In (This) Space, No One Can Hear You Scream

One of the blog post requirements for class was to share our workspace. Oof, this is going to be a disaster. Before the pandemic, I had a pretty nice set up going. In the den of our tiny apartment I had a drafting table, bins full of supplies, canvases, a custom made, wall mounted drawing board, stacks of sketchbooks and pads of paper, a smaller drawing table, lightboxes…just tons and tons of stuff. It was a lot, but it was organized and relatively neat. As I took these photos, my “studio” looks like it was tossed by the mob looking for the Maltese falcon. It’s in total disarray. In very short order, this had to become my office for work, which meant shoving things aside and bringing in a computer, a different chair, installing more practical lighting, running cables across the room etc. A couple of weeks into things, I remembered I’m still a student, and I needed to reclaim some of that space for homework projects. This meant shoving more things aside, and putting the stuff I need in a place where I can get it, and use it, with more thought put into ease of access than feng shui, aesthetic appeal, or common decency. Scatter a few animal skeletons, and you’d think a cave troll lives here.

A few more weeks of working from home, and one might.

Anyway, here’s my half impractical, barely functional studio, half impractical, barely functional office space.

(Click to advance images)

Contemporary Artists and Technology

Originally, the concept I wanted to explore for our “imaginary culture” revolved around technology addiction.   Admittedly, this was just a thinly veiled excuse for me to continue my elitist, condescending, holier-than-though crusade against people I think spend too much time glued to their phones.  I’ve ranted enough about this in the past that, for now, I’ll be succinct:  I worry that too much time spent absorbed in devices leads to serious social/developmental failures.  Technology is not inherently bad.  There is a healthy, responsible amount of time to spend on a device and it just so happens to be the exact amount of time that I personally engage in.  I’m a jerk.

This virus/social isolation ordeal we’ve collectively been going through has recalibrated my stance on technology.  When the internet felt like a luxury, it was easy to criticize those I thought guilty of frivolous over-indulgence.  Today, it feels like a necessity.  I myself have gone from maybe an hour a day of online activity in my personal time to spending, conservatively, 36 hours a day in front of a screen.  It’s how I do my job, attend classes, do my shopping, keep informed, check in with family…it’s become the platform through which I entirely function.  If a person wants more stimulus from life than what can be had bouncing a tennis ball off of four walls, getting online is practically mandatory.  Who am I to begrudge someone for wanting to connect to a thriving virtual world rather than endure the anxiety inducing nightmare that is the real one?  I think I can cool it on the smug criticism for awhile.

The contemporary artists I chose for this assignment were selected before the outbreak.  As a result, they feel like a time capsule now.  A relic of a time when the greatest existential threat I was facing was Tik-Tok or Instagram.  I’m going to speak of what originally drew me to them, with the caveat that what once felt like scathing social commentary to me, now reads more like needless party pooping.

Pawel Kuczynski

https://www.pictorem.com/profile/Pawel.Kuczynski

Pawel Kuczynski is an illustrator from Poznan, Poland.  As I don’t speak Polish, I have little insight into his thought process other than what his work tells me.  That’s fine, as his clear, satirical images are able to communicate plenty.  Kuczynski targets a lot of the same sources of skepticism that I share, and does so through a sharp, observational sense of humor.  Something about the way he frames a scene, renders the human figure, and delivers a visual “punch line” in his paintings makes me think of Gary Larson’s “The Far Side” comics.

“Confessional” is as mystified as I am with the way people seem perfectly content to air their dirty laundry through social media channels such as Facebook, effectively shouting their personal problems and failures to their friends, family, employers, and strangers.

A similar idea is reflected in “Watcher” in which the Facebook “f” logo is portrayed as a surveillance camera.  Everything we do on Facebook is public, who knows who is watching, or what they are doing with that information?

In “Gossip” salacious hearsay passed along in hushed tones is converted into a tweet and sent out to the world at large through Twitter.  In a connected society, any information you choose to share with others is susceptible to unrestricted dissemination. 

These three pieces are a small sampling of the way Kuczynski comments on our willingness to sacrifice our privacy in exchange for social media access.  My topic was on technology addiction, and this is the behavior of addicts:  Self-destructive decisions blindly made in pursuit of an object of desire.

John Holcroft

https://www.johnholcroft.com

John Holcroft is a commercial and freelance illustrator from the UK.  His work is digital, presumably vector based, which adds a layer of irony as his subject matter is frequently critical of an over-dependence on technology.  While not as overtly humorous as the work of Pawel Kuczynski, his pieces are clever, and colorful, imbuing them with a sense of playfulness. 

The messages he sends can be metaphorical, as in the scene of a man filling his ego with a bowl full of Facebook “likes” or literal, in which a baby chooses a smartphone over a rattle.  The relationship between children and technology, in particular, seems to be a concern of Holcroft.  In one piece, a small boy is gripped by tentacles physically emanating from his tablet.  In another, a young girl has grown foliage from sitting motionless in front of her phone for so long.  My personal favorite features a teenager on his phone, encased in a wall made of Lego bricks.  His parents are building the wall, or possibly trying to break it down, but in either scenario the sense of separation and isolation conveyed by a person constantly engrossed in their device is clearly communicated. 

When viewing his work as a whole, John Holcroft revisits themes of social media being addictive, in some cases a literal trap, and potentially harmful to our youth.  As a commercial illustrator, it could be argued that these are evidence of the client’s feelings more than Holcroft’s.  I am of the mind that even freelance artists are drawn to the projects that are of personal interest to them, and the repetitive themes of this artist’s work can be trusted to reflect his own beliefs.

M-m-m-my Corona!

This coronavirus outbreak has wreaked havoc on my work/school/life balance. For a couple of weeks the breakdown seemed to be…doing some quick math…100/0/0%. Working for Mason, which was quickly thrown into disarray, meant I spent most of my waking hours answering emails from panic stricken students, staff, and community members, called into endless emergency meetings, and just generally trying to figure out how the school functions in a remote-only environment. Things finally seem to be settling down into, if not normalcy, at least, a regular routine for the time being, which has allowed me to survey the things that were left unattended to for nearly a month: personal hygiene, and schoolwork. This blog is dedicated to the later (email me for a link to my blog about the former) so this entry is part one of playing catch up.

We were asked to take inventory of various supplies we may have laying around the house for at-home projects going forward. Luckily, I always have a lot of crap on hand, and my stockpile is at peak volume thanks to an ill-advised shopping spree I went on in preparation for the stop motion video project. This is just what I could fit on the page, I have, conservatively, 1000 more things.

The hardest part of this assignment wasn’t taking inventory, it was, sadly, the drawing element. Usually this is my favorite activity (I got a degree in it purely for personal interest) but drawing for me is like long distance running: If you don’t exercise those muscles and loosen up regularly, you’re going to get stiff and feel like garbage afterwards. I haven’t picked up a pen or pencil in weeks, and I’m definitely feeling the rust. Oh well, it’s just a sketch. Hopefully I’ll be able to get into a rhythm again soon. For now, onto the next overlooked assignment…