Title of Event: Matt Dain, Reading List
Date & Time of Event: 2021
Location of Event: Samek Art Gallery
Type of event: Art Exhibition
Aiden Smith, ArtsXpose
Title of Event: Danielle Porter: Voices Revealed
Date & Time of Event: April 18th – 29th 2022
Location of Event: Holmes
Type of event: Art Exhibition
Aiden Smith – Washed Ashore by Angela Haseltine Pozzi
Like this sculpture, I intend to use trash or other materials that cause pollution in my project to try to show what the planet is becoming.
Art21 Contemporary Sculpture Assignment
Many of the videos that I watched were related to the Artist’s childhood and also involved more than just sculpting. Many of the artists used film making or engineering to produce their works and to make it so that people could physically interact with their works. I found it interesting that a lot of the videos I watched displayed art that I found weird or made me uncomfortable. This wasn’t because anything about the art itself was weird but more because of how the art was being made ad the approach the artists would take to produce the final piece. It seemed like a lot of the work that I saw was designed to make the viewer slightly uncomfortable either by physically being different than the norm or by making fun of the it.
Aiden Smith ArtsXpose
Title of Event: Lya Finston, Honey From the Stone
Date & Time of Event: Friday January 28th 5 pm
Location of Event: Holmes
Type of event: Art Exhibition
Aiden Smith, ArtsXpose
Title of Event: Angela Meckley, Simulations
Date & Time of Event: Thursday March 10th, 12 pm
Location of Event: Holmes
Type of event: Art Exhibition
Project 2 Part 3: The Dunning-Kruger Effect
There isn’t an author for this cartoon but it explains Dunning-Kruger very effectively. I plan to do a 3-D version of this or something similar.
Project 2 Topic
For the second sculpting project, I chose to look into the phenomenon known as the Dunning Kruger Effect. My shrine for this project will focus on how people tend to feel like they know everything about a topic by barely learning anything about it. As they continue to learn more about said topic, they realize that they know very little. Then, after they have become experts on the topic, they realize that they know quite a lot about it but still have limitations. This phenomenon is important to me because I feel like it is engineering in a nutshell. Freshman year, we all felt like we know a lot about what we were learning but this year I am realizing that I have only scratched the surface. For this project, I want to highlight how often this happens. I want to do this by either recreating the standard plot of the Dunning-Kruger effect or by making something similar but comedic. My audience for this project will be both myself because I have witnessed this firsthand and also others who may have experienced it but aren’t aware of it.
Project 1: Part 1 Writing Assignment
The object I choose to work with for this project is a skull with various symbols etched into it. Many of the symbols relate to religion, with a cross on the back and other Celtic symbols on the front. Personally, I think that skulls represent death and rebirth but in a celebratory way. Many people think skulls represent darkness which can be true in some cases but to me they symbolize the celebration of moving on to something or somewhere new. A skull is mostly used to denote death or danger. Many warning labels for dangerous chemicals use skulls to show that their contents can cause harm. Some cultures use skulls to celebrate their dead or to represent good health and new beginnings. Keeping this in mind, I want my project to follow the idea of embracing something new. I think that by using different materials I can show that to become something new, you must change both physically and mentally. I plan to do this by altering the skulls after I cast them and cause damage to some or build upon them.
Aiden Smith, LUMPENPROLETARIAT (ALIVE), Matthew Day Jackson
Immediate Reaction
The reason I chose this piece was because of how fascinated I am with space exploration and how I felt this piece reflects the idea that everything that can go wrong will go wrong. The ruggedness of the sculpture itself and the pained expression of the subject’s face represent a common theme with Matthew Day Jackson’s work. Like many of his other pieces, it represents the exact opposite of happiness and contentedness. It reminds me of how difficult life can be and how nothing ever goes according to plan.
Objective Description
This sculpture immediately seems bulky but in a controlled way, like none of the usable space was wasted. The first thing that pops out is that the sculpture has a face instead of a completed space helmet. The face seems almost as if its unhappy or uncomfortable. The rest of the suit is extremely detailed. The arms and chest seem puffy, like an actual space suit, with little room to move. The legs are detailed in a similar way until a little below the knee, where the space suit becomes a smooth rigid block.
Technical decisions
The sculpture is made of a mix of wood and plastic, and it seems like layers of these materials were put together and then cut away to form the final product. The helmet, face, and chest of the sculpture are extremely detailed, and look like they took up most of the time. The arms and legs seem much simpler and are smoothed out. The hands have almost as much detail as the face and seem like they took as long to design. The work sits on a cube made of both materials, but is part of the sculpture, the legs become the cube slightly below the knee and show a lack of movement for the entire piece.
The Work in the World
Currently, the world is in the age of space exploration, but is limited by science and costs. This work, which depicts an astronaut that is essentially “stuck” goes hand in hand with the lack of our ability to explore space beyond our relative atmosphere. Also, the pained expression on the astronaut’s face, which seems to show that the astronaut is experiencing some type of problem represents all the problems that occur during space travel. The first example of this that comes to mind is the Challenger disaster in 1986, where something that people thought was a small problem ended up causing the deaths of all the astronauts on board.
The Story it Tells
This sculpture to me represents the helplessness of having to deal with a problem but at the same time not being able to do anything about it. The pained expression and the sculptures feet being a solid immovable block go along with this. I came to this conclusion because space travel and any other type of scientific progression can be painstakingly slow processes. People working in these industries often feel stuck or limited by their own knowledge. This sculpture also follows the pattern of having some dark undertone or meaning like many of Jackson’s other works. In a way, this sculpture could represent Jackson’s anger with a lack of technological progression, or simply that he is familiar with feeling stuck or unable to move forward.