Plaster Casting Without the Beach

I followed the plaster casting video but used a empty planter as my man made Beach. I think being at the beach makes this project a lot more fun and you don't have to worry as much about making a mess. Here are the pictures and how I did it.

First was a trip to home depot to get a bag of sand and a bag of plaster and a bucket to mix the plaster in.
























Next I took a pot for plants and filled it with sand. The planter rather than a bucket is used so you can water the sand down to compact it around your hand and the water then drains out the bottom.

















The next step is to mix the plaster and then poor it into the mold.
















Then comes the waiting game. The time was used to start the blog while it sets allowing a better use of time than frolicking at the beach. Unless of course you have the time to do it, I would recommend going to the beach.

Unfortunately due to weather conditions it is taking an extremely long time to set. Hopefully in the morning It will be ready... but i doubt it. Maybe I bought the wrong stuff to use.

Earth Art Project

Well it turns out this is a poor attempt as my time this weekend was sucked up by work family and A full day of Museum runs. I had planed on doing something more elaborate in an area I have hiked many times but that will have to wait until another day.

I call this piece "Leaf Skeleton" the sticks were gathered in my back yard from a tree that has been dropping them thanks to the wind that has been present all day.

Beall Center for Art + Technology

I attended the Beall Center at UCI. Which I might add is hard to find if you have a GPS that does not like the address and have never been to that campus before. After driving around for a bit I new I was close and asked a parking structure attendant for help. He had no clue what I was talking about. I showed him the directions I found using my phone and he was able to point me in the right direction. The building was about 100 yards away in view from where we were talking. the building is small and has rotating exhibits. The current exhibit was called Eyecode: Works by Golan Levin. This was a fun exhibit to be at. There was about 8 installations and all of them were interactive. My girlfriend and I both agreed we had the most fun there. it is hard to explain all of the creations but I did take a few pictures.

The first one was called Ghost Pole Propagator, you would walk in front of the screen that had stick figures moving around on it. When the sensor saw you your figure would show on the screen and follow your movements. It would record these and after walking around the small exhibit I Saw my figures floating around with all the others in the back ground.


The Second one had a camera that would show your face split into 3 layers and rotated through with other faces it had saved. So your mouth, eyes or forehead would be swapped with others at random to create different faces. After severl minutes of making faces and laughing we moved on.















I decided to take a picture of one other item while there. You could use your finger to write whatever you wanted on this little tablet and it would look as though the screen would freeze from the points where you touched it out until it went white and was ready to be used again.

Bowers Museum of Cultural Art

This afternoon I went to the Bowers Museum. I have been there before but it was a very long time ago. As my girlfriend and I walked through I saw something on the wall that caught my eye. The word Shaman on the wall followed by South America. so we walked down that corridor through the exhibits and I didn't see anything related to it. I decided to take a couple pictures of painting that intrigued me. I enjoy outdoor sceneries and one of these painting seem to be done in its own style. On the way back out I was the reference to South American Shaman. It want much of an exhibit just a picture of South American with a few artifacts on the wall. Not what I was expecting.






The method of brushstrokes used by Conrad Buff in his Ocean Vista painting from the 1920's. His style used fine and well placed strokes of the brush to create a bigger picture that does not look so great up close but splendid from a distance. I took pictures from both views so you could see the difference.















The second picture caught my eye very similar to a place I have been before, on a stream fly fishing while a couple of deer came down to drink water. Interestingly enough I found the same sort of brush strokes in the painting. It was created by Joachim Ferdinand in 1885 called Untitled (redwoods). When I looked closely at the trees you could see the same style that Conrad Buff used in his paintings.

Museum of Latin American Art

I went to MOLAA this morning and walked around a bit before I found something that caught my eye. I guess most of the regular paintings and pictures I find in museums do not stimulate my senses. I find this to be true at every museum I have been to. The odd things are the ones that catch my eye and cause me to stop and observe them for a bit. I am not interested in figuring out what the creator of the piece was thinking but rather just enjoy what was created. There were two pieces I saw that really caught my eye. Both of them I could see from across the room and couldn't wait to get to them, hastily passing the other art pieces before them.

the first one was created by Murta Minujin in 1995 called Solo Una Manera, or Only One Way. I found this name to be the opposite of the art itself. The piece seemed to look different from whatever angle you looked at it. The shadows created by the strands hanging in the foreground moved with the breeze in the museum as well.


The second piece was created by Sara Modiano in 2007 called Inner connection. This piece was created from a picture in wich it was diced and then pulled out from the center. When you stand directly in front of it you can see the picture clearly but as you move to teh side the picture is lost in the blocks.

Long Beach Museum of Art

I went to the LB Museum of Art this morning to see what they had. I was surprised at how small the establishment was and arrived early due to a misread on their website. The cafe opens at 8am the museum didn't open until 10am. Anyways all the Art they had on display was created via video projections or films that had been edited. I enjoyed the walk through a little more than my girlfriend who accompanied me. some of the items were a little to emotional for her but I thought it was very interesting. Almost all of the pieces there utilize editing of sounds and video. Some of them are set in a dark room where you only see the video or projection accompanied by whatever noise the artist rendered. It takes some time for your eyes to adjust, at first you cant even tell if anything else is even in the room. It was a fun experience and I managed to get a couple pictures.




First one was a video created by Nan Hoover in 1981 called Doors. It is two doors that seem to be mirrored and person wearing all black seems to walk back and forth through them. it is separated in the middle and makes you think how they open and close toward and away from each other.


The second one was interesting. It was created by Bjorn Melhus in 1998 and was called Again and Again. Basically it was a himself repeating many of the terms you hear on television over and over as it we have not heard them enough. I enjoyed watching it. It was set up on 8 monitors side by side. the video is run on a 6 min loop.