studio journal

new painting

sam@samsanford.com (sam sanford) — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 00:35:00 +0000

Sam Sanford, Grail, 2009, oil on paper, 37.5" x 35"

new painting

sam@samsanford.com (sam sanford) — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 14:49:00 +0000

Sam Sanford, Boys' Club 2000, 2009, oil on canvas, 40" x 40"

Come see this and a bunch of great stuff by other people at MASS through August 8th.

Journal of the Collective Me

sam@samsanford.com (sam sanford) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 20:14:00 +0000

Saw this on glasstire's twitter - it collects tweets containing the word 'me' - a simple idea but it gets pretty rich if you delve into it for a while...

thumbs up

sam@samsanford.com (sam sanford) — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 14:14:00 +0000

water

sam@samsanford.com (sam sanford) — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 14:01:00 +0000

change

sam@samsanford.com (sam sanford) — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 19:08:00 +0000

[image source]

color theory images

sam@samsanford.com (sam sanford) — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 13:44:00 +0000

freedom to suck

sam@samsanford.com (sam sanford) — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 15:06:00 +0000

Shepard Fairey, "The AP, Obama, & Referencing"

Brian Sherwin, "Response to Shepard Fairey"

Without a clear empirical way to locate the line between legitimate and illegitimate appropriation, I say we have to err on the side of anarchy in order to protect freedom. Let Fairey make his terrible art and let the zombies keep snapping it up - I don't care if he gets rich. His disingenuousness and the vacuity of his artworks betray a deep spiritual illness - he is already punished. Let's not create laws that could be used to restrict our artistic freedom just to slap an annoying mosquito.

color channel mixup

sam@samsanford.com (sam sanford) — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 05:25:00 +0000

manual dithering using Hilbert Curve construction

sam@samsanford.com (sam sanford) — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 23:25:00 +0000

This is an experiment I did in 2005 with a manual dithering system loosely derived from the construction of the Hilbert Curve.

3 whites mixed by alternating RGB primaries with their inverses

sam@samsanford.com (sam sanford) — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 22:14:00 +0000

cyan/red, magenta/green, yellow/blue

so epic

sam@samsanford.com (sam sanford) — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 17:55:00 +0000

optical mixing with quicktime

sam@samsanford.com (sam sanford) — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 14:22:00 +0000

WARNING this could possibly be a seizure risk

Cyan, magenta, and yellow mixed from RGB primaries by alternating frames (blue/green, red/blue, and green/red).

video: cat, color channels displaced in time

sam@samsanford.com (sam sanford) — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 02:11:00 +0000

Lisi Raskin "Armada" at Blanton WorkSpace: video, interview, photos

sam@samsanford.com (sam sanford) — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 21:19:00 +0000

>>video<< sponsored by Glasstire

Armada - Lisi Raskin's installation in the Blanton's WorkSpace - officially opens Friday, but it's already open to visitors. It's a beautiful group of abstract painted wood sculptures and wall paintings derived from works on paper Raskin made during a recent trip to military sites in Arizona, especially the "Boneyard," a vast airplane graveyard. Raskin works improvisationally, embracing happy accidents and refusing to get stressed about technical issues. Rather than work against the natural limitations imposed by materials, means, and circumstances by seeking technical perfection, she employs a "language of failure" that allows her to work in harmony with the difficulties and shortcomings that inevitably arise. The resulting work does not appear sloppy or thrown together, but fresh, active and full of life - by refusing to worry about the details she gives herself the freedom to stay tuned in to her interest as the work unfolds.
I am very grateful to curator Risa Puleo for giving me the opportunity to join the crew of assistants who helped Lisi build and paint these sculptures in Risa's backyard.
I am also grateful to Glasstire for sponsoring my video of this show for their new Vimeo page. It's a walkthrough of the installation as well as footage from the making and moving process, with audio from an interview with the artist.
More photos of the show and the process are in this Flickr set.
Raskin will return to Austin to give a talk and a performance at the Blanton sometime in May - I'll post the info here when I get it.

