Inside Art & Art History at UNCC

The Digital Art Mob (DAM) is proud to host Digitally Inclined, its first student art show, juried by Ryan Buyssens (Digital Fabrication Lab Administrator for the College of Arts + Architecture) and Jae Emerling (Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art History in the Department of Art + Art History).

Digitally Inclined will be on view from February 10th through March 3rd 2010 at the new Student Union Gallery at UNC - Charlotte. A reception will be held on Wednesday, February 17th from 5:00 to 7:30pm and is free and open to the public.

The Digital Art Mob is an informal group of students, faculty and staff interested in the intersection of digital technologies and the arts. Those interested should visit http://digitalartmob.ning.com to find out about upcoming events or contact Heather D. Freeman, Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the Department of Art + Art History at hdfreema@uncc.edu or 704-687-0184.

All students in the College of Arts + Architecture were invited to submit work, although any student in the university community was eligible to apply. The jurors reviewed 191 artworks from 46 artists. The show features 30 works by 23 artists including digital prints, videos, animations, interactive works and mixed media works. DAM asked Buyssens and Emerling to choose works that demonstrated high aesthetic and conceptual refinement, as well as a range of techniques as they related to digital technologies. While some works were completed constructed in programs like Adobe Photoshop or Final Cut Pro, others combined both digital and traditional technologies. The video art ranges from non-linear abstractions to documentary-style narratives and the two interactive works include a meditation on Dia de los Muertos and a game in which the user interacts with a voodoo doll.

The artists included in the exhibition are Nicole Anderson, Christian Anzola, Diego Arocha, Austin Ballard, Stew Cantrell, Amelia Fletcher, Maya Hazelett, Damon Hood, Adam Iscrupe, Bethany Kern, Melissa MacDonald, Ryan Tyler Martinez, Lauren McClure, Abby Moize, James Noland, Elizabeth Ashley Owens, Karen Pierce, Brim Soh, Jessica Soss, Der Vang, Kayla Whitmore, Yanting Zheng and Lina Zuluaga.

Paucity by Lina Zuluaga. Still from Video.

Assistant Professor of Digital Media Heather D. Freeman will have her digital prints and animated prints at with the animations of Steven Subotnick in Artspace this February 5 - March 26th, 2010. There will be an opening reception Friday, February 5th and a second reception on Friday, March 6th from 6-8pm along with Gallery Hop which Freeman will attend.

These exhibits are free and open to the public. Please visit ArtspaceNC.org for directions and hours.

Intimate Animals Heather Freeaman & Steven Subotnick

February 5 – March 27, 2010 Gallery 2

Intimate Animals presents the work of two artists creating independently -- Heather Freeman and Steven Subotnick. While both artists are investigating individual concepts, the artists were paired together for this exhibition because of their commonalities. Both artists personify animals in their work, utilizing an array of animals. Freeman uses a variety of animals, from flamingos to seahorses to gorillas; in the work of Subotnick, jellyfish, a fly, and an anthropomorphic family of mole-like creatures are the main characters presented. In each artist’s work, animals represent human emotions and feelings. Additionally, each artist has created hand-drawn animations. In Subotnick’s case, Jelly Fishers is the result of many hand-drawn images layered together, along with a musical composition that is also a product of layering. For Freeman, the animations are just one aspect of her Personal Demons series that includes large-scale digital collages on paper or fabric. Another commonality is the importance of metaphor for both artists. Lastly, although both artists work digitally in processes that by their very nature are overtly planned and premeditated, they have both found ways to work intuitively.

Freeman’s Personal Demons series, presented in this exhibition, began with a simple question, sent out by email and on facebook in what year. Initially sent to friends, and then forwarded on to strangers, Freeman asked any willing participants, "Please share with me your personal demon. Also let me know if you'd like it to remain anonymous.” She received more than fifty responses to her inquiry and thus far has created about twenty works based on these responses. The artist hopes to eventually create a work to represent each response. When the project began Freeman was hoping participants would be prompted to reveal “dirty secrets or guilty moments.” Instead, the project took an unexpected turn, as most everyone responded to her question by revealing self-perceived character flaw. In the beginning, answers came from individuals with whom the artist was familiar, and it was easy for her to recognize that these flaws were in fact aspects the individuals were actively and aggressively concerned about. This concern meant that individuals were actively engaged in turning this flaw into a strength, or had already done so. For example, Seahorse developed from an individual writing about his fear of fatherhood. Freeman was personally familiar with the participant and knew he was actually “an absolutely marvelous, even maternal, father.” Thus, when she began receiving responses from unknown individuals, Freeman knew to equate the answers with the strengths of the participant.

Freeman’s use of animals to personify human emotions and traits reflects her childhood-interest in taxonomy. Her investigations at a young age have provided her with quite a lot of knowledge about different species, their unique behaviors, and their habitats. She is also well-informed about animal mythology. Beginning with the project participant’s statement, Freeman selects an animal that seems to communicate the underlying trait, relying either on factual information about the animal or animal mythology. Freeman is particularly interested in the fluidity of mythological personas – the same animal may be associated with different traits in different cultures. Lastly, Freeman researches eastern medicine, and selects images of body parts and organs associated with the particular issue of the mind, referred to in the participant’s personal demon statement.

