Title of Event: Annual Student Art Exhibition
Date & Time of Event: April 27th at 12:30pm
Location of Event: Samek Art Gallery
Type of Event: Art Exhibit
ArtsXpose #3 – Tas Csikos
Title of Event: Why it Matters
Date & Time of Event: April 25th at 4:30pm
Location of Event: Downtown Samek Art Gallery
Type of Event: Art Exhibit
Art21 Contemporary Sculpture Assignment
The contemporary artists that I decided to cover are Mika Rottenberg, Do Ho Suh, Mika Tajima, Rashid Johnson, Damian Ortega, and Doreen Garner. A common theme that I have noticed in most of these artists is their intention of addressing political and societal issues in their pieces. For instance, many of Garner’s pieces use silicone fragments of black bodies to convey ideas of disease, racial oppression, and enslavement. Do Ho Suh, on the other hand, has a famous piece called Some/One, that is composed of dog tags that form a larger, uniform structure, that he says is heavily inspired from the time when he had to serve his mandatory military service in South Korea.
ArtsXpose #2 – Tas Csikos
Title of Event: Six Second Delay, Anthony Cervino
Date & Time of Event: Wednesday March 8th 10pm
Location of Event: Holmes Exhibit Space
Type of event: Art Exhibit
ArtsXpose #1 – Tas Csikos
Title of Event: The Nemesis Machine
Date & Time of Event: Wednesday March 8th 12 pm
Location of Event: Samek Art Gallery
Type of event: Art Gallery Exhibit
AI Generations – Tas Csikos
Talismans Research – Tas Csikos
A fear that I recently became aware and anxious of is the thought of receptive bilingualism. Hungarian is my first language and it was the language that my family used to speak at home. Since I grew up in the states, this language barrier made it difficult for me to learn English in elementary school, so overtime we transitioned to speaking English at home. Recently I became aware of the toll this has taken on my Hungarian. During video calls with my grandparents, I’d always answer their questions with a simple ‘igen’ (yes) or ‘nem’ (no), and would ask my mother to help me formulate more difficult sentences. Concomitantly, I would understand exactly what they were saying but would struggle to translate my english thoughts.
The main obstacle I can think of here is that this is a mental and intangible fear and I would need a physical way to articulate it. I would like my project to represent someone talking to me in Hungarian and then represent me trying to respond. This could be physically represented with a head that is receiving dialogue, but not responding to what it is hearing.
Keywords:
- Translation
- Speechless
- Confused
- Anxiety
- Response
- Bilingualism
- Fading
- Lost
- Hungarian
- Grandparents
Accumulations: Model A Ford
The object I have decided is a scaled replica of a 1930’s Ford Model A, Wisconsin Bell Telephone Truck. I think the Bell truck represents a significant step in the development of transportation as the Model A and its successor, the Model T, were one of the first in the category of affordable and mass produced vehicles. The model reminds me of the Great Depression, a time of economic disaster and poverty. Ford was one of few companies to make it out of the depression, but even then had to halt the production of their Model A automobiles. By the end of the production in 1931, Ford had made significantly less Model A automobiles than Model Ts. Considering the concept of mold making and the ability to produce multiple objects from a single mold, I want my project to resemble the mass production of Model A automobiles. I also want to somehow integrate how production was affected by the depression to add complexity to the final piece.
Future Artifact, Tas Csikos
- Immediate Response
When I first stumbled across the piece ‘Future Artifact’ by Ivan Toth Depeña, I was instantly reminded of the classic Pixar movie: Wall-E. I began visualizing the scene where the Wall-E, the robot, is compacting and shooting out cubes of trash and arranging them in a similar fashion as the art piece. Upon closer inspection, I noticed homogeneity in the trash being used. They were all Pepsi cans? In my head, I exclaimed the obvious, ‘this must have something to do with the soda company,’ and started to search the background for any hints as to why the art piece was located there.
- Objective Description.
Future Artifact is a giant cube that must be two meters tall. It stands on one of its corners that is buried into a concrete slab on the ground with lights and anti-skateboard studs. The giant cube itself is composed of 4 by 4 by 4 compacted cubes of pepsi soda cans. The smaller cubes are smooth to the touch, indicating that they are either encapsulated in resin or inside some transparent container. These smaller cubes are sandwiched in place by shiny blue L-shaped brackets along the edges of the giant cube. In the background, there is outdoor restaurant furniture to the right and a subway station to the left.
- Technical Decisions
The description of the art piece gives a lot of background information that wasn’t apparent from visual inspection. The art piece was created from the remnants of the first pepsi bottling plant, and resides near to where the plant used to be. The crushed cans are sealed to give the impression that they are supposed to last a long time and serve as a ‘future artifact’. While the bottling plant no longer exists, the art acts as a memorial and a way to ‘remind viewers of the past’. It is possible that the artist wanted to include some ambiguity in this piece. It is up to the viewer to decide what this piece means to them.
- The Work in the World
To the average viewer, the art piece looks like a giant cube of trash. Judging by the materials used, this art piece does not serve as a commemoratory artifact to the first Pepsi bottling plant, but rather to criticize how much trash the world is producing. One interpretation is that the piece is foreshadowing a world similar to the world in the movie Wall-E, where the Earth becomes uninhabitable due to the vast amount of trash that we have generated.
- The Story it Tells
Although we are limited by the short description the artist provides us about the piece, it is clear that there could be many different interpretations of this art piece. Like I mentioned in the previous section, this piece might allude to the growing pollution problem we are facing in the word, but it could also convey how the surrounding community has developed after the demolition of the bottling plant, or the economic opportunities the plant brought with it. The piece is very well preserved, hence the name, and will serve to provide the history of the place for many years to come.