Class Info

Roster

Now that the enrollment period is over, it’s a great idea to drop by both our Art110 roster page & MyCSULB & BeachBored to make sure everything is in order.

• Art110 roster page – Make sure you’re on it, and that the link is correct.
• MyCSULB – make sure you’re enrolled!
• BeachBored – check your points!

Schedule

• See the schedule on Trello

Slack

• Thanks for switching to First Names!
• It’d be great if everyone would add a profile pix!

Post Naming

Many of you did use correct post naming. And many of you did not. I didn’t take any points off this time for post names, but I will next week. It becomes very hard to grade with confusing post names. The format is in the syllabus:

• glenn.zucman.com/i2va/spring17-syllabus/#post-names

Points on BeachBored

All points for Week 2 are now up on BeachBored. Be sure to check your points and know where you stand! So far we’ve had 102 points possible. Here’s how many points you should have to be on track for each grade level, and how many peeps in 1p / 2:30 are currently at each grade level:

A = 92 points – 55 / 41
B = 82 points – 12 / 14
C = 71 points – 1 / 5
D = 61 points – 0 / 0
F = 60 points – 5 / 4

1p GPA = 3.53
2:30 GPA = 3.38

Leaderboard

Here’s our current leaderboard for Week 2!

Top 5 @1pm:

1. Sara Rivenbark, 127
2. Maryam Takla, 127
3. Alicia Castro, 127
4. Eliza Karpel, 113
5. Bailey McCann, 110

Top 5 @2:30:

1. Jennifer Ostroff, 111
2. Norma Garcia, 108
3. Chelsea Mallinson, 107
4. Angela Kight, 107
5. Nestor Peralta, 106
6. Maria Romo, 106

This Week

Art Talk OTW

The Mind in the Cave

Art Activity

• No Art Activity this week.

Classmate Conversation

• @ SOA Galleries / Classroom – see below

Artist Conversations

We’re doing our 1st Artist Conversation this week. Here’s the timetable for today:

1p:

• 1:00 – 1:40 @ Galleries – find a classmate you haven’t talked to before – do a classmate conversation, look at the galleries, and pick an artist to talk to. Most of the artists will be sitting at a table outside their show. Sometimes they have class or work and an artist might not be available.
• 1:40 – 1:45 – head up to the classroom
• 1:45 – 1:55 – use paper, laptop, phone, etc to write a quick draft of your post
• 1:55 – 2:05 – trade your draft with your classmate and give each other feedback on their work
• 2:05 – 2:15 – class discusses the artists as a group

2:30:

• 2:30 – 3:10 @ Galleries – find a classmate you haven’t talked to before – do a classmate conversation, look at the galleries, and pick an artist to talk to. Most of the artists will be sitting at a table outside their show. Sometimes they have class or work and an artist might not be available.
• 3:10 – 3:15 – head up to the classroom
• 3:15 – 3:25 – use paper, laptop, phone, etc to write a quick draft of your post
• 3:25 – 3:35 – trade your draft with your classmate and give each other feedback on their work
• 3:35 – 3:45 – class discusses the artists as a group

Sample Artist Conversation

Remember that the Artists you will meet in the SOA Galleries are mostly young artists just beginning their careers. They’ve typically worked for many months to put up the work we see in the galleries, and you are very likely the 1st person ever to write about them and their work! That’s awesome! But it also gives us the responsibility to be accurate and informed about the work

Your syllabus has a Sample Artist Conversation here.

And for convenience, here’s a copy of it:

Last Week

Classmate Conversations

I did say that these could be informal, but they should be more than 1 sentence.

• Here’s a great one by Jennifer Ostroff!

Landscapes with a Corpse

At first, I had no idea of how I was going to “die,” but I knew I wanted it to look bloody and gory so I could have some fun with fake theatre blood. I am also a very clumsy person so I incorporated that fact into my “death.”

The timeline of my “death” begins when I wake up in the middle of the night to get a glass of water downstairs. I walk down the stairs and I almost reach the last steps when my foot slides on my little nephew’s scooter toy. As I slide off the scooter, I lose my balance and fall backwards. I end up hitting the back of my head on the stair steps and cracking my skull open. My little nephew wakes up after hearing me scream and goes to investigate. He sees me from the top of the stairs and feels guilty that I died by slipping on one of his toys.

The main idea of this story is that my little nephew should put his toys away because someone could seriously get hurt! He always leaves his toys scattered all around the house and everyone is constantly tripping over them and hurting themselves. My “death” is an exaggeration of that, but it is still somewhat realistic. I am also the clumsiest person to exist and I feel like I would die in some kind of freak accident like this (haha).

