Month: December 2017

Exploring Gender and Identity

Anna ArsiriyART 122Y

Curatorial Creativity Project

While a person’s gender may begin with the assignment of his/her sex based on his/her genital characteristics, the true identity of a person goes beyond biological aspect of gender. This virtual exhibition “Exploring Gender and Identity” features the artists who are not afraid of expressing the complex interrelationships between their identity, body language, and self-expression. They explore the relationships between gender and society. These modern American artists are not the first to do so. However, over the last forty years, they refused to categorize genders as only male and female. They explored questions of transgender, bisexuality, and many other new sexual entities born from the interaction of all mentioned above.

Artists presented in this exhibition, including Kruger, Harris, Greiman, argue that gender is not what truly defines a person. Some artists, such as Sabean ridicule modern stereotypes created by society in a comical way. Some artists, such as Smith, bring up strong messages about some really tough issues different genders have to experience nowadays. Some artists, such as Reimer, Warhol, and Harris, intentionally photograph portraits of themselves wearing ambiguous costumes to emphasize identity roles. Some artists, such as Abramovic and Ulay, try to represent the third entity born from the interaction of male and female energies. All together, these artists create a very powerful social resonance which in some ways helps people to answer questions such as “who am I?” and “where do I belong?”.

 

See the Curatorial Presentation in Browser

Download the Curatorial Presentation Here

Project 3 | Possible World

Anna ArsiriyART 314

 

 

Since I consider interior design as one of the possible future career paths I wanted to connect this project with designing an interior.  My Possible World focuses on the creation of a small immersive environment such as an interior design of my living room. I decided to start with not so much of designing but copying an existing room in my house. Of course, the environment is simplified and many objects have similar but not the same structure (such as piano, spiral staircase).

Here is the picture of my living room vs. the rendered Maya image.

DCIM102GOPROG1935647.

In Maya, I modeled the environment and its materials, textures, lighting and movement of a camera through space. First part of the project was to create an environment. The material and textures include laminate, wood (piano, coffee table, stairs, plant), carpet, leather and others. Doors and windows with blinds are png images inserted into the walls. I learned how to use bump mapping to create a realistic textures of leather and carpet.

Bump mapping of leather texture(alpha gain = 0.1, picture with inverted in Photohop colors)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bump mapping of carpet texture (alpha gain = 0.8)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Second part was to create a simple rigged entity. In my case, it is a butterfly. Even though I learned how to use Blend Shapes, I used Expression Editor (Windows->Animation Editors->Expression Editor) for rigging the wings.

Left wing (I played around with each wing separately).

Note: These functions are made only after creating additional attributes in the Channel Box (Edit -> Add Attribute) , such as in my case Wiggle, WingSpan, and CycleTime.

math function = sin

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Right wing

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The first couple of seconds of the animation shows randomized motion of the butterfly which is also done using Expression Editor.

random function = noise

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For the light, I used one light source – point light with intensity 1000 and retrace shadows.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After organizing lighting and movement of a camera through space, I created a small animation of two butterflies flying in my living room.

Unfortunately, I could not batch render an entire animation. After rendering first 50 frames, which took about 2.5 hours, I calculated that I would need 50 hours to render my 1000 frame movie. To demonstrate some of the textures, I rendered a few separate frames.

At the frame 1, we can see closely the butterfly wings and piano keys with their reflected shadows.

At the frame 322, we can see the spiral staircase materials and textures (and the realistic shadow on the wall):

At the frame 460, we can see the carpet and coffee table textures:

In order to see the carpet little better, I removed the coffee table:

At the frame 562, we can see textures of the plant (leaves, pot, crust, dirt) and the nice shadow on the wall:

 

At the frame 835, we can closely see the leather texture:

I also rendered a few other random perspective views to have a better understanding of the room layout and some other textures.

Art Review

Anna ArsiriyART 122Y

Peter Morgan

(Almost) Good Enough to Eat

Exhibition schedule: Penn State Abington Art Gallery, 116 Woodland Building, October 23 – December 15, 2017.

 

Peter Morgan’s exhibition (Almost) Good Enough to Eat, which opened at the new Penn State Abington Art Gallery, was astonishingly delicious. I would not recommend anyone to visit it in a state of being hungry. Beautifully glazed jelly doughnuts, melted cheese atop nacho chips, sweet waffles stacked on top of each other will make a spectator crave for food (almost) immediately. The variety of colors and forms, unusual compositions involving wildlife, and imaginary tastes that people can sense right away, make this exhibition especially interesting and almost childlike attractive. However, after spending more time in the gallery and analyzing these pieces, Morgan’s exhibition seems to demonstrate quite a challenging intellect which creates “connection between often seemingly disparate topics” (from Peter Morgan’s Artist’s Statement).

The gallery has total of six ceramic sculptures. Five of them are standing on the same height pedestals, and one central hotdog piece Voyage of the H.M.S. Frankfurter stands on the higher shelve. All six pieces are put apart from each other, whereas at the same time one makes a whole. The sculptures depict funny composed wildlife (except for the hotdog piece) with a food incorporated as a landscape.

 

For me, the nature of this exhibition reflects Morgan’s vision and understanding of the world which adds a touch to a whole picture. The first experience provided by this exhibition is some kind of superficiality and childishness. Perhaps, from the first glance, Morgan’s intentions were to create something that people have never seen before. But after careful observation, a spectator may consider that the author questions existential aspects in a deeper level. Unlike Jeff Koons, the author is evoking humor successfully. Through the use of puns and analogies, Morgan combines incompatible things both in context and scale.

“My objects are often archetypal depictions focusing on our idealized understandings and desires of the subject, rather than their actuality. I think of my sculptures being collaged from an encyclopedia, a place where, in theory, all the information in the world is kept in a concise, ideal, and easy-to-read format. My pieces illustrate and investigate what we know and how we know it, through an exploration and celebration of cultural mythologies. Through my selection of topics, I create a sense of place and time through which the viewer may enter the work, physically and/or psychologically.”  (www.artsmagazine.info)

 

In the work called The Hypothetical Prehistoric Giant Wolverine Battling a Polar Bear Over a Deal Beluga Whale, on top of a Glazed Huckleberry Jelly Doughnut, for instance, Morgan depicts Arctic wildlife standing on the beautiful colorful ceramic doughnut. Even though the name of the work directly describes what is going on, I feel that this piece could warn people about the global warming and other ecological interactions of the Arctic Ocean on a huge scale. Perhaps, it reminds of a human being on the top of the food chain or simply of celebration a carnivorous lifestyle and how culture drove human evolution in general.

To sum up, the exhibition (Almost) Good Enough to Eat by Peter Morgan, provides once-in-a-lifetime experience to see the dolphin jumping out of macaroni and cheese, cargo ship carrying a giant hotdog, and other easy-to-look-at-sculptures. In general, the exhibition implies the author’s intention to represent the illustration of cultural mythology. Morgan’s skilled craftsmanship, playfulness, and intricate intellectual clues create a beautiful absurd, which I truly enjoyed to observe.

 

WORK CITED

“(Almost) Good Enough to Eat”. Woodland Gallery. Penn State Abington College. 1600 Woodland Rd, Abington, PA 19001. 23 Oct. – 15 Dec. 2017.

Morgan, Peter. “Here Is My Show Here.” Peter Morgan, 2017, www.petergmorgan.com/here-is-my-show-here/.

Wampler, Angela. “‘Color Me Bad’ — Peter Morgan.” A! Magazine for the Arts, 29 Feb. 2012, www.artsmagazine.info/articles.php?view=detail&id=2012022621063035196.