With Presentations by Cheryl Safren and Debra Swack
This ASCI meeting was enlivened by not only the presentations but the spirited discussions surrounding them. And everyone enjoyed the opportunity to network, catch-up and develop new (& renew old) acquaintances.
"Copper World"
Cheryl Safren summarized her past twenty years with five slides - an amazing process in itself - and spoke briefly of her mixed background: 20 years as a painter, with 10 years in engineering and 10 years in biology and astronomy. From roughly 1978 - 1988, working in the motor city of Detroit, Michigan, she was attracted to paint still lifes of large scale, human-engineered structures in the modernist style of flat, hard-edge, quasi-abstract form. In 1988 she turned to organic, textured patterns with interests in the polarities of order and randomness. Her mixed media textured-surface murals related to marine and cell biology. Her next move was to replace the painting process with chemical etching and coloring processes on copper plates to depict aspects of science, as in her Nucleosynthesis series. More specifically, she uses chemicals heated to 3200 - 3600 degrees in an open kiln wearing protective gear. She works in abstract form that does not represent science but uses generalized organic patterns located in science to create imaginary worlds that parallel the processes of cosmology in its stages of cosmic and planetary creation. Her world-building has been well received publicly with numerous public art commissions. (And as a critic I can offer that her aesthetic reflects the very recent turn in painting, videography and digital art interest in abstraction that has the critics scrambling to explain and frame.) Today she wants funding to move into a new phase, the creation of three-dimensional forms through chemical means and she has been attaching plastic and glass to parts of her panels. Any suggestions on funding sources for her new directions are welcomed. Tzayaret@optonline.net
- please find images by Cheryl Safren at the bottom of this page
"Wargames"
Debra Swack's presentation was immersed in a great deal of discussion as the group tried to understand the technological specifics of her projects and philosophy. Her "95 Variable Chimes" sound project/installation will be altered in size to relate to the environment, and it continues her interest in the shapes of sound. The concept of the interplay of sound and vibration as material form also functions metaphorically in her aesthetic for the string theory set forth by Brian Greene (Layman's Note: The essence of string theory, as Green records in his book The Elegant Universe, is that vibrations replace particles at the subatomic level as the building process, rather than building block, of matter and as these tiny one-dimensional filaments vibrate differently, they shape matter differently.) But the initial variables in the sound work will also be gathered digitally and edited since Swack's aesthetic includes the concept of composition. Her project titled Playing Cards matched cross-grids of words with grids of digital drawings to explore the subliminal associations of gender bias she finds encoded in not only words but in structures. Her interests are focused on the interrelationships between systems & their recombinations: word/image, sound/structure, pattern/form, etc., and frequently with their social consequences. Her Digital Zoos video projected the protective camouflage patterns from animals (created through software algorithms) into environments to remind us of the system inversion of fashion: We are attracted to their camouflage patterns, kill them, then wear their patterns for display. Her Toy Soldiers video used stop action positioning (5,000 frames and a month of editing using After Effect) to have them dance to an up-tempo love song to interfere with our normal social patterns that use and accept toys to imbed hatred. The group felt her best work used not prepublished pop music but newly created music, such as her father's chamber music composition used in relation to her video edits of carousel horses. We discovered that the word carousel means "little wars" and those cute wooden animals were initially warlike. Her use of music initiated an impassioned group conversation over the need to obtain copyright permissions for the use of music, especially since Swack's carousel piece was shown publicly at Banff. Her use of video of tree limbs manipulated through After Effects and Premiere was a study in branching systems which for Swack worked as visual correlates to a proposed biological explanation of love that argues people need other people to develop and close their nervous systems.
- please find images by Cheryl Safren at the bottom of this page
Rich Leslie Visiting Assistant Professor Art History & Criticism SUNY-Stony Brook; Graduate Faculty (Theory & Criticsm) School of Visual Arts; critic, author and curator; rich-amy@att.net.
These summaries are composed from notes and any errors and misunderstandings are accepted by the author!
