Jessica Hische

This is Jessica Hische.  She is awesome.  Her presentation was supremely interesting as she touched on being a student, her transistion into the workfield from art school, and her transistion from the dream job to working for herself.  As I am quite uneducated when it comes to type, font, and lettering in general, this was a huge eyeopener for me because it made me trully realize that there are tons of people in this world with some really particular obsessions, like letters for example.  As you can see in the photograph, she has the word "Type" tattoed on her muscle, which means it is her strength.  ANYWAY, she discussed her success and attributed it to having a general path, but not a "dead set never vear off the path" path.  One thing I was confused about was the difference between type, font, and lettering.  And judging by the tattoo I'm going to assume that her main thing is Type.  Most of her presentation was about being in the type/font/lettering field and what one needs to be leery of, ways in which one can organize their habits as professional and so on.  Overall her talk was very interesting and I have realized just how specific artistic practice is sometimes.

H. John Thompson

This Mr. Thompson seemed like a cool dude.  He comes across as a regular Joe, kindof monotone(maybe that is under the pressure of the great doom eyes of young studenti) but he also seemed really comfortable talking about his art.  And although he was monotone, I sensed a great deal of pride and confidence in him.  He seemed very happy about his work.  What kind of work you ask??  WELL, he seems like a boy from the countryside that probably turned out a little weirder than everyone else.  He uses things like the land and broken down trucks on his farm.  He loves to create spaces in places like a field, where he can show an installation.  For example...his family works a farm, and there has always been this ooooollllllld broken down truck sitting in a field with weeds growing up around it.  Some time after having an extrememly emotional moment with some horses, he subconciously constructed an installation referencing this emotional horse experience.  I thought it was really wonderful that he could talk about an emotional experience almost from a matter of fact stance.  He constructed a small shed/barn structure, took the old broken down truck apart, and wired it and lit it up, and lifting it off the ground to display in the shed structure.  Simple, and honest reference to the life and times of a horse.  It was very interesting, and again...simple to me.  Which I liked.  It wasn't like, "Ohhhh I was going through this terrible dark period in my life and the broken down truck represents my broken soul." Although I would not be totally opposed to that or anything, but I'm pointing out the direct reference to an event and how simplified and also seperated it became.  I like this guy a lot.  He seems to build his studio wherever, or make wherever he is his studio. 

My Face

Hans Rosling: The Good News of the Decade

Hans Rosling discusses the good news of the decade in this lecture.  He is a professor of international health and discovered a paralytic disease in Africa.  His lecture began by talking about the United Nations 8 Goals for the progress of countries.  The goal that Rosling focused on was child mortality.  He discussed the statistics of Africa, and the individual countries within.  He brought up how the average mortality rate was measured on a more long term scale, and suggested that the progress be measured in 10 year incremements.  He also discussed how the statistics of progress aren't fair in Africa because for one thing, it is measured as a continent, not as individual countries, which he says are vastly different.  In measuring the progress in 10 year increments, we can also differentiate between different era's and time periods, such as the 1990's when the the AIDS epidemic was peaking, there were obviously a lot of child deaths, so to group the 1990's with a decade after that is making immense progress is not fair, because there are different circumstances.  He then describes how smaller families tend to have less instances of child death.  There is also new research that says 50% of the falling child mortality rate is attributed to female education, as the effects of the education may not show until 15-20 years later, but none the less it comes through.  He mentions at the end of his lecture that the environmental crisis depends on the stabilization of the world population.  This can be achieved by lowering child mortality rate, access to family planning and educating women and girls.  He stresses long term perspective, but measured in 10 year periods.

Warning Sign

Doug Bucci

Doug Bucci gave a very trange and interesting lecture yesterday. It was strange to find out so much about his personal life, almost TMI, but it was sort of refreshing to hear someone so emotionally and thoughtfully involved in their work.  He talked about how diabetes plays a major role in his work, and he was very enthusiastic to discuss this with everyone, despite seeming like a total "dork" or weirdo.  He sort of cheered us on as he sypathized about our foundations year, but reassured us that it was totally worth it.  I feel like some people might not be aware of the amazing gifts, knowledge, skills and even new eyes that we are being given as students.  He told us that the faculty would remain with us for the rest of our lives.  I will already never forget certain professors, I can tell.  He told us about his experience in being a painter at first, and then hating it and turning to jewelry, which may have given people a little bit of a clue that its not going to be so easy to be one type of artist.  His words about juggling time, and jobs and family and studio work and things like that were on point too, I am 27, I have had a taste of the real world and know it's not all fun and games.  I was also impressed that he talked about dropping the corporation job and how that made him totally poor, because that displayed what it's like to take a chance.  Dive right into an uncomfortable situation, which I also agreed with.  I have always thought that discomfort to some degree is important, and as he said, means you are learning. His work was interesting, most of it wasn't really my thing, but it was interesting and some of it was actually very effective and I could tell that he felt very strongly about it, which is very important as an artist.  Over all I enjoyed his story and experience as an artist.

Marrianne Dages

Last weeks lecture was fairly interesting.  I thought that she had some really important things to say but after a while she kept repeating herself in different ways.  None-the-less, she was drilling a very important fact, we are artists because we make work, we don't make work because we are artists.  This was also emphasized by Gerard the following week. I hadn't actually picked up on that until he said it.  She informed us that it is important to start thinking about what the studio means to us.  How we perceive it now, what we might want to have in the studio, what kinds of supplies and equipment, perhaps even starting to stock up slowly.  She talked about residencies and sharing studios with other people.  Her work was pretty cool, and I think her book binding was really beautiful.  I was more interested in the equipment that she was showing photos of, it all looked very big and mechanical and important and fun to use.  This added to my interest in printmaking.