Katy Seals Superstar

I am so happy to share with all of you the thesis exhibition of one of my best friends and bridesmaid Katy Seals.  I feel like a proud big sister right now after looking at all her work and reading her amazingly smart and concise statements for the show.  Katy is destined to continue doing many great things so keep an eye on her.  I asked Katy a few questions and these are her responses...

1.  Where did you go to grad school?  What interested you in the program?  How many years was the program?  

  - I attended The University of Oklahoma, I was drawn to the program because the studios were HUGE, their presses were enormous (at the time I was doing a lot of woodcuts). I made a connection with my professor and his wife and felt close to them which made the experience and the move not so intimidating. The program is three years long.

2.  Tell me about your thesis show... What was the thought process that brought you to the work you created?

     -I've always enjoyed things that are campy, tacky, and humorous, so when I saw Jersey Shore for the first time I saw art within the show and knew I was going to make work based on the absurd characters. I loved how everyone was a cartoon of who they are in real life and they were getting paid to get wasted drunk every night of the week. I was shocked AND jealous at the same time. I was drawn to Snooki the most, her gender role on the show and her cultural identity. Snooki was born in Chile and adopted by Italian-American parents. She proclaims she is a "guidette". Snooki's sexuality was very extreme too, on the show she was sexually aggressive and verbal about her wants and needs. To me, she was simply a (somewhat) sexually liberated woman and I enjoyed her forward nature.

-While making the work many people who say "That Jersey Shore show is so stupid" or "I can't even bare to watch it". Saying the Jersey Shore is stupid is like telling me that WWF wresting is not real. I know the Jersey Shore is "stupid" and "obnoxious", but why not take a closer and more educated look at a pocket of American sub culture that has many rich themes jam pack into it? Obviously the Jersey Shore is not for everyone, and defiantly not for the faint of heart. It was funny how I accidentally became a pop culture ambassador for one of the most ridiculous shows in television history. 

3. What is the media? How did the media work with what you were creating?

       -The media played a huge role in my whole thesis project. Obviously I was doing a lot a research on modern feminism, cultural identity and consumerism within fashion culture so I was constantly going to my university's libraries page and various gossip sites to keep up with Snooki. Throughout my graduate career the Jersey Shore ran all 5 seasons. During the start of my thesis semester they aired their final season and rumors of Snooki being pregnant was all over the tabloids. I enjoyed when people would tell me stories they heard of her online of saw on the new stand. It was interesting making work on a personality that was constantly being blasted in all forms of media. 

  4.  What is next for you?  Any future plans?

     -That's a million dollar question... I'm going to apply to various teaching jobs and roll the academic dice like everyone else. I love teaching and luckily got some experience in while in school but I'd rather just get paid being fabulous. 

 4.  What is next for you?  Any future plans?

     -That's a million dollar question... I'm going to apply to various teaching jobs and roll the academic dice like everyone else. I love teaching and luckily got some experience in while in school but I'd rather just get paid being fabulous.

 
5.  Where can we find you on the internet?

      katyseals.com all the way

6.  Any advice for students looking for grad programs?

     -Yes, I would suggest to look at location. Pick a place where you'd like to be. There are nice people everywhere so chose a place where you know you'll enjoy the environment. Also do research on the institution, it may be a dump or the professors might be ax murderers. Go visit and and the faculty can place a name with a face, also the visit might allow you to fall in love more with the school you're interested in or you may realize it is not what it's cracked up to be. Also look at what places are awarding scholarships, funding and teaching positions. 

Katy also made this incredible video where she created her own Snookie Superstar.  Take a look!

Check out Katy's website for more goodies.  I really can't express enough how proud and excited I am for Katy and her awesome show and talent. Thanks, Katy!

Hannah March Sanders, Master of Fine Art

It's been a while since I have featured a great interview with an artist on here. Today's interview is from someone we all know and love. Hannah March Sanders, who you'll remember as being dreamy and arty with Blake Sanders, recently had her thesis show at Louisiana State University. In her interview Hannah gives great insight on how she came to create such an ambitious show. She also gives great advice. She's like a big sister artist who tells it like it is.