— Angela Kight

Because I have been swimming competitively since I was 7, and lifeguarding/teaching swim lessons since I was 16, I decided to die in the pool. I created a scene, with the help of two close friends, where I am trying to rescue someone who was drowning and in the process I drowned too. I recreated the scene with both friends. This first picture is a picture of my friend Rico, who helped me with the molding activity. His drowning was caused by the lack of ability to swim. I went in to help him when he got tired swimming half way across the deep end but he was resisting my help and elbowed me in the head. This caused me to knock out and we both drowned.

— Gabriella Tecun

For this week’s art experience I decided to do a depiction of a girl dealing with dementia who copes with her memory loss by writing notes to herself each day to remember what she must do. However, things take a turn when one of her notes, the one that reminds her to take her medication, washes away as she is washing the dishes which causes her to forget to take her meds before bed resulting in her death.

— Jackie Perez

Heels so high you can talk to God

I honestly was very excited about this project, because who doesn’t, from time to time, question their own mortality? While you’re in your car, do you ever stop to think that you might not finish your commute? I think it is a very human thing to consider your own death…and at this point in my life, the scenario I picked seemed pretty likely, if not overexaggerated.

I don’t consider myself to be vain, but I do like to accessorize from time to time, and as much as I hate the cliche’, I really do love shoes, stillettos to be exact – I own quite a few pairs (I’d have even more If my dog hadn’t chewed the hell out of a few pairs). Why? They looked good on me when I tried them on. Do I get a lot of use out of them? Not really – the higher the heel, the more I walk like a newborn giraffe, which is where I got my idea for this project – clumsy girl putting her aesthetic first, and her ability to balance second.

It was simple. I put together an outfit, brushing off the highest pair of heels I owned; did my makeup; and grabbed my little brother to be my makeshift photographer, and we set up the scene. With his help, we positioned my limbs, and took a few shots. My friend Lauren even sent me some texts to add to the scene, which I took a screenshot of since the camera didn’t pick up the image. Once done, I transferred the images to my laptop and gave them some touchups in Adobe Photoshop.

— Jennifer Ostroff

I first thought about The Walking Dead, my favorite TV show, and wanted to do something regarding getting eaten by zombies. Once I got to my car, I noticed I still had my clown mask I bought from Halloween and knew I was going to do something regarding getting killed by a clown. That idea came to my mind once I saw the mask and remembered how terrified people were of clowns a couple months back, since they were ambushing random individuals. After finding the clown mask, I had to find a weapon for the clown to kill me with. While looking, I found a club that I got from Kenya and decided to choose that.

The scene is illustrating the clown attacking me after I opened the door to go to my car. The clown was waiting in the front and ambushed me. After that, he hit me in the head with his club, forcing me to drop my keys. After I tried to get up again, he hit me repeatedly in the head till I died and turned my body around to take a picture, like he usually does with the rest of his victims. How the idea came about is my friend in the picture, the clown, and I were going to another friends house. I told him about the project before we left and that I needed his help for a short scene. My little sister, who took the pictures, was laughing the whole time during the process which made it hard for me to keep a straight face.

— Michael Shenouda

Pushed past the (legal) limit

I was honestly super excited when I received this assignment. I told my mom about it and she couldn’t believe this was a school assignment and said it sounded extremely macabre, but I have a morbid curiosity and am fascinated with all things gore and horror. So when I read that I had to create a scene in which I was dead, my mind jumped to something bloody and gory. Almost immediately, I had the image of a bloody bathtub in my mind. It was really fun for me to create this scene. I had maybe a little too much fun trying to get my fake blood to look as realistic as possible and thinking of the small background details, such as the bloody wine bottle, that would complete the image.

— Jennifer Drees

This week was definitely an introspective one for many reasons. I was feeling stressed out about all that I had to do for my classes and I was not really in the best state of mind. Maybe not the best time to start planning my own death. With that said though, this assignment actually turned out to be pretty fun.

As you can see, I chose to go to the beach for my death. We decided to do it at Newport Beach and honestly it would be a pretty nice place to go in my opinion. My boyfriend took the pictures and he is actually a photographer so he did not mind at all and was actually excited about this assignment. I am usually pretty awkward with posing for pictures, but this felt okay because it was not supposed to look “natural”. Originally I wanted to actually go into the water or at least have my hair wet to make it look like I had drowned, but the weather really did not call for that and I did not want to freeze to death in the pursuit of my fake death photo.

— Rachel Palmer

As a biology major, my first thought when tasked with this assignment was dying in the lab, but I was too shy to lay down and pretend to be dead while everyone else was working. I decided to do suicide by jumping off a building at school driven by stress. I think this assignment would have been more fitting for the week leading up to finals week.

