Over the past four+ years I have spent a significant time away from social media & spent time adjusting to a new life in the Pacific Northwest. Last fall I enrolled in a Woodcut Printmaking class and tapped into a creative flow and a technical process that was relatively new to me. Below, an example of a first state of an ongoing piece:
It has been a while since I have posted here and I sometimes wonder how a viewer may change over the passage of time. For example, if say someone once looked at my blog/website upon a previous time and later revisited the same image of a work I had posted, is that view experienced the same way? Over the past four+ years I have spent a significant time away from social media & spent time adjusting to a new life in the Pacific Northwest. Last fall I enrolled in a Woodcut Printmaking class and tapped into a creative flow and a technical process that was relatively new to me. Below, an example of a first state of an ongoing piece: I promise I'll post more images soon of additional prints.
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Above is a sneak preview to a new line of shadow projections that I will be presenting this Saturday, 12/21/13 at the Winter Wonderland space located inside the Westfield Plaza Camino Real in Carlsbad (2525 El Camino Real; the space is between Cricket Wireless and Zales). The image you see is a shadow of a snow-covered pine tree layered over an inkjet transparency of a forest. A real pine tree sits in the right foreground. The smell of pine adds to the wonderland experience.
I'm pleased to share that I have been creating new work and hope you will stop by this Saturday to witness it in movement. My 2pm presentation and Q&A follows Jukebox Radio, a performance group that works with music, puppets, and play. They will be hosting a workshop at 12:30pm that day as well. Stay tuned for an additional update on my involvement with Winter Wonderland. I'll also be participating in a pop-up shop on Sunday, 12/22/13 and will be selling some recently new work and handmade crafts. Here we are. My colleagues and I graduated earlier this summer and for me I feel a sense of relief from the rigorous training we received the past two years.
What's next is based upon variables that we as artists define and carve for ourselves. Some of us have moved to LA, one is currently traveling overseas, another out in the East Coast, and a couple of us remain local. Being launched into the professional world and settling a career within the art-world is merely a step for our kind. The journey continues and it certainly doesn't stop here. For being in transition of relocating and displacement, finding gainful employment and/or residencies, I am learning to come to terms with the jolting freedom we've thrown ourselves back into after having immersed ourselves in the bubble of art school academia. An MFA isn't so much about gloating the degree that we earned. It's more of a matter of what we do with our MFA. Whether we're out as future faculty, freelancers, arts administrators, curators, practitioners, or even a survivalist taking a hiatus from the art-world and eating instant ramen to make ends meet, we are made... but in the long run, what counts is that we are making and are continuing to do so. I'm a few months off from having promised some kind of documentation of BYOB LA. So I'm going to briefly continue what I shall call the "Catch-up Olympics."
Onward with the reading/viewing race! A special and belated thanks to Sterling Crispin for pulling up these sources and recruiting the UCSB grads in participating in the event: http://www.laimyours.com/16717/byob-at-transmission-la/#more-16717 http://www.byobworldwide.com/tagged/mocala http://youtu.be/EMkAN8xvsoY Sorry about the lag in posts - I've been having some technical difficulty on the site and now that grad school is done there's been a lot of transitioning happening. On a recent note, I participated in the Dusk 'Til Drawn fundraiser at the Contemporary Arts Forum in Downtown Santa Barbara. The event started this past Friday, which took the form of a 24-hour drawing rally. I wasn't one of the marathoners, but clocked in a good work day yesterday. There is a reception this evening to sell and celebrate the numerous drawings that were created over the weekend. Perhaps I'll see one of you out there. Perhaps you'll get to see one of my drawings in return. The mobile shadow theater was launched on the Friday night of Halloween weekend in IV. And there is still much to do! I think it was a good experiment, and I am working on refining the content of what I had presented in the theater. Additionally, I've been putting my nose back in the books to research more material and history, background in the areas of the history of IV, the history of shadow puppets, relational aesthetics, etc. Maybe I'll post up my notes sometime in the future. Anyway, recounting my experience from the launch, my students and I did a dry run of the show. We spent the previous Thursday and all day Friday beefing up the content and added more text to the visuals of what we projected via overhead onto the screen (see image above). One of my students recruited her friend who played the snare drum during our procession along Embarcadero Del Mar. A live music ensemble would be great and effective, and as it turned out, my speakers weren't loud enough and I need to find something that is more robust but still compact and portable for outdoors. I ended up performing until 1am and moved my theater a couple of times in the span of one block to try out different locations. My student helpers were either tired or wanted to participate in the IV Halloween festivities along Del Playa. I also promised their time, so after our 9:30pm dry-run I was on my own, but Kim Yasuda was with me and she was a great help in talking to some of the business owners around the block, and helping document me in action. I learned from this experience that being next to the sidewalk was hard competition for my show against the show of students in their Halloween costumes. My best performance was when I re-posted myself back at the Bagel Cafe. I was squished right next to the store front bordering Little Acorn Park. But it was past midnight and there was a long line of students going outside the cafe. While several costumed students sat out on the patio and ate their bagels, they tuned in to my show. To me that counts, and I think one of my best options while testing this experiment is working with the local food businesses that allow outdoor seating areas for people to take the time to sit, eat, and simmer down their alcohol blood levels. Another highlight included one of the homeless figures "Pirate" who walked along and stopped right next to me and my projector. He seemed taken back with the graphic image of him, and reminisced about his old hat. See the quick youtube clip down below. My theater and I turned out untarnished. It didn't get trashed or lit on fire and though a couple of walking wanderers stopped by to talk to me during my performances, I was left unharmed. A group of undercover cops had nabbed someone behind my theater while I was posted next to the parking lot behind Hempwise and "worked" behind me for a little while. That was slightly awkward, but they seemed nice to me and asked me questions about my project. I still believe that there is a place for the mobile shadow theater, and think the story needs to shift away from what it was presented. Since it's on wheels, I can move it to a different location and showcase what Isla Vista was and is to the varying audience of student residents, marginalized families, and the committed folks that have lived in IV for a long while. Thanks to those that came out on that Friday to see me at work, to my student crew that helped tremendously with me, Michael Schmitt for his "golden hands," IV Arts and the Friday Academy for their support, and thanks to all of the grads for their feedback at my crit. Voice: "Isn't that great?"
Pirate: "That is wild!" |
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Van (rhymes with "fun") C. Tran Archives
September 2018
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