In honor of this southern belle her interview is brought to you in Georgia font. Enjoy!

1. Your thesis show was beautiful! Are you relieved to be finished? What was the process of pulling it all together?

Thanks! It's just been a total whirlwind. I'm definitely NOT happy to be done with school. I'm a total academic. I love being in school. I even love to watch movies and read books about other people in school. I'm really going to miss all this great printmaking equipment and our libraries here at L.S.U., also. I am somewhat relieved to be done with my thesis exhibition just because it was such a mad dash to get everything done while teaching, planning and executing a wedding, and just getting through daily stuff like laundry and dishes.To describe the "process of pulling it all together," I think the key word would be "miracle." I got up early. I stayed up late. Blake helped out with laundry and cooking a lot. My school friends helped out with getting me 8' sheets of plywood from the hardware store in their larger vehicles and donated old clothes and things to me, both to wear and to crochet into floor pieces for the exhibition. After losing feeling in one of my thighs for a few months due to a pinched nerve from carving, I started doing yoga every half hour while working on my blocks to stay limber. I still don't really know how I got it all done except that I'm very stubborn, I don't have cable, and I don't really enjoy sleeping that much. And I love what I do, of course.

2. What is the show about?

It's about my love of literature and my experience with disasters in South Louisiana such as Hurricane Katrina, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and the extreme university budget cuts. It's also about playing around with fabric, sewing, crochet and becoming a stronger woodcutter. I love drawing and accentuating wood grain in the drawings through carving, so the show is also about experiencing materials on a grand scale.Below is my artist statement for my most recent work to flesh this out a bit more:

Artist Statement

My most recent body of work, Trials and Tributaries, examines disasters occurring in southern Louisiana, interpreted through the Greek myths The Twelve Labors of Herakles. Mankind’s false sense of control over Louisiana’s resources leaves us vulnerable to nature’s powerful acts of reclamation: hurricanes, floods and the ground sinking beneath our feet. While researching the details and origins of The Twelve Labors, I found a plethora of similarities with local culture, politics and natural disasters. The characters in these narrative prints include hybrid monsters drawn from Greek mythology, which I have then further augmented with various forms of local south Louisiana fauna and contemporary political figures. I explore events ranging from Hurricane Katrina of 2005; the BP oil spill in the Gulf, Summer 2010; and the raging university budget cuts going on during my thesis year, 2010-11.Trials and Tributaries includes woodcut prints on repurposed bed sheet fabrics, appliqué stitched together to form colorful, layered surfaces. Accompanying the prints, I also create collections of crocheted floor pieces called “foot prints,” which incorporate scrap fabric from the printing process as well as clothing donations from family and friends. The pluming shapes of the “foot prints” mirror Doppler images of monstrous weather conditions, encroaching on painfully smaller coastal cities and ecosystems. This powerful image of pluming dangerous substances or weather systems functions as a reoccurring image throughout much of my work about the Gulf Coast.

3. You work on such a large scale and use alternative materials. What drew you to that process?

I feel that it is easier for me to draw from my arm rather than my wrist, so a me-sized or slightly larger scale gives me room to really spread out and loosen up my marks. I've always loved drawing large, especially with a blend of charcoal, gesso, water and soft pencils on board. When I did more painting, I always enjoyed making the underpainting the most with those sorts of materials.

For my thesis I wanted to go as big as possible to really make use of the great large format presses we have at Louisiana State University. I knew I would probably only be able to get one or two colors down for each piece since I wanted to do between eight and ten 4' x 8' images in just two semesters. I choose relief because I love how powerful one color images in this medium can be, and wood is a relatively cheap medium in which to work large.

I started printing on fabric as a way to create cheap proofs (we had a lot of free donated hotel bedsheets around the shop), but I was drawn to their warmth and ability to flow around with the breeze and around other objects. Also, prints on fabric are generally washable and easy to transport. Due to some issues with printing on the fabric that I had in the beginning, I started cutting out pieces of prints from different fabrics and sewing them together to get the best composite image. I loved the new doors this opened up! I went to Goodwill to get lots of different bedsheets to explore pattern and color. I would print each block 5 to 10 times on different fabrics and then collage pieces together. We had some poly-fil around the apartment from a never-completed pillow project Blake started, so I began using that to stuff elements and create a 3-D effect in the final project.

