John Garrett and 8 hour projects

John Garrett:
I was extremely inspired listening to John Garrett's lecture, and really enjoyed working with him during our class and collaborating with him on his piece for 8-hour-projects. In his lecture, John spoke about his art and his influences. He was influenced by his surroundings growing up as a child in New Mexico, all of the patterns, and colors and textures. What I think is really interesting and important as an artist is to work with different materials, and he certainly does. He has worked with rust fabric, bamboo, plastic, aluminum, fabric and pretty much anything he can get his hands on. What really resonated for me during his lecture was his ability to find materials in the dumpsters and on the streets and reuse them in a way that gives them an entirely new meaning. I think that can really relate to our class because I assume we will be working with found objects, and recycled and reused materials. He spoke about one piece in which he took debris off the street and used it to symbolize how him and his friends felt like they were being treated like trash at the time, with many of his friends dying from AIDS. Being able to find meaning like that and turn it into a work of art is so inspiring to me.

8 hour projects:
It was really interesting to see the final presentation of the work from the artists involved in 8-hour-projects. For example, John Garrett decided to do a white coating over his piece, and initially I did not understand why, but he explained that a loss is a loss, no matter if it is a person or an object or something intangible, and all of our losses are different yet unified through this white purifying coat of paint. I thought that was really cool. Also, I really enjoyed seeing Ian Thomas' final presentation of his performance. He included nearly everything down to what he was wearing in his piece, and this to me is a new way of viewing art. Traditionally, I think we feel that once the mess of the creative process is over, we want to clean it up and make it look nice and tidy and pretty. Ian really pushed those presentation boundaries and for someone who did not see the 8-hour-projects work day they can piece together what he did during his performance. I was also really pleased to see Heather Brand's digital work presented as big ambiguous cluster of ghostly people that participated in her piece. On Saturday I remember speaking with her and her being unsure of how to effectively translate all of the videos she took of participants into a cohesive piece. I think she nailed it!


                                   Here is a picture of my object I'm creating out of wire: