obligatory AHH CRAZY FINALS post
The studio is usually pretty empty after five, but the last few days almost everyone has stayed until late, working obsessively on their projects. We’ve become so manic that people will start laughing hysterically at things that aren’t even very funny (yesterday someone laughed so hard they cried over the fact that if you try and sew a donut shape you can’t turn it right-side-out again). Last night we even ordered pizza to the school, although the driver became lost and annoyed. Everyone is starting to drive me crazy because I’ve been seeing too much of them. I’m looking forward to just sitting silently once the holidays hit. Jury crit is next thursday. I’m terrified, but I think I finally actually feel like I’ll finish everything. Eep.
Stolen from Jen’s Blog
It’s hard to explain Dee Fontans. I was showing my family pictures from our Regalia show, when my uncle exclaimed, “Who does that woman think she is, Dee Fontans?!” and it was.
The Jeweler! (Last posed by Jen.)
Workshop with Louise Lemieux Bérubé
Today I went to a workshop with guest artist, Louise Lemieux Bérubé, where we learned to make files for jacquard weaving, using Photoshop. Basically, you need your image to have a weave structure so that you will get fabric out of it, and each pixel in your image stands for a thread. I am too tired to explain any more than that, so here are some images:
First image.
Reduced to two colours.
Weaving structure(twill weave) applied to both layers.
So the image with the weave structure can be input into a jacquard loom, which can weave any thread at any time, but the weave structure applied keeps the cloth from falling apart. Here are a couple more, dividing the cloth into 7 layers instead of two.
Twill, also photoshopped onto a different background.
Satin weave applied - just means more threads going in the same direction at once, creating a different feeling of cloth.
If we want, we can send files back to MCCT with Louise and have our designs woven on the jacquard they have there(ACAD doesn’t have one) but the cloth needs to be handmade by an intern, so it’s expensive, and will have to be worthwhile.
Transit.
Waiting for the #28.
One thing about waiting for the bus, though(especially now that it’s pseudo-spring outside) is that I have reasons to be outside for little bits at a time. At school I spend so much time inside that dingy-soviet-esque building that I’m probably low on vitamin D or something. I told myself I’d start taking breaks and going down to Riley Park for walks, but I always feel guilty for not working on things. I think I just need to try harder.
Weaving.
Compu-Dobby Loom(controlled by computer program)
I’ve been enjoying weaving, while at the same time am not sure how to incorporate it into my practice. My instructor in repeat printing suggested we try to make the next project kind of begin to fit in with what we’d like to be doing, since we end up learning all these separate processes and don’t know what to do with them. I have no idea what to do for that one, either, though. Perhaps a garment of some sort. Anyway, my weaving class is doing a workshop with guest artist, Louise-Lemieux Berubé on Saturday, designing things for weaving on a jaquard loom, using photographs. That might be a good way to start figuring that out.
Currently I’m trying to thread my loom with this wool-stainless steel hybrid. It looks and acts like dirty hair, and it taking a very long time. Maybe I’ll end up with something good. I’m not going to get my hopes up until all threat of tangle has past.
Closeup - black is cotton, yellow is unidentified cupboard thread
ArtaWEARness
Friday and Saturday night I volunteered as the assistant to an artist participating in ArtaWEARness. I was wardrobe-malfunction repair lady, keeper of anachronisms(ipods, hair elastics) and door-holder. It was a great experience, and I will definitely be applying next year. Several of the artists had been in the wearable art class and the Regalia show last semester, so it’s great to see their work come to a more final and complete point.
It was a great show! Here is a video of the final runway walk(I’m in the lineup somewhere as Becky’s assistant).
Miniature show
Mini Show! Poster by Melissa Wong
I’m collaboratively organizing the fibre department miniature show with Melissa Wong, another girl from the fibre department. I’m pretty nervous also excited. I’ve been trying to get more into what my roommate Jen refers to as the “keener club” (because it’s always the same people doing everything) and get some experience with things like this in the safe environment of school. Stuff like this in the “real world” is a lot harder to break into, not to mention the people surrounding it are more intimidating. As I’m easily intimidated as it is, this will be a good start. Last year I went to a pot luck that actually turned out to be a meeting, and was the only second-year student to go. I didn’t know anybody there, and then I ended up agreeing to help with some fibre fortnight stuff that I never followed through on. While I hope that people forget that that happened, I still feel like a total tool for it. I said I’d do it but then was completely terrified. Maybe this mini show thing will redeem me for it, at least in my own head.