I used the microbiology building because it’s related to my major, is one of the buildings I walk by daily, and is pretty quiet most of the time which made it easier to take the photos. The first photo was taken from the 4th level while the second photo was taken from the ground floor or 1st level. I made the mistake of getting up after the first photo was taken so there is a small discrepancy in the way my hair is laid on the floor.

I guess the lesson of this post is that the mind has a tendency to stress over anything and everything so you have to make an effort not to be a victim of unnecessary stress and learn to get priorities straight and balance every aspect of your life so that stress doesn’t creep up on you and take over your life.

— Shannon Satterfield

This is the pool in my apartment complex. I have always been drawn to the aesthetic of the pool in contrast with the building and the sky…

I chose to call this Dead Pool, not because I was dead in the pool, but because the pool itself is dead. I have been living in this complex for about six months and I have never seen a person other than myself and my friends in this pool. I almost feel sorry because it is such a beautiful under appreciated pool so I’m glad I could give it some recognition.

However, creating this beautiful and dark scene came at a cost. The pool was freakin’ FREEZING! I enlisted my boyfriend as my photographer and we had to formulate a game plan ahead of time because we knew I would not want to be in the water for long. I told him that as soon as he got good shots form the second floor, to run to the first floor. In the rush, he managed to get mostly blurry picture or pictures of me coming up for my breaths of air! Also, if I don’t look too convincing as a dead person, it’s because my whole body was tensing due to the freezing temp of the water. It was so cold that my skin actually felt like it was burning. It’s okay though, because it was worth it and I was well aware of what I was getting myself into.

— Bailey McCann

From the moment I heard about the landscape with a corpse project, I pictured a romantic death instead of tragic and gruesome one. While thinking of ideas, I thought of Ophelia from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Much like Izima Kaoru’s photos, the death of Ophelia has a somewhat romantic, aesthetic sense to it. In the play, some characters claim Ophelia slipped on a branch and fell into the water while others claim she took her own life. Either way, Shakespeare provides the image of her body peacefully floating in the water with her flowing dress and hair.

I really wanted to do something similar to the scene in Hamlet but felt it would be difficult to recreate. First of all, I have no idea where to find a pond or swamp in Long Beach. Even if I did, I did not want to get into the freezing water! Instead, I decided to do something different with the ocean. My boyfriend, Luke came along to take the photos of me. It worked out well because he also needed to take photos of me portraying different emotions for one of his film classes at Chapman. We joked that one of his emotions would just be “death” but ended up taking some nice ones for his project too. I chose my theoretical death to involve my body being washed up onto the beach after a shipwreck. While drowning itself is not romantic, and probably quite unpleasant, the death that I portrayed could be seen as aesthetically beautiful with the ocean background. We found some seashells at the shore and placed them in my hair and hand to show that my body had been floating in the ocean for some time before it washed onto the beach. To make it even better, the sky was gloomy and helped portray a symbol of death.

Death itself does not scare me that much. I am not afraid to die nor am I afraid of what happens after death. I think it is really the anticipation that kills me-no pun intended. Two years ago I got into a pretty bad car accident where my brakes went out and I crashed into the back of a city bus. A few seconds before it happened, I realized my brakes were not working whatsoever. To avoid swerving into oncoming traffic on the other side, I made an impulse decision to hit the bus in front of me. The weird thing about this experience was my sense of tranquility even though I knew I was about to crash. It’s almost creepy to think about how calm I was. I just accepted what was going to happen and didn’t really worry about getting hurt or even dying.

It really put death in perspective for me; I believe when I do die, the experience itself will be free of worry and fear. I like to think that it is actually a very fascinating experience. Both of my grandparents died of cancer within the past 4 years and my mom, who is extremely fascinated with death (even more so after her parents died) explained to me what both of them went through while they were passing. My mom said it was almost like they were met by loved ones and were even speaking to them as they were dying. My grandma had already closed her eyes but she was smiling and saying hello as if people were greeting her into the afterlife. I guess we will never really know what it is like until they day we die, but I like to think it won’t be so bad. Like I said, I am not afraid of dying. It’s just the anticipation and not knowing when and how I will go. Even more so, I have a lot of anxiety about losing loved ones. I was really close with my grandparents and I can not bear the idea of grieving over other loved ones like I did with them.

In the end, I really enjoyed doing this project. It made me think more about death and the afterlife. I think it’s really refreshing to have an activity that involves death since a lot of people are terrified of the subject and avoid it as much as they can. This can be really problematic in the future, especially when you experience the death of someone around you. We need to be able to come to terms and make peace with the concept. I strongly believe the subject of death is something that should be discussed more openly in our society-after all, it happens to everyone.

— Eliza Karpel