet profile sites once i get the hang of this i may even catch-up to the thorough diary routine of brigham (briggie on this thing). my only other experience in blog reading is amishrobot.com (josh penrod), papa november (joe penrod - off amishrobot) and movable walls (chris lynn: tinypineapple.com/chris). those four guys deserve their blogs because they are four of the five most cleverguys i have met so far (gian being the unblogged one). so in holding brigham and others as my trailblazers i immediately realize the futility of creating a clever blog and will forever blog in their shadows. for this first post i haven't even taken my own photographs. i owe all images to suzanne heaton, my perfect travel companion on my trip across the country.

this is a re-enactment of me selling my volvo to karri Jorgenson in provo the very hour i took off in my u-haul. we are agreeing on the perfect sum of ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS which also turned out to be the perfect sum to match the prices of gasoline while driving a truck from utah to virginia full of wood bought in thrift stores. filling a $60 tank several times a day made me feel good about procrastinating my next car purchase for a while.









next we have the lovely suzanne and myself getting amped for the best trip of her life...ever.









and here we introduce the truck that i grew to love and the gian i grew to love, widely known as the most clever human being known to anyone i know.





this was a happy moment in wyoming. i don't find the word addiction harsh when it comes to america's favourite action drink, Yoo-Hoo. and yes, i do capture the irony in using the british spelling of the adjective in describing something so american.



So we drove from Provo to Denver on a Thursday. I'll save stories for when i get my own photos and skip to this Chicago moment. For my last trick i present Dan Flavin whose retrospective, even for a minimalphile such as myself, was surprizing in how good it was all together and in person. I got to see it with my last mission companion in Spain, Jimmy Peterson [iamesjpeterson.com], who is also just starting grad school. He will follow Todd Chilton's [toddchilton.com] footsteps at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as a Painting major, (Todd just finished). (Also, I started capitalizing because of the spellcheck on this thing). Anyway, cool show...with both cool and warm light installations. I'm a nerd.

p.s. I moved from Provo, Utah - where I lived for seven years as a student at Brigham Young University and a teacher at Heritage Schools Inc. - to Richmond, Virginia to spend two years at Virginia Commonwealth doing a masters in Painting and Printmaking.