The mini show accompanies Fibre Fortnight, which runs from March 8-19th at ACAD, in the main mall. It’s one of the only times fibre gets exposure around the school, so it’s pretty exciting.
Ironing.
I flatten crime.
It’s been a frustrating couple of days. Yesterday I came to school to work on silk screen, and the sink I needed to use(it has a pressure-washer, which is why another sink wouldn’t do) was clogged and full of purple water. A girl in the room said they’d been chased out by the security guard at 1 in the morning and accidentally left the tap on, and the leaky sprayer and clogged sink didn’t help matters any. I tried to wash my screen anyway, but when I put it in the sink, it started to float away. It takes an hour to get to school by transit, that assignment I had been trying to work on is due Tuesday, and I have to work tomorrow, so I felt like I should get something out of my time.
Ironing is nice. I didn’t realize how much I actually enjoyed it until finals last semester, realizing I should probably press my yardages for my surface design class. This was the first time I’d seen the whole pieces of cloth all at once, with all the details in the dye process. Ironing is purely physical and allows me to think (or not), soothed by the cloth, kind of. I’ve gotten so sucked in to ironing that I’ve missed my bus more than once.
Ironing is not nice, however, when attempting to use school equipment and finding random blue spots appearing all over my hand-dyed fabric. What’s with that, anyway? It’s kind of funny because the reason we have an ironing board in the studio now is because people kept complaining that the ironing station in the more public area wasn’t clean and that they would iron and then there’d be gunk on it, transferred to the cloth, or random dyes or other miscellany. Well, if the ironing board in the fibre major studio is also now all contaminated, it obviously wasn’t “those pesky first and second year students”. It’d be kind of funny if it hadn’t ruined my cloth.
so much for a holiday…
I’ve been on reading week since monday, but I don’t seem to have accomplished anything. Things that are due in the next two weeks:
- A cheese costume for printing on cloth. I still have to finish printing the fabric and then assemble the damn thing. AHH!(monday)
- Art history midterm take home paper, which includes ridiculously vague questions(monday)
- A crocheted basket dipped in wax, which hopefully won’t start a huge fire(thursday)
- A research paper for a scholarship with my dad’s union, which I have been trying to write for months but it is about the Olympics in Vancouver and I can’t find any positives about it anymore. The research is just making me furious. Check out Five Ring Circus. This one needs to be finished and mailed so it gets to Vancouver by Friday(not today, in a week).
- A coat for the recession, with pockets with stuff you might need if you’re poor, like a book on butchering squirrels and stuff(next tuesday)
- Declaration of major! AHH (next tuesday)
- Presentation on Joseph Beuys (next tuesday)
Bloody Next Tuesday. I don’t know if this is going to work out… Now that I’m reading this list, my assignments are kind of silly, aren’t they? Here I am being so stressed out about this. I still have to learn to knit by the end of the semester, but I keep hurting my wrists/hands/arms with tendonitis or carpal tunnel or something. I think it is partially due to how tense I am, and I was sitting in this chair with really steep arms so it is like sitting in a box, all scrunched up. I don’t know.
I am doomed to a silly fate wrought with knitting injuries and weird assignments!
Need to go to school now.
being behind
I wish I hadn’t acted like I was shopping when I was doing my course selection, but nothing can be done about that now, I guess. Next semester I will definitely be dropping one or two classes, so that sanity can resume, if I was ever a supporter of sanity. I hate feeling guilty every time I do something that isn’t homework.
This weekend I went to Red Deer for Kylie’s birthday. I was the only one who came, which is pretty silly. People are so unreliable these days. I probably encountered irreversible hearing damage at the one club we went to. We could hear the music from two blocks away. I can picture the DJ saying, “Wow, this music really sucks! I bet it will be better if I turn the volume to an ear-splitting level.”
I am kind of brain-dead right now. I was just working on an exhibition review for my applied writing class, trying to compare two seemingly unrelated artists. I really do like some of the one photographer(George Webber)’s work, though. It is immediately obvious that he is from rural Alberta.
I made amazing cupcakes yesterday, half of which went to the birthday girl. The rest had disappeared by supper time. It was too bad, because I really wanted one. They had crushed Oreo cookies in the batter and the icing. Oh well.
Time for sleepy time.