Really, I just kept experimenting and exploring. Usually failures in one area pushed me to try new things to solve problems. I'm really falling in love with sewing and crochet and all the possibilities of these mediums! I just learned to sew last summer when I decided I wanted to make my own wedding dress. This was my first sewing project, and everyone thought I was crazy. But, fortunately, with some help from my grandma and a lot of seam-ripping and starting over, I made the dress of my dreams from a $1 pattern.

My drive to recycle/reuse materials led me to take scrap bits of prints on fabric and start crocheting them into large doppler-radar-projection-like floor pieces I call "foot prints." These also became a bit part of my show, and I continue to make them from scraps I have lying around and old clothes and bedding friends and family donate to me.

4. You got married in your last semester of grad school and I was honored to be part of the event. You were so beautiful and so relaxed! Was there any secret stress going on at all or did it really come together as smoothly as it looked?

You were an awesome flower girl, Ann!

There was a lot of stress leading up because Blake works three jobs, and I was so engrossed in creating my thesis work. We really got it done by not sleeping much and just sticking to it. Blake's a great mastermind of schemes, and the "Blessed Unions" wedding exhibition, performance and panel discussion plan of his blew me away! Basically, we just grit our teeth and did everything we could to make it awesome. Once we got up to Saint Louis, everything seemed to go pretty smoothly. We're a great exhibition-hanging team, and Blake is good at channeling stress into brilliance. We couldn't have done it without all of our friends in the exhibition, wedding, panel discussion and other friends and family members who came out for the events. My bridesmaids helped put me together and lead me in the right direction, and everything else was magical. Galen Gondolfi, the owner of the gallery where we were married, was a total godsend. He figured out the PA, loaned us a bunch of materials and even let us sleep in his bed. We also owe a lot to SGC for helping us meet up with Galen, advertising the events, and donating a small amount of $ towards the reception.

5. What's next for you and Blake post grad schools? Where will the dreamy, artful couple be next?

No idea, really! We'll go anywhere for a good gig. Presently, we plan to stay in Baton Rouge through December. Blake is teaching printmaking at Tulane University in New Orleans and Art Appreciation at Baton Rouge Community College. I'm teaching Design I and Drawing I at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette. We'll both be getting something else on the side to help pay bills. I'm crossing my fingers for screen printing jobs we both applied for, but we might end up in the service industry part time for a while longer.As soon as we do move, we plan to invest in some screen printing equipment and get our Orange Barrel Industries business really kicking with a clothing line, visiting artist editions and more!

6. Any advice for students when they are looking for grad schools?

Apply for all the places you think you might want to go for any of the following reasons (or other reasons that are important to you): location, professors there you like, nearby attractions like great art museums, lots of family/friends live near there or go to school there (it's always good to have a community,) etc. Make a list of reasons why you're attracted to various schools. Maybe they have a great press associated with the school or professors whose artwork you really admire…Go and visit and make a decision based on your priorities list of why you want to be there, your gut feeling about the place when you visit, what kind of money they offer you, and what the assistantship program might be like. The biggest factors for me were getting a full teaching assistantship so school would be cheap and so that I'd get a lot of teaching experience since I want to be a professor, and then I also did make the decision in part because my boyfriend-now-husband had a job near the area. Also, I realized the potential at my school-of-choice to work large format in a ton of different mediums, which was really attractive to me. I think one of the things that sold me on LSU is their great collection of litho stones and their two 10 foot presses.Basically, decide what's really most important to you and judge where you want to go based on those priorities--but don't let logic shout out your gut feeling. Talk it through, and don't let any one or any university pressure you into making a decision you're not comfortable with.

