Art from Ephemera: January 2008

Thursday, January 31, 2008

PoetryPostcardProject.com

Originally a commission by the Tempe Cultural Services Division for their show Textology: The Art of Letters, Matthew Shindell creates a suite of five postcards to be published through Galom Press, then sends them to ten poets with whom he is in contact with. The poets are selected among applicants and friends of his, and the applicants can apply on the site. The backs of the postcards have surveys and prompts to which the poets are to write their poetic response, such as the one in the example to the left by Kirsten Kaschock from the second postcard round. The poets can have an unlimited amount of postcard responses back to Matthew Shindell. Fans of the project can also contribute unsolicited postcards with their own poetry or abstracted text. To remain updated of the project, Matthew Shindell's poetry blog posts fairly regularly and is where the most current information can be found.

BookInscriptions.com

This is a screenshot of www.bookinscriptions.com, a blog started last year by a guy named Shaun. He collects photos of unique book inscriptions, as he is interested in how these books were at one point gifts with meaningful messages that have now been discarded. Shaun asks bloggers to send an image of an inscription they have found along with a picture of the book cover and details on how or where it was found. Pictures, notes, and other items found inside books can also be sent in. I went to a used bookstore in search of such an inscription, but could only find an old tattered newspaper article.

Monday, January 28, 2008

Found Magazine.com

I found this while going through my Grandfather's attic. I was surprised to see how good looking men were back then. I slipped in into my purse without telling my grandfather, I'll never know the people and he'll never know I have it.

The picture above is my found object that I submitted to the website,foundmagazine.com. The picture turned out to be a picture of my grandfather's wrestling team in 1939, not knowing that my grandfather was actually present in this picture until my mom brought it to my attention. Previously before speaking with my mother I had taken it upon myself to submit the picture with my small blurb that described what I was posting and a little story behind it. The picture became more personal and extremely creepy that one of the "good looking men" was my 88 year old grandfather. I highly enjoyed partaking in the website and found the site extremely user friendly.

Monday, January 14, 2008

spring cleaning

The second round of this course will begin a bit later this month. The class has been revised slightly, based on my experiences with and feedback from a really stellar first batch of contributors, which will hopefully only improve this here blog component. The revised syllabus has been added (look to the right and down a bit), but it's subject to change before January 23rd.

About the course:

Art from Ephemera (Mail Art and the Internet) was a multi-media studio class where students explored the distribution of images and text through network systems, creating art from ephemera in the form of hand-made mail art, as mass-produced printed material, and in digital format as e-mail art and blogs. Students were introduced to strategies of visual communication traditionally associated with Dada, Fluxus, and Mail Art movements, initially looking at a range of artists from Marcel Duchamp to Henrik Drescher. Our investigation each semester progressed towards more recent approaches to these strategies that utilize digital technology and the Internet, both as a broadcast medium (one to many), as well as a system that enables new forms of emergent content (many to many). In this way, students considered the medium of the Internet from both aesthetic and conceptual perspectives. Students had the opportunity to develop their personal voice through several short individual assignments, paying particular attention to the interface of art and technology, as well as contemporary theory around access, public and social spaces, interaction, audience, and community during class critiques, slide lectures, readings, films, and special presentations.

Download a sample syllabus

About the Instructor:

Rebecca Bird Grigsby origtinally taught this course as a Post-Graduate Teaching Fellowship in the Text & Image Arts area at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA. As an interdisciplinary artist, Grigsby's work encourages transparency and active engagement with the illusion of control and related notions of interiority and domesticity, employing unlikely materials while flipping on its head a child’s typical practice of incorporating the detritus of the adult world in their creations. Other than her own photography and printed imagery, she now works almost exclusively with recycled materials and fragments of her daily experiences as primary caregiver for her two children. She received a MFA degree from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University ('08), and a BA degree in Art Practice and French from the University of California at Berkeley ('02). Other teaching and related educational experiences have included working as a Graduate Teaching Assistant in the Print & Paper, Painting, and Text & Image Arts areas at SMFA; in the Education Department at the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, MA; with SMFA's pre-college summer studio program; in the Art Practice Department at U.C. Berkeley; and with the ArtsBridge Scholar program in Oakland, CA. Exhibitions include Heaven Gallery, Chicago, IL; Tufts University Art Gallery, Medford, MA; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; SMFA galleries; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; San Francisco's Fort Mason Center; the Berkeley Art Center; and the Worth Ryder Gallery at U.C. Berkeley.

Art from Ephemera