Class numero dos

Class number two began with a critique of our booklets.  I was inspired by Ann Hamilton's braille piece "Myein" that I posted in my first post and have chosen to continue experimenting with braille and light in the next couple weeks.

The critique was good.  Everyone took uniquely different approaches to creating their books and because of that were able to discuss a few ways to relate the first assignment back with our students.

These are some of our ideas:

• Limiting students to one material allows them to experiment with options of how use that particular material creatively.  Kinda like elmers glue. Maybe not.
• This project encompassed using grids.  Creating pictures that can be viewed seperately or combined to create a larger image.  We talked about Chuck Close and how he uses grids with his work.  Side note:  I met Chuck Close last year and have a few interesting stories to tell about that.

• Grids brought up the idea of collaboration, like these cheesy folks, or working together to make artwork.  Which reinforces basic skills like cooperation as well as expanding upon and growing artistic expression.

We also talked about a few artists that deal with text.

I was lucky as an undergrad to hear Shirin Neshat speak about a movie she was directing, when she came to Arizona State University a couple of years ago.                

I also found Xu Bing to be very interesting.

Xu Bing

And lastly, I decided to add one fun fact which hopefully will continue in each post that came up in class.  I had no idea that their is an american version of cursive.  I thought as long as we use the same characters the script wouldn't change between languages.  But check out French cursive.  Totally different.  Maybe everyone already knew this, but it kinda blew my mind.