The Painter’s Studio

January 30, 2012

My rendition of The Painter’s Studio was inspired by Gustave Courbet’s famous painting by the same name. Though none could question the impeccable color, detail, and composition of Courbet’s masterpiece, its true genius lay in its complex narrative. Courbet was a Realist painter who made The Painter’s Studio (1855) during the transition from Romanticism to Realism. Although Courbet was a keen member of the Realist circle, he portrayed himself as a Romantic painter who colored the countryside while a muse stood as his source of inspiration. Yet, the gloomy studio filled with disinterested peasants, nobles, collectors, and art critics reminded his viewers that the painting existed in a Realist setting. Courbet’s artwork revealed his affection for Romantic paintings and his frustration toward the judgments of the evolving art world. Ultimately, The Painter’s Studio attested to the struggle of an artist caught between the changing standards of two art periods.

As a painter who felt sentimental toward the representational paintings of the past and who was expected to embrace the Greenburgian abstractions of today, I decided to appropriate and update Courbet’s painting to speak about the contemporary experience. Historical and contemporary paintings differed in that while historical paintings acted as windows into other realities, contemporary paintings treated the image as a surface. Therefore, I replaced every color with white to remove the illusion of space. I also applied heavy brushstrokes to accentuate the paint and to advocate painting as a literal integration of paint and canvas. By remaking a realist painting according to contemporary trends, I questioned my role in today’s shifting art world.

Reoccurring Nightmare

May 3, 2011

Video Broadcasting Schedule:

1:20am - 1:40am

2:35am - 2:55am

3:30am - 3:40am

4:15am - 5:05am

5:40am - 6:20am

$30 of Copper from Kennecot Canyon Copper Mine

March 10, 2011

A successful artwork should command unity between concept and material. Aiming to create an artwork in which the choice of material was key to the concept of the final piece, I began this project by selecting copper wire as my material. I experimented with it until the concept of creating a landscape model of Kennecott Copper Mine, UT, the largest open human excavation, emerged. Because the idea originated from the material, the two were naturally married.

A fixed project budget of $30.00 stood at the core of this artwork. It inversely related the size of the mine to the size of the model. As the copper mine relinquished more metal and increased in size, the amount of copper in the earth depleted. As a result, the price of copper rose, the amount of copper available for the budget decreased, and each new iteration of the model consequently reduced in size. In this way, this sculpture bridged the gap between model and site by linking them with mutual dependence; one could not change without altering the other.

Unity in Division

September 15, 2010

I installed Unity in Division to address a common issue found in group shows. Because the artworks of artists sharing the space varied in theme, shows often seemed fragmented and artworks rarely responded cohesively to each other. Furthermore, artists frequently positioned their pieces near the gallery walls and therefore posed no significant impact on the exhibition space; the center of the gallery remained empty. To create an artwork that meaningfully responded to the show space, I installed massive string nets in the center of the exhibition. They simultaneously divided the conceptual pieces from the material pieces and bridged the halves by acting as a transitional space between the disparate themes. Despite cutting the exhibition, my piece occupied the central space and unified the art show.

Mapping Absurdity

April 22, 2010

I often pondered about the difference between fine art and architecture. While they posed as two dialects of the same language, they differed in usefulness. Whereas fine art was functional (purposeful) but useless (impractical), architecture had both function and use. Unlike artists who indulged in pure expression, architects must contend with useful design.

But what happened when design plans broke down or failed to meet expectations? In theory, architectural designs that lost their usefulness shared similar traits to art. The works of creative individuals like Gordon Metta-Clark, who straddled both spheres, seemed to concur. When he relocated cross-sections of houses into galleries and stripped them of usefulness, they transformed from architectural spaces into artworks.

This observation inspired me to explore other iterations of this transition. By making blueprints of impossible scenarios, I applied the certainty associated with an architectural process to the ambiguity of pure expression. In my act to stretch the architectural language to extremes, say, by constructing a precise diagram of a fictional animal, I transformed blueprints into art.

Properties of Glass

March 19, 2010

Properties of Glass was a study of the material and immaterial qualities of glass and its use in modern architecture. By positioning the shards at precise angles so that each caught a different amount of light, the sculpture demonstrated the transparent, reflective, and refractive properties of glass. I also found the inverse relationship between the material’s fragility and hazardousness particularly interesting. Since glass was most dangerous when it broke, its weakness was its strength. To convey this observation, I pointed the shards vertically to assert an intimidating presence, but also punched a hole in the middle of the bottom panel to reveal its fragility. Finally, I simulated an abstract cityscape to show the versatility of the material and the beauty of glass in architecture. The resulting piece simultaneously radiated a sense of violent explosiveness and hinted at the material’s brittleness and elegance.