Still making gifs

This time of the mannequin I made for costume mounting this 1830’s era dress.

 

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Grad School and Internships

Sooo last time I posted was a year and a half ago, where I mentioned being really busy and starting grad school. Since then I have taken most of the classes required for my major, completed a five month internship at a history museum, got a new job working a rare books library labeling and rehousing books, manuscripts and broadsides, and I started a new internship 2 months ago in a textile conservation lab. Here is a photo of an old book I found digitized online while researching at the museum this summer and the title still tickles me.
I also put on a few more events and shows at Washington Street, and made a ton more art but had to give up my space in the studio this summer for at least the next year while I finish school. I miss all my Washington Street buddies and making gallery shows and events happen. A million and one family, personal and life things happened too, but most of those are a wild bummer of adult-life so I won’t be posting about those. Good things that happened include going to Iceland, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Chicago, and a couple more local trips to NYC and the Cape and Providence! Edward also changed jobs and now works in a bakery and restaurant and we are overall less stressed maniacs which is nice.

I am going to be posting about my internship experience and whatnot, if only so I can keep a record for my personal use! Here is another advertisement, from the magazine Colored American, published here in Boston in the first years of the 19th century, edited by the amazing, talented Pauline Hopkins. This was found in the archives at the Museum of African American History, which I dearly loved interning at and miss working with the great people there.

This advertisement is almost as silly as the image above and I wish I could just research old magazine adverts for the rest of my life, they are so wild. I hope they paid Pauline plenty for this full page ad, and hopefully their “cure” was at least harmless!

There is one more advert I wish I could share with you, which is from a literary magazine from the late 1800s, but I don’t even have a photo of it, since it is part of the Harvard archives and I am 99% sure I am not supposed to take photos so I don’t! But it was for this product “Tarrant’s Seltzer Aperient” and had these super creepy anthropomorphized characters that looked a bit like something from Grimm’s fairy tales, all loving some seltzer.  Here is one of Tarrant’s super weird advertisements in a trading card form (here are more). So weird, right?

I hope if anyone looks at this blog that they want to see photos of old books and magazine and deteriorating textiles that I am helping to stabilize and conserve for exhibition and storage!

I forgot about the internet

Since my last post here, I had some art up in some other shows, made a ton more art, went some places, hung out with some people, went to a million weddings. I also decided I didn’t really like having an internet presence. So I deleted facebook and instagram. I kept a private twitter, but mostly didn’t post for 6 months, and am still considering deleting it altogether.

I do still post on flickr and make art tho. Here are some photos of some junk I have been playing around with.

Metallic blue paper was really hard to photograph in fluorescent lights, but the stencil came out good and I love sasparilla plants.

Beautiful giant quilt my friends and I made for our friends’ upcoming wedding.

Tiny paper beetle.

Just the beginning of a smallish sized piece that will be up at the next show at Washington Street, opening July 12th.

I also made myself a ton of clothes – mostly dresses and leggings, and took a class that is the beginning of me going back to school to hopefully get a masters.

So yeah! I haven’t decided to delete this blog so I figured I might as well post in it.

 

Cut Paper // Paper Cut exhibit at SCATV

My work will be up at SCATV from May 1 through May 26th at SCATV. Come hang out with me and talk about art at the reception May 21st from 6-9PM at the SCATV building in Union Square Somerville.

“Cut Paper // Paper Cut” is showing work from 2 series I have been working on, looking at old memories and working hands. If you didn’t get a chance to stop by SOS, this is a great time to come see what I have been up to over the past year. You can also check out this video the first interview I have ever done and it was both really fun, and hard to get through due to my terrible allergies!

This work is funded by a grant from the Somerville Arts Council and the Mass Cultural Council. Thank you to everyone, especially Janet Cormier and Wendy Blom at SCATV for hosting me this month.

Somerville Open Studios May 4th – 6th

I am participating in Somerville Open Studios (SOS) again this year at the Washington Street Art Center. My studio is a messssss because I have been doing a ton of work! This year my buddy Marissa Falco is coming to hang in my studio with her art too! I have a couple pieces left to finish this week, and a ton of cleaning up to do. I also just hung my show up in SCAT for the month of May. Thanks again to SCAT, and Janet and Wendy for having me on the artists show and in the gallery for this month.