7. Any advice for artists who are about to get married (me)?

It's going to be great! I can't wait to see an Ann Flowers wedding. As an artist, you can save a ton of cash by being creative and doing a lot of things yourself. That being said, don't be afraid to ask for help from all your friends and family! When Blake and I were feeling totally overwhelmed, we sat down together and made a big list of all the projects that needed to get done to make our events happen, and then we made lists of friends/family members who might be able/willing to help with each task. It was great to turn over a little thing like renting a PA for the event over to someone else. If you feel bad asking for help, as for it in lieu of a wedding present. Who needs a new whisk, anyway? What you need is someone to pick up the flowers while you are squishing into your dream dress!

See much more from Hannah's show here. Learn more about Orange Barrel Industries here.

Thanks, Hannah, so much for such an interesting interview!

Meaghan Busch's Fairy Tale Thesis

It's thesis show time at many schools! Last year I was so wrapped up in my own that I'm not sure how much attention I paid to what was happening around me. This year I am able to pay closer attention and see the amazing work being produced.

Like Meaghan Busch. She recently had her thesis show at George Mason University. I first met Meaghan at Frogmans a couple of summers ago and have been following her work ever since. I knew she made prints but I did not realize she also made amazing sculptures. Sculpture is definitely a medium I wish I knew more about.

I recently asked Meaghan a few questions to go along with this post.

Q1. You just had your thesis show! Congratulations! What was the title of the show? If you were in an elevator and going from the first floor to the fifteenth and someone on floor two asked what you work was about and they were getting off on floor 26 so you only have 13 floors to tell them about it what do you say? Did you follow that? In other not so weird words, how could you quickly describe your work?

A: The title of my show was "24 Tales" If I had to describe my work work to someone quickly I would tell them that I work with personal imagery that reference my childhood and Grimm fairy tales. My prints are autobiographical and are at first glance simple child friendly looking images but the titles and the content is anything but sweet. My sculptures develop based off the prints and are the images and objects within my work come to life, they are in the scale of children's toys as well.

Q2. Where did you get your master's degree?

A: I am currently finishing up my Master's degree in Fine Art with a concentration in printmaking and sculpture at George Mason University in Fairfax VA.

Q3. Is your thesis work drastically different from your undergrad work? If so, how did your work change and grow? If not... um, I'll email you back with a new question!

A:.My thesis sculptures are similar in material choices but thats really where the similarity ends. I became really self indulgent and started to let myself make things I hadn't allowed myself too in undergrad, two of my printing plates on zinc were altered and based off ones from undergrad as well. The work has become more imaginative and much more personal from my past work.

Q4. What are your plans after grad school? Are you excited? Scared? Nervous?

A. I am currently finishing up and I hope to teach Printmaking and the Fine Arts at the college level someday, my not so secret passion is to write/illustrate children's books and hopefully get them published in the next two years. Its scary being flung from the (college) nest but after a solo show it all seems within my grasp.

Q5. Any ideas for some new themes you would like to start exploring with a new body of work? Any old themes you would like to go back and re-visit?

A. I want to make some tunnel books and prints dealing with personal past and current relationships with family and friends that are all hand printed and bound. I think the themes I have been working with are going to stick around for a while.

You can see more of Meaghan's work at her website here. Thanks, Meag, and lots of luck to you!

Reception!

Wow! I've had a really crazy and busy and wonderful week. Last Thursday was my reception for my show. Several of my friends and a bunch of my family all came to town and made it a grand occasion. Here are some photos from the reception. This is the last official week of school before finals week. I have a lot of loose ends I have to deal with which is a little stressful but after that I'm no longer a student. I'm not sure how I feel about that yet... So I'll leave you with photos....

This is my cousin in the house. She spent most of the reception sitting at the desk. A lot of people asked if that was purposeful. She was perfect in the home.

My friends stayed all weekend long. We ate too much food, went to see The Giving Tree Band, drove to the train station twice and had the best sushi in town. Yesterday I spent the day having friend/family withdrawals.

Wednesday all the graduating MFA grads are going to Chicago to set up for a group show that will be opening this Saturday. More details on that soon.

In the meantime I'm off to work on my Thesis and preparing for a big Etsy update!

Not Yet A Home

Wow! It's been a wonderful mostly stress-free weekend and my show is now up in the gallery.

Introducing:

Tomorrow I will try to get my artist statement posted to explain a little bit more about my work.

Thursday is the reception! I can't wait!!