Janet Cardiff

I had head of Janet Cardiff’s work before, and the one thing everyone seemed to describe it as was spooky, now I can see why. Her use of the three-level spatial structure fooled your mind into hearing and believing in noises that were not even there. I was not even on one of her guided walks, and there were some points where I didn’t know if what I was listening to was real or just a part of the audio piece. She uses the three-level spatial structure as almost three different levels on which to disorient you. On one of the levels you can hear Cardiff’s voice guiding you, and your mind initially focuses in on this level as the level on which she is sending you different sounds, the fake level, but as she adds sound to the background and foreground you realize that you can no longer distinguish from what is real and what is just sounds she is feeding to your mind. Some of her comments I found extremely wired and I couldn’t place them, but I imagine that is one of the things you would pickup and understand better if you were on the actual walk.

Ectoplasm - Lance Winn

I went to Lance Winn’s lecture on ectoplasm, or the tactility and form of art. What really struck me about this lecture was how well he described his process and intent for his artwork. He came up with all these different and crazy ideas and then worked them through for results that he would later build off of and improve on. He just took stuff he was curious about and went for it. At first I was a bit skeptical, I mean I found the lawn ornaments were a bit, well, out there, but as I saw him build up his though process and explore these different areas of art that we usually ignore or take for granted I was sucked in. Some of my favorite pieces of his were the landscapes he built out of his mistakes. He just kept on cutting away at the paper until he found something he was happy with. This idea of just working on a piece of art with no preemptive design or motives is sort of refreshing, you just work on it and work on it until you get to a point were you are comfortable with it. That and I, for one, have in the process of making of my own work encountered several mistakes of my own, that I have had to work around, and for the most part the results that occur from fixing these mistakes invoke creative solutions and usually an unexpected result that on many occasions turns out to be better then the original idea.
Lance Winn’s combination of the 2D and the 3D aspect of art, PBS art tips, and name tracing took simple ideas and applied them in new and creative pieces of art.