Unfortunately I have to work at my bill-paying job on Saturday, but I will be in the studio Friday night and all day Sunday if you want to stop by and chat. My studio will be open all 3 days though. We are 321D Washington Street, Somerville MA. Friday night is a new SOS program of having an extra day(night). At WSAC, Gretchen – photography, Tara – mixed media and drawing, and Danielle – painting and fibers, as well as Marissa and I will all have our studios open. Other artists might be around too, but no promises that their studios will be ready for viewing. The gallery at WSAC will also be open with our group show previewing some of everyone’s work.

The Union Square area (Union Squarea) is a great place to stop by for SOS, since it is very close to several of Somerville’s big studio buildings. WSAC is in Zone F on the SOS maps at spot 108, and have 20 artists, with most of them participating in SOS. Our buddies Fringe are just on the other side of the tracks as well at spot 109, and Zone E on the other side of Union Square has Joy Street, Brickbottom, Mad Oyster and Pearl Street studios, all hosting many artists in the same building.

Here are a couple more previews. Top to bottom is Lauren Leone’s encaustic and mixed media, Murat Recevik’s reclaimed and repurposed wood sculptures and panels in process, and a new piece by me that is only partially done in this photo. It is titled ‘Hey Girl’, will be hung in the gallery, and is for sale!

 

See you at SOS!

Stop motion and Terrariums

Played around with a new app last night to make a stop motion video on my phone. I like the anigifs better, but this app (Stomo) is nice if you don’t use photoshop, or you only want to use your phone from start to finish.

And I made terrariums with my buddy Sarah and she posted about it on her blog. It was really fun and so far nothing we planted in there is dead yet! Here is an instagram photo I took of some totally awesome moss that got put in those terrariums.

Animated gifs, papercuts and drawings <3

No lie, I love animated gifs more than pretty much anything on the internet.  The past few weeks I have made a couple. The first one is made with images from my phone, from a piece I started and finished tonight. All told, if you cut out the minutes I was just standing around chatting, it took about 2 hours start to finish. I didn’t spend much time taking photos, or making the anigif. I didn’t color correct or straighten anything except for the first frame with the final piece. I also originally saw this hand signal/symbol online, and it has been stuck in my head ever since.

Small Craft Advisory is running a fair outside in Union Square this summer, which we are pretty excited about. I made this little gif using the poster drawings made by Elise. I played around with the original flyer elements (seen here) to make this goofy reminder to vendors to apply before apps were down. Deal with it!

And via a twitter exchange with my buddies from Gather Here, the idea for SKIRT WEEK was hatched. GH is planning it as a week of double-session skirts. 5 days, 5 different skirt patterns that you learn how to make and walk out wearing, all during the much-loved Shark Week. There are few things I love more than summer and sharks (well, as I mentioned at the top, my love of anigifs knows no bounds, so this ties it all in pretty well). This anigif is made from drawings that I did. I just did them as black line drawings on paper. I scanned them in, cleaned them up in photoshop, and then added in the colors with the paint bucket, and the text. Fun and easy.

All of these gifs were simply made using the Animation screen in CS4. There a loads of online tutorials, and I highly recommend that everyone play around with making anigifs. They are the best.

Sometimes I like to be as busy as possible

Check out this weirdly cool mis-aligned panoramic-ish photo of my studio. I cleaned the hell out of it a couple weeks ago. it is now a total mess, because I have been working in it! time to clean it again, and re-arrange my art on the walls for SOS 2012. Here is my SOS profile, and here are all my fellow Washington Street artists.

First up! Spring Zine Thing is full up with awesome zine people ready to come sell, swap and talk zines all afternoon at WSAC on April 15th from 2-6PM. That link up there goes to our facebook event where you can see the list of zines and zine makers and libraries coming to hang out, and click their links to take a look at what they make.  Super exciting! The event is free and open to the public, and you can get directions and more info about the WSAC here.

And other than that, I have been working in the studio for myself, for friends, for family. Other than being dead tired from seeing 3 shows last week (white pages! balaclavas! wild flag! hunx and his punx! heavy cream! radio control!), things are great! Here is my life of the past few weeks in a series of instagram photos.

papercutting is still my true love, shaved my head into a chelsea (lolz), new crappy flats, eyeball manicures, propagating plants, too much drawsomething, being a good cookie with friends, new WSAC sign, silkscreening with Eddy P for La Parca.

