Mail Art: Don't chew food with your mouth open

My "mail art" piece consisted of a card that had several drawings of mouths in pencil on one side. The reverse side was bordered with a quote from little book on table manners advising why one shouldn't chew food with their mouth open. In the center of the quote was a collage of mouths cut out of magazine ads.

UTSA at Radius

Portrait of a Struggling Artist
1 min. Performance
Two artist bound at the wrist attempt to create portrait drawings of each other with ink and brush.

After all is done I think the show at Radius Cafe was a great success. It gave everyone equal opportunity to get their feet wet in a curated show as well as have some experience with performance. I personally am not comfortable being center stage in a packed room but the durations were kept to a minimal and for my performance it was just the right amount of time. Everyone did an awesome job and I'm proud to have been in this show with this group of people.

The Well-Tuned Piano in The Magenta Lights

La Monte Young
b. 1935 Idaho
1958 B.A. in Music at UCLA
Graduate Studies at U.C. Berkley

Marian Zazeela
b. 1940 New York
1960 B.A. in Painting at Bennington College

La Monte and Marian

Fluxus Compositions

The Well-Tuned Piano in The Magenta Lights
6 Harrison Street Dream House, New York 1987

Interviews

Dream House At Guggenheim Museum

BUY!!!

Landscape Piece

Renewed
Mixed Media: Acrylic paint, newspaper, leaves, tree branches and roots on plywood
2.5 ft x 3.5 ft

With the exception of the paint all materials in the piece were found objects in the environment. Newspaper clippings from the business section along with dead plant material were adhered to a weathered piece of plywood from an abandoned lot. Along with the construction of these materials are loose brushstrokes of abstracted forms that work as symbols of human relationship with the landscape. The idea to include found objects came from early Rauschenberg "Combines."

The concept behind this piece was to depict ways in which people leave their mark to claim and use land. The plywood and abstracted post and lintel form reference the use of natural materials to function as shelter from other natural elements. An abstracted flag in reds symbolize how societies claim territory over each other. Newspaper clippings from the business section refer to how natural resources lead to the trading of wealth and the plant material refers to how the land eventually reclaims everything through time.

Whose landscape?

Walking through downtown I couldn't help but notice sections of the city where nature would begin to reclaim its territory. A small shoot creeping out of cracks in the sidewalk, vines racing their way up light poles or droves of grass and weeds toppling over chain linked fences, these were all small battles taking place in the middle of the city. I kept thinking about how the city as a whole continues to grow and destroy in order to sustain itself and how similar this is to every other little "societies" in nature. Of course we work at a much larger scale but in hindsight we infest the landscape and destroy all in the way to make room for ourselves the same way termites will infect a home or mold will infect your loaf of bread. It is just the way things are, it's nature's little game that we have to participate in in order to survive.

Spiral Eyes

Spiral Eyes
Ebony Pencil on Paper
10"

This mandala exercise is a study in fluid line quality. Free flowing lines expand and contract into interwoven contours of organic forms.

The was not any subject or central idea in place at the start of this study. The tip of the pencil was just placed on the paper and set free to lay down anything that flowed out from the experience.

Singing in the Rain

First Mandala Study: 'Singing in the Rain'. I've never done one of these before so it was a nice new experience. Suggested to do the drawing as an exercises to get the creative juices flowing I just approached it by starting a gesture drawing, which is something I usually do in times when I need to get the juices going. All I remember is that on this particular morning it was raining pretty hard while I was walking to class. I remember walking in the rain listening to all the traffic and weather and other city sounds going on. All this was on my mind when I got to class so I started doodling a random gesture and the mandala turned into a window scene of my morning stroll.