Whitney Biennial

At the whitney, two artists i saw with similar style works were Rober Williams and Aurel Schmidt. Their work was similar in content with the fantasy like monsters in the series that contained beyond ferocious in it. In Schmidt's the content is a minotaur filled with all kinds of masculine things such as beer cans, condoms and cigarettes. That is where the artists differ. Schmidt focused on masculinity in her piece while Williams seemed to create up obscene creatures that try to fit into somewhat normal environments. I really did enjoy how Schmidt made up her minotaur, in particular the cigarettes as the veins and the six pack of beer for the abs.

Triptych Explanation

For my triptych, i chose to do three aspects or adjectives of myself: silly, artistic/nerdy, unique from left to right. In choosing these adjectives, the pictures i chose to go with them had to match. For silly, i chose the image of me stuck in the sand, knee deep, while leaning back with a cheesey smile on my face. To add to the silly aspect, i put a spotlight on me. For the middle panel which was artistic/nerdy, i have the sunset with me silhouetted in front of the sunset. The drawings in the background were some of my sketches previously drawn and brought into illustrator and traced to make them like sketches. Putting them into the background creates the illusion of thinking about them since they blend in. The last piece, unique, not only is the illustrator intensive panel but looks very different from the rest. I put into the panel different things about myself that were unique so to say, crooked pinkys and the ability to ride a scooter on my butt. I probably could have added more images if i were to have access to them at the time. Nonetheless, i think i got the point across.

Text as symbols

One Inch Tall

If you were only one inch tall, you'd ride a worm to school.
The teardrop of a crying ant would be your swimming pool.
A crumb of cake would be a feast
And last you seven days at least,
A flea would be a frightening beast
If you were one inch tall.

If you were only one inch tall, you'd walk beneath the door,
And it would take about a month to get down to the store.
A bit of fluff would be your bed,
You'd swing upon a spider's thread,
And wear a thimble on your head
If you were one inch tall.

You'd surf across the kitchen sink upon a stick of gum.
You couldn't hug your mama, you'd just have to hug her thumb.
You'd run from people's feet in fright,
To move a pen would take all night,
(This poem took fourteen years to write--
'Cause I'm just one inch tall).

Shel Silverstein

Comparison of artists

While looking at the works of Marina Abramovic, Frida Kahlo, and Cui Xiuwen, I took notice to the difference in style before I noted any comparisons. First off, Frida Kahlo was born a great many years before the other two and is now deceased. She painted rather than took images or photographs. Moving onto the comparisons, an obvious one is that they are all female artists. That is not to be overlooked though because that most likely has a big influence on the types of works they did. Abramovic and Xiuwen both work with photography and I believe some altered photography as well. The majority of their art works have a repeating female figure in them, in Abramovic’s case; it is herself, while Xiuwen uses a little girl instead. With Abromovic being the main figure in her works, she is similar to Frida Kahlo who did a very many self-portraits of herself with some variations. The feelings and emotions of the artist are also depicted in their works like Happy Christmas and the Two Fridas. The emotions that Frida expresses in her work are similar to that of Xiuwen’s series of A Day in 2004. In The Little Deer, Frida’s head is placed on a deer and she is shot a great many times with arrows. Those arrows are like the bruises all over the little child in a few of the A Day in 2004 works. They both show pain and suffering in a different way.

Exercise 2