Art from Ephemera: Flynns Ephemera

Showing posts with label Flynns Ephemera. Show all posts

Monday, October 29, 2007

Distribution

Originally I intended to send everything to my boyfriend. He and I live together, so I just thought it would be a weird thing to send a letter to someone who is constantly around you, someone who you have no reason to write a letter to. But all personal correspondence is like that, there is no reason to send someone a letter when it is so much easier to call or email them. Letters were once such a banal thing, but they have become precious because they are no longer neccessary.
I did send about half of the postcards to my boyfriend, and we have yet to recieve them. Honestly, I will be shocked if we ever get them back. The mail in our building is so unreliable. But the return address is my parents house, so with some luck they'll get them if I don't. I sent the other half of the envelopes to my siblings (in Maine) just because they will enjoy them.

Godzilla postcards

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket

For the first project I chose to make postcards depicting stills from monster movies (mostly characters from japanese movies such as Godzilla, mechagodzilla, mothra etc.) I began by fiding movie stills on the internet, then manipulated the images in photoshop. After mounting the printed images on sturdier paper, I used text cut from the New York Times and adhered these words or phrases to the postcards.

I chose these images because they make me feel nostalgic. As children, my siblings and I watched these films over and over again. The majority of our childhood toys were from Japan, including a great many monster figurines. I wasn't really trying to make any sort of statement or do anything experimental with my project, I just wanted to make someone laugh or smile when they recieved their monstercard in the mail. Particularly my brother and sister, because they will have a similar reaction to me when seeing the postcards.

17 years late

This is a postcard I found while visiting my parents. My uncle sent this to my dad 17 years ago. The postcard came with gifts for me, I was 3 at the time, and because of how old I was (I guess) my dad never passed the gifts on to me. It was just so strange to be recieving them now, as a 20 year old, when they were supposed to be in the hands of a 3 year old.

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

This book belongs to...

There were more pages to this but I've only posted these 3

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