Some Artworks From Space Research

For those of you who are unfamiliar:
Art Foundation, or AFo as it is commonly referred to, is the first year of the VCUarts program. During this first year we take four studio classes (Space, Surface, Drawing, Time).
This semester I'm taking Space Research and Drawing Studio. Space is a class that is about the observation and creation (both technical and artistic) of sculpture. My teacher is Matt King, and I think he is alright. Here are some photographs of the things I've made:



This is the first actual "sculpture" that we had. How it works is we make these things on our own time and then we have a critique (aka "crit").
Matt told us to go and home and draw something that has significant meaning to us from three different angles. When we came into class we swapped drawings with other students and were given the task of making the object according to the drawing, not from our memory.
Next we had to construct a 20-ish inch tall stand for them that was specific to the object. My object was a pair of sunglasses that belonged to a girl named Brittany. If you can't tell, the stand is a girl's tank top, sunglasses, and hair without a body. I received an A on this project.



This was our second project. We were put into groups of three and had to construct this cardboard thingie. So: it had to have an "unexpected relationship with gravity", touch the ground twice and the stool once, be constructed of 5-7 beams, incorporate two curves, and be as tall as our tallest group member. My group only fulfilled two of those restraints, and it was a little lame. But our teacher commended us on our "amazing engineering feat" (which was my idea, by the way). For this project, our group got a C on execution and a B on the idea.











This project was based on a conversation that we were to record that was "both personally and publicly important to us." My conversation was with my boyfriend Greg around the time of his 20th birthday. We talked about time and how it inevitably passes and how years are fractions of lives. Our teacher gave us instructions to "link two dissimilar objects through an unexpected medium." I chose toothpicks for several reasons: they are like the remnants of a tree, they are something that we observe and use often but don't really value or pay attention to, and the very act of putting them together is time-intensive. I know it's difficult to tell, but the sculpture is of an open mouth with a spear like thing going through it. The head was supposed to be completed and life-size, while the "spear" is supposed to be a clock hand (with clock attached). I was unable to finish the piece because the night before it was due (procrastination?) a fire alarm was pulled and our hall was forced to stand outside until early in the morning. I thought this was very ironic, considering the topic of the piece. Even though it was obviously unfinished, I still received an A on the sculpture.





















For this project Matt gave us a long list of random items we were supposed to collect. Examples: something that was once loved, something slept on, something associated with travel, an outfit, something that was never meant to be indoors, etc etc. After we gathered all the items we had to write a short story about a character who throughout the story meets all of the items on the list. My story was about a man who is in a loving but hollow relationship with his recently deceased pack rat wife. As he mourns her death, he starts throwing out all of her accumulated junk. Eventually he finds a half full (or half empty) bottle of pills, which his wife had used as a means to commit suicide. Morbid, I know, but that's where I was taken by these items. After our stories were written, we pretended that our character was dead and built a monument or reliquary for them. I instead made a reliquary for my character's wife as if he were creating her grave. I was influenced by my art history class, as we were studying about how the flutes and shape of a column gave objects a sense of structure and strength, this is evident in the red polka-dotted skirt. I also tried to make this grave a type of surrogate human. Hidden at the bottom is the pill bottle, and the slight contempt that the husband harbors towards his wife.