Shelby Rodeffer Lecture

Shelby Rodeffer is a sign painter and artist based out of the city of Chicago. She runs her own business where she paints signs commercially. When Rodefferer started working for money as an artist, she was doing freelance work but she didn’t enjoy it. She didn’t like being forced to create certain things and having creative directors above her. After doing freelance design work for a while she discovered a documentary about sign painting that really turned her on to the craft. Then she started researching all about sign painting, and attended sign painting workshops where she got to actually practice her newfound love for the craft.

            Now, she paints text for all sorts of companies on all sorts of walls, windows, and more. One project that she did that I particularly favor was the tour bus she painted for The Pitchfork Review. This one is specifically interesting to me because it differs from the work she does on walls, she got to be less text based and focus more on imagery.

Link to her page talking about this project:

http://shelbyrodeffer.com/work/the-pitchfork-review/

           Rodeffer supports their personal art through the commercial work that they do. Some of the themes that they like to explore include: femininity, gender roles, opportunity, and feminism. Their work features skills learned from sign painting, carefully and artistically placed words and phrases. They work in different mediums like wood and canvas, but to me the most interesting medium they work on is silk.

Good Spirits

Rodeffer delved into the commercial and business side of art more during the question and answer section of the lecture. One useful piece of advice they offered was to have a dedicated sketchbook practice, having one always open at home to explore less permanent and ideas in a pressure free way. If a person was hoping to get into a specific new craft, she offers the advice of contacting an established artist and offering to pay them their hourly wage to teach their skills.

This lecture made me think about opportunities that I have as an artist, to work commercially and fund my own work at the same time. The reason I enjoyed this lecture the most was the authenticity of Rodeffer and the insight into both their commercial and personal sides of their art.

Link to Rodeffer's website:
http://shelbyrodeffer.com/

Winona "Winnie" Farrell

Winona "Winnie" Farrell

This video I created because I wanted to try to encapsulate the essence of Winnie so that I could show people why I am so obsessed with her. To do this I filmed many different people doing essentially the same thing, petting and showing her love.  This structure relates to the McLuhan quote, "The public consists of separate individuals walking around with separate, fixed points of view. The new technology demands that we abandon the luxury of this posture" (Media is the Massage 69). Although all the humans involved in this film are individuals, my directorial vision strips them of their differences and represents them all in the same way, all with the same opinion of Winnie. Through the technology of filming, purposeful editing, and specific song placement, I influenced the attitude of this video to be solely positive and reflective of my love for Winnie.

Lecture by Xiaohong Zhang: Reimagining Chinese Urbanity

On Friday, September 21st, I attended a visiting artist lecture hosted by Xiaohong Zhang describing her life as an artist and the works in the exhibition that opened that night at Lawrence University.  Ironically, I had also been specifically assigned to attend this lecture as a part of my job at the Lawrentian to photograph the event.
The works of Xiaohong Zhang are heavily influenced by her interest in Soviet realism. Many of her pieces are politically charged, specifically in respects to consumerism, the environment, and work ethics. Her Chinese heritage influences her art in many ways, from using the medium of traditional paper cutting to the political issues she chooses to feature in her work. For example, she made a piece that talks about Chairman Mao as being a communist symbol, and she also me a piece about the conflict between China and the United States. The aspect of her lecture that interested me the most was when she illustrated how she spoke about the environment through her work. She often features tree motifs in her paper cutting work. One thing that really fascinated me was how in her landscapes, she replaced trees with cranes. She did this not only in her paper cutting, but also her digital paintings, and 3D digital works. Zhang spoke about something that heavily relates to what we are learning in “New Media,” which is her viewpoint on the mediums she chooses. She uses new and contemporary tools and skills which keeps her work relevant to today’s audience while still referencing traditional Chinese art forms. She described mediums and tools that enhance her ability to communicate and make her work more modern. Her ability to adapt to the modern era relates to the McLuhan quote, “Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments” (Media is the Massage 26). Her intuition as to which modern mediums to employ shows brilliance on her part as an artist, as a contemporary audience will best receive a contemporary message.

Her website:
http://www.xiaohongzhang.com/index.html

Xiaohong Zhang

Student engaged with her work featured at Wriston 

Example of her paper cutting,
"Brave New World"

Blog Start

I am Julia Balestri, a 19 year old who is currently attending Lawrence University where I study Studio Art and Film. One of my dream jobs would be to direct music videos. I also think it would be cool to work for a company like Vice or Redbull. I like to work with a variety of different mediums ranging from jewelry to photography, painting to videography, clothing to drawing, from body modification to collage. I have found it hard to focus all my energy on one specific medium for a very long time because I am always searching for new ways to represent and build my ideas. I enjoy focusing on the small details of life, and that tends to show through my photography and videography. I am very interested in documentation, which also shows through those mediums and also appears in the collages I compile along with the subjects I chose to draw. I find myself  mostly grounded in reality; different viewpoints on what is "real" tend to intrigue me the most. Something I love most about art is that anybody can do it. As Keith Haring used to say, "Art is for everybody." If I could make any impact on the world I would be satisfied if all I could do is inspire other people to find their voice and create more things for everyone to see. Like Marshall McLuhan has said, "Today, the mass audience can be used as a creative, participating force." I believe that free public pieces are some of the highest forms of artistic expression.

Below I have included some of my more recent works

Sheep candid in Iceland

Purple hand earrings

Card dangle earrings

Crane in Iceland

You can view jewelry that I have made here:https://www.instagram.com/spazcore/

You can view some of my video works here:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCM0z31YaD088hKe3yXDOGQ