Rebecca Arnold: Senior Portfolio: December 2009

Rebecca Arnold, Research Blog: Closing ideas

Well, this is it. My last blog posting of the semester. I guess I'll talk about my very last picture to shoot for my final portfolio that I will be doing this weekend.

I actually had a dream about this photo idea a month or so ago. It was vivid, and in the dream I knew exactly where I was: Oz! Yes, I had a Wizard of Oz dream. I remember watching Judy Garland walking down the yellow brick road, prior to meeting the scarecrow, and stopping at the edge of the backdrop. One of my favorite things about this film is the backdrop - it is so obviously very much a backdrop...but it doesn't matter. It's of no concern to the viewers, and that makes it successful. Anyway, she walked up to the backdrop, confused and reached out to touch it. It wasn't Judy Garland, it was actually Dorothy the character. She looked around, not knowing what to do because this beautiful landscape she once wanted to cross just turned into a still image she couldn't break through.

I love this concept. I'm going to photograph one (or several, depending) of my father's paintings. He has done quite a lot of landscapes in his lifetime, and I want to photograph one as if it were a backdrop. After taking another photo separately of myself, in costume, I will work in photoshop to connect the two images. I hate using so much photoshop, I try only to use it for color and lighting correction. But this is appropriate. I'll spend a lot of time on this image, and I can't wait to get started.

As I wind down to the final image and the final blog, I am feeling like I came out of this semester somewhat successful because I've figured out what I really want in my pictures. I am moving past my complicated ideas and I'm sticking to what I know. Thank you, blog, for being there to hold all of ideas. And thank you Tom, for having the patience to read my blog.

Happy Holidays!

Rebecca Arnold, Artist Lecture: Amy Hauft

Amy Hauft, chair of the Department of Sculpture + Extended Media, spoke at the Anderson Gallery last night. She lectured in the same room that her exhibition was in, which was called Counter Re-formation.

After earning her B.A. from the University of California Santa Cruz, she attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture on scholarship, and later earned her MFA at the Art Institute of Chicago. Hauft has exhibited her large-scale architectural installations in galleries all over the world, including the Brooklyn Museum, the New Museum, the International Artists Museum (Poland), The American Academy in Rome, Wesleyan University Gallery, School of the Art Institute of Chicago Galleryaaa, and USC Atelier Gallery. She has been awarded residencies that have allowed her to work in different parts of the world including Umbria, Italy and Poland.

Amy Hauft, Counter Re-formation, 2009, 32 ft x 27 ft x 35 in; Plywood, canvas, sugar, ABS plastic, polystyrene foam, plaster, epoxy, paint

Amy Hauft, Counter Re-formation, 2009 (detail shot)

Amy Hauft’s installation uses sculpted sugar, art-historical references, metaphor, and shifts in scale to create a variety of experiences for her viewers. She replicated (in both scale and structure) an 18^th century Louis XIV banquet table, originally intended for 100 guests. The ornate contours of the table are meant to have the viewer wander with its shape, and in one corner there’s an immaculate spiral of circles radiating from a central vortex. The table is covered with white cloth.

Hauft discussed with us her trip to Europe, where she studied casting and sculpting sugar under culinary historian Ivan Day. There, they leafed through cookbooks from the 17^th century, and that this was when she found an etching of the table she decided to recreate. This was during the Baroque era in Europe, when artists were making sugar sculptures to mimic porcelain – a time before the art of porcelain was perfected. She also discovered a series of miniature staircases that French woodworking craftsmen had made. She combined pretty much all of these things.

On the Louis XIV table, there were small sculpted, painted hills of Styrofoam (which…isn’t sugar, like she had first said) with glitter sprinkled over. She said that these forms are intended to look like multiple things – snow drifts, icebergs, mountain ranges, sand dunes, etc. There scale is meant to shift on how you perceive them. In the center laid a medium sized sugar-sculpted staircase Hauft had created.

Amy Hauft finished up the lecture by saying that the intention of her work is to try to remake a physical experience she has had outdoors, even if it is impossible to create a landscape indoors.