A million awesome things

1) I got a grant to do art! I mean, I still had to go to work the next day, but still!  Huge thanks to the Mass Cultural Council, and the Somerville Arts Council. I applied along with several friends back in October, thinking why the heck not. It was a great experience to make myself catalog all my recent work, and write up a full CV and artist’s statement.

Then to top it all off, I got a notification mid-January that I actually received a grant. My first ever! So so so so excited. As part of the grant, you get to put on an event to show what you have done, which leads me to my next point. I love art and Somerville and Massachusetts!

2) Marissa and I are putting on a zine event, called the Spring Zine Thing for April 15th. Check out that facebook event link and reserve a spot to sell or trade your zines! Spread the word, this will be a really fun afternoon of hanging out with cool zine people. We are putting this on as a Small Craft Advisory event, and SCA is also working on the Union Made summer fair as well as starting to work out the details for the Bazaar Bizarre of December 2012. Plus anything else fun we can think of before then.

I’m going to make a zine with Marissa for this about getting inspired about art and stuff. You should make one too!

3) The other event I am crazy about is what we are referring to currently as DREAM TEAM; a collaborative art show for September 2012 at the WSAC, with three of my talented artist friends Lauren, Alex, and Sarah. Seriously so excited. We are planning this so far in advance because we are unstoppably awesome. So you might as well mark off the entire month of September to make sure you are free to come see this show. To get myself a worked up into a frenzy I am…

4) Signed up to take a paper cutting workshop with Béatrice Coron at Mass Art in March. HOLY CRAP IM SO EXCITED SHE IS AN AMAZING ARTIST.

5) I have done a bunch of stuff with art and friends in general this winter.  I had the pleasure of hanging out with the Lady Fest Boston people for their January events at WSAC, and donated 2 pieces of art to their benefit auction. I had a piece up at 13Forest in Arlington for their show Plenty. I have silkscreened some collaborative projects with friends for Gather Here. Just so I have another picture to break up all this text, here are some photos Jen took of me making a quick sidewalk sign for Lady Fest in Central Square. Try not to think about me touching the sidewalk in Central too much. I am not easily grossed out, but this was pretty gross and I washed my hands 5 times in a row afterwards.

I will make a post with some actual art I made soon! I guess all of the above shows how busy I have been. You can also read some miscellaneous posts I have made over at the WSAC blog or the BBB blog in the meantime if ya innerested.

Hands

I really love drawing and paper cutting hands. All the little precise creases and joints are so satisfying to  measure out and get correct.

Here is an in-progress piece that I started last week, and got about 2/3 of the way finished. Nine hands in total! You can see that I drew a grid to help me space things out. Just like with hand lettering, I like to have a grid down to make sure I can do repeat shapes and images evenly so they look like they are on the same plane or in the same perspective. I measured the finished size of the paper, which I think was 12″x16″, and measured out the halfway point on each size. From there I just drew the rest of the grid using the width of my ruler, which is about an inch. Not a perfect grid, but enough to go on.

And here is a completely finished piece, just 2 hands, titled ‘Swearing is Still Fun’.  I did this really quickly at the beginning of last week. It was started from a sketch, and made into a finished drawing, completely cut out and spray painted in 1 hour.

In the end, the border will be underneath the mat, but for positioning the papercut with either spray adhesive or studiotak on the back, the square frame really helps with laying the final piece flat when there are so many thin lines. This week I hope to finish the hands piece, as well as get a few other pieces matted and framed.

I am also putting together a benefit art auction called Something Sweet which I will post about more tomorrow on the BazBiz blog to get the word out. It is a group effort of artists at the Washington Street Art Center to benefit the Somerville Homeless Coalition. I luckily got the task of finding artists to participate! So far we have received almost all of the pieces for the auction, and it was really awesome to go through all my favorite current local artists and ask if they would want to participate.  So much great work, the show is going to look amazing. There is a bit about the show up on the WSAC website, as well as tons of links, images, and info up at the Something Sweet facebook event. Come by Friday November 4th from 6-9 for music, food, and silent auction for some totally amazing art!