In the example of Seahorse and the individual’s fear of fatherhood, Freeman relied on pure science to select the appropriate animal. The seahorse was an appropriate choice to represent this man, as male seahorses are impregnated by the females and then carry their offspring to term. The seahorse has also been viewed as a symbol of strength, perhaps alluding to another attribute Freeman perceived in this individual. To create the works Freeman uses photographs primarily from her own personal archive, taken at zoos, aquariums, and natural history museums around the world. The images are composited together before Freeman draws back into them directly on the computer using a Wacom Tablet. The finished images are printed out in two possible formats: on watercolor paper or on cotton sateen. The images on sateen are then cut out along their irregular edges and adhered to voile. In the center of these images Freeman cuts into the imagery, allowing a place for animations to be viewed (on an LCD screen mounted behind the large work on voile). Her hand-drawn animations are an extension of the content of the digital works.

While this work is carefully planned and pre-meditated, Freeman’s process also allows for a reliance on her own intuition. She must distill the statements made by others down to a core element – what she believes is at the heart of their personal demon – such as guilt, identity issues, creativity, natural phenomena, or patience. While knowledge of science, mythology, and eastern medicine might inform her image choices, Freeman must also rely on her own instincts as she selects and composes the various pieces of the puzzle. She spends a great deal of time matching personal demon statements to animals, body organs, and settings, until a harmonious image develops.

Initially Freeman deemed the Personal Demons project as strictly a serious project, but participant responses helped shaped the overall body of work. Both serious fears and traits are represented along with more humorous ones, including plate tectonics, fear of fatherhood, bad hair, and lack of patience. Freeman notes that just as art is a mirror of life, sorrow, fear, and humor are all worthy of representation.

Steven Subotnick’s hand-drawn animation, Jelly Fishers, also presents a full range of emotions, utilizing animals to personify human behavior and traits. Jelly Fishers is based on Title, a lullaby from the island of Guernsey. The artist was attracted to the lullaby because of the melody which is both soothing and dark. He compares it to the sound of the ocean contrasted by a funeral march. The words of the lullaby -- describing a hungry family, a resourceful grandmother, and the act of fishing -- all directly influenced the artist when creating Jelly Fishers. However, in Subotnick’s remake of the lullaby, the family of humans has been replaced by a family of anthropomorphized mole-like creatures on the brink of starvation. The mole-like creatures are passive, despite their dire situation. In one scene, the family sits at a table before their empty plates, miming the act of eating. Raising their empty spoons, they stop just short of their mouths. They carry on in this way – monotonous, repetitive, like a lullaby – as they work at quieting the hungry baby.

The passiveness of the lullaby, Title, the artist’s source of inspiration, bothered Subotnick. In his own version, he inserts an outside force to provide a necessary push; without an external force the family is willing to simply accept their fate. This push comes in the form of an irritating fly whose interference throws everything off balance, spurring a chain reaction. The irritant’s behavior prods the head of the family to go fishing; causes the sleeping baby to wake up and cry; and brews a storm at sea that causes a huge wave to swallow the home of the mole-creatures. Once underwater, however, the family discovers life – thus food – in the form of jellyfish.

From the beginning, jellyfish figure prominently in Subtonick’s story. The currency of the mole-creature’s world -- from the “hill” their house rests on to the clouds, the fishing net, the baby’s bassinette, and ultimately, their savior -- all can be understood as jellyfish. The relationship between the mole-creatures and the jellyfish is not a symbiotic one, but rather one of total dependence. Seen in the context of a lullaby, this dependence might allude to a parent/child relationship, where the danger of being consumed by the other (in this case literally) is always a concern.

Subotnick views jellyfish as a metaphor for the lullaby itself – they are soft and they move slowly, rhythmically, in an undulating way. This description – one of beauty – is quite contrary to how most people view jellyfish. In fact, for the artist, the general disdain most people feel toward jellyfish is what made them such an appealing choice as the angels or saviors of the story.

To make this animated lullaby, Subotnick created numerous drawings, paintings, and collages. These images were then scanned into the computer, then combined, composited, and layered with other drawings and paintings. Just as Subotnick layers the drawings and paintings, composing them into a linear story, he also layers and composes various pieces of music from creative commons websites. Like Freeman, composing both the visual and the audio components are rather intuitive for Subotnick. Working independently provides Subotnick with freedoms simply unheard of in large-production, Hollywood animations and films. He does not have to work linearly from a completed storyboard. The artist can create drawings, paintings, and collages throughout the process, and simply allow his concept, and thus the overall story, unfold naturally.

Intimate Animals pairs two artists, Heather Freeman and Steven Subotnick, both of whom are inspired by stories. In Freeman’s case, the stories are shared through contemporary social networking tools, while Subotnick was inspired by a more traditional lullaby. Both artists utilize animals as substitutes for human counterparts. Working in new media, including digital collage and animation, both artists imbue their animal protagonists with human traits and emotions.