Jesse Butcher "We're All In Love With Dying And We're Doing It In Texas"

sam@samsanford.com (sam sanford) — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 22:29:00 +0000

Finally edited up some footage I shot at Jesse's artist talk last August:

bored-at-work (paper) collages

sam@samsanford.com (sam sanford) — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 23:37:00 +0000

Heyd Fontenot and the Cycle of Oppression, A Note

sam@samsanford.com (sam sanford) — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 16:12:00 +0000

Heyd Fontenot, Green Rainbow (seven figures), currently at Art Palace

A feedback loop causes victims of oppression to become oppressors themselves: when physical or psychological violence abridges our freedom we develop a need to control people and situations for our own security, so we come to endorse and collaborate in systems of control. For most people the violence is gentle - the soft oppression of mainstream culture eroding our confidence and motivation until we give up questioning the prevailing order; while those who experience exceptional violence and oppression often seek exceptional power - the abused becomes the abuser. In either case the cycle is self-reinforcing.
Heyd Fontenot's art practice is a means of breaking that cycle, for himself and others, by subverting the victim's desire for control. He exercises directorial control over his models, experimenting with potential narratives and modeling behaviors - not de-sexualizing their nakedness but freeing the situation from the constraints of mainstream culture's normative ideas about sexuality and nakedness, freeing sexuality from society's dominant storylines. Having suffered the oppression of growing up gay in a Catholic family in a rural Southern community, Fontenot can empathize with the voyeur, who has been shamed for his sexuality and attempts to protect himself with distance and isolation - but he subverts that reaction by making his voyeurism into a self-conscious experiment and inviting everyone to share in it. He controls the situation but he injects randomness, experimentation, and open-endedness; he lets himself lose control in a controlled manner so he (and his models, and the viewer) can safely explore alternative narratives. In this way Fontenot undermines the value-system that oppressed him in his childhood and breaks the cycle of oppression.

(This note is based on my interview with Fontenot at his current show at Art Palace;
see the previous post to hear an abridged version of that interview and see a video walkthrough of the show.)

Heyd Fontenot at Art Palace - video walkthrough & interview

sam@samsanford.com (sam sanford) — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 14:36:00 +0000

Heyd Fontenot, "Business In The Front, Party In The Back"
January 30 - March 11, 2009
Art Palace

free postcard

sam@samsanford.com (sam sanford) — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 23:56:00 +0000

This is an image I made for a postcard. It is printed with only cyan, magenta, and yellow inks, with the registration intentionally skewed. If you sign up for my mailing list I will send you one.

artists as writers/critics/scholars

sam@samsanford.com (sam sanford) — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 21:59:00 +0000

Since applying to the MFA Studio Art program at UT, I've been spending a lot more time reading critical/scholarly/theoretical writing about art, and I'm wondering what effect this will have on my artistic production. Until now, I have followed my own visual and technical interests wherever they lead, finding deeper meaning in my work mostly after making it (usually when forced to write about it). I have usually been somewhat surprised by aspects of the meaning I find in my own work, as if it gives me access to hidden workings of my mind, revealing connections I didn't know I was making. For example, I made the painting Mask (inset at right) because this old photo captured a feeling I wanted to express and investigate. It wasn't until over six months after painting it that I saw the connection between the supression/repression of youthful emotional expression and the rise of fascism (something I picked up from reading Wilhelm Reich years ago). I wonder if, by focusing more on meaning and connections like this, as well as on theoretical/philosophical issues such as 'what is art for?' and 'what does meaning mean?' my artistic products will be impoverished because the meaning will be self-conscious and predetermined? Or will it continue to surprise me, creating a sort of dialogue between myself conceiving and making the work and myself looking at and thinking about the work after it is made. This is an interesting thought because it identifies a possible feedback loop - the output becomes the input for the next iteration; critical thought influences art-making, then thinking about the art product changes the course of future critical thought, and so on - a structure that is known to cause radical transformations.

solvent of unreality

sam@samsanford.com (sam sanford) — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 05:18:00 +0000

new Hilbert Kaleidoscope

sam@samsanford.com (sam sanford) — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 14:08:00 +0000

[16.7 MB MOV]

new painting

sam@samsanford.com (sam sanford) — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 15:08:00 +0000

Sam Sanford, Recital, 2009, oil on paper, 12" x 18"

new website built with Indexhibit

sam@samsanford.com (sam sanford) — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 19:36:00 +0000

I redid my website with a new tool called Indexhibit. It's a php/MySql application that lives on your server and that you use to build a site within a preset format. It's kind of like making a myspace profile. If you know php and javascript you can edit and create plugins to customize it all you want. I came across this on the Birdhouse Gallery site. I like it because it focuses the viewer's attention on content and because it limits the site creator's options and saves lots of decision-making and editing time.

[NOTE: I abandoned indexhibit after about six weeks becuse I could not figure out how to get rid of the stupid fade in/fade out effect on the slideshow script. (03/04/2009)]