Works-in-progress

Okay New vlog

2011-11-12T15:05:00.000-08:00

I have a hard time updating these day to day things as is, but since the wave of blogging has gone to tumblr.

victoria's new new blog

Printmaking..

2010-03-31T15:55:00.000-07:00

My new job has me teaching printmaking to developmentally disabled adults. I'm trying to relearn different printmaking techniques so I have some semblance of knowing what I'm doing. I'm mostly doing woodblock and drypoint etch on plastic plates since using smelly materials is not an option for me with no ventilation and the kind of students im working with .. the picture of the cat is done by one of my students. His name is Bernice. Also a very good dancer.

A (semi) Brief Artist Statement

2009-10-29T22:54:00.000-07:00

I've been told by many people who came to my show to come up with an explanation to my current thesis: EVERYTHING MUST GO! It's kind of like a frequently asked questions section to all who were completely baffled or will be soon baffled by the stuff in the show. So first some background...

The theme for EVERYTHING MUST GO! came from a visit to an old pseudo-hometown in Michigan that I had once considered as close resemblance to what I would have called a 'rural' farming community. I had not visited nor had seen what had happened to it for many years. I had found most of the town empty and stores all gone out of business to be replaced instead by random historic landmarks. Many of the landmarks had once been diary farms or trains that I remembered were still in existence, but somehow turned into museums in order to preserve the authenticity of the town.

I tracked down my fourth grade teacher and was told to visit this old school house that was one of the town's attractions and found it next to a brand new elementary school surrounded by a pristine white picket fence. It looked something like a cross between abraham lincoln's study room and a gold mining ride ride at an amusement park. Some things almost looked convincingly old and other things, like a plastic folding table and plastic garbage bags in a barrel made it look kind of sad even though it was presented as historical fact. What was even funnier to me was the fact that I could not even go inside the historic schoolhouse. I stood from the outside looking into one of the windows standing on an AC unit. It was very pristine looking and painted with fresh coats of white paint. It also had a historic outhouse next to it that was painted with the same tender care complete with shingles and a little black crescent moon painted on the front.

What intrigued me was the idea of a fabricated past or a past that one could only imagine to be real. I started to think my idea of this town was also a fabrication of my own experience and decided to construct my own historical landmark of my memories. I took houses and barns from the town in addition pictures of houses and tool sheds that looked like barns in Home Depot catalogues and painted, cut and pasted them all into my constructed world. I remade the outhouse next to the historical schoolhouse and made an animation that was supposed to be layered with video clips of my past and present inside the outhouse. I also made the house intentionally inviting, but you could only look through the hole I cut in the door instead of being allowed inside. My purpose was to conceptually flush out all my assumptions and associations with the past in order to readily open myself to the future.

Question: Why did I put in the shadow on the floor?

My intention was to make the house relevant to the space it was in by transforming it like a painting. I wanted it to somehow act like a painting in that it had the ability to transform its surroundings into another space and time. hence, I painted the outhouse different colors to try to imitate a fake sunset and its shadow.

Question: Why do I cut out my paintings?

I cut and paste things into paintings because I want to emphasize the temporality of human experience, I want the disjointed to be apparent even if it is a picture of something mundane like the site of a suburban town. I believe that all memories, like how we edit our scrapbooks can be edited constantly to fit our attitudes and needs for the time being. I also think very circularly and in fragments in order to make sense of things. Therefore, I can only take information in pieces and sections and treat it with all the crudeness of a person who is afraid of losing sight of the thing that they want to capture. Almost like recording a dream.

MFA SHOW: EVERYTHING MUST GO!

2009-09-29T14:14:00.000-07:00

The reception is held in Claremont on a Tuesday... But also, It will be up for the rest of the week and taken down on Halloween. Hope to see you there!

....WOW!

2009-08-06T21:56:00.000-07:00

I have a new installation set up at Cgu's installation gallery. It's the second installment of Dylan's submarine robot underwater. I tried to do his video justice by making the viewer feel more intimately involved in the robot's POV. .. Here are some hastily snapped shots.

Great times, great free booze ticket. More art @ Bordello

2009-06-30T19:45:00.000-07:00

I had a great time working with Ms. Yoshie and Christina who are excellent installation/video artists at the Bordello Bar. This was our first collaboration and I've decided to share some moments....

Yoshie's video. she had this new video of her friend dancing with candy bar wrapper's edited to cover his junk.

my video

I forgot what this queenie's name was..

Yoshie displaying our artist wages with pride.

Unfortunately, I never got around to taking picture's of christina's area mostly because I ran out of memory and got too hammered..Sorry christina!

work drawwrings

2009-05-12T13:49:00.000-07:00

I got a nice easy-going work study job baby-sitting a computer desk. This is what happens when you put me at a desk filled with office supplies.

must... update..!

2009-03-27T23:50:00.000-07:00

I briefly recorded with my digital camera the woodpeckers that reside outside of the cguart building and made this.

Bring in the new year

2009-01-09T12:57:00.000-08:00

Here's what I've been up to lately. I also added on a neat ad that dylan showed me to set the tone for 2009.

LACDA snap to grid pics

2008-10-20T10:52:00.000-07:00

It's kind of funny that this blog lately hasn't posted anything that I've been working on, but right now I've been very vulnerable with the weird things I've been experimenting with... so for now here are some pics of the snap to grid show! I'm in there somewhere...

Favorite art pieces at bm

2008-09-07T21:03:00.000-07:00

It's hard to see the smoke ring in the sky, but it was really cool. some of the art I didn't get around to photographing well, so I resorted to art perez's photo album of burningman, who runs a really neat model drawing workshop at a bar on los feliz.

The Desert is No Joke

2008-08-31T15:18:00.000-07:00

I have luckily arrived back just in time to miss the crazy dust storm of the Playa even though it caught us in the beginning. It was a fascinating time at burningman, but also, I am very grateful for things like showers and beds.

On another note, this is such a cool picture that I took recently at a show that I just had to put it up.

Come to Claremont on a friday night!

2008-07-15T01:48:00.000-07:00

I'm hosting a closing reception this friday the 18th at Claremont. Come see my paintings, projections, and fish paraphernalia before I take everything down.

super awkward newish paintings

2008-06-19T08:09:00.000-07:00

The middle one I actually wanted to toss, but David Amico wouldn't let me so I rolled it up and gave it to him. The figure on the very right has a yellow balloon as its head, but I never got around to taking a photo of it.

I am a work in progress

2008-06-10T16:59:00.000-07:00

Things for me to work on this summer:

Building better canvases that don't warp and getting over my fear of the table saw/ other power tools

Finding a solution to making a support for my fish collage/painting before I have to submit it to some potential show in which I have no idea how to hang.

Focus on buffing up my craftsmanship and technique with painting

Re-learning tolerance and patience towards others

Not hurling projectiles at bill

also, on a totally random note, this video is stunning. I found it on moto atom's website.

I figure might as well

2008-04-09T15:15:00.000-07:00

Well, the open studios is coming up soon and since i'll be dropping off cards at various galleries, I felt I might as well plug it in here.
I'm not sure if anyone would be interested in driving all the way out to claremont, but what the hell, it couldn't hurt right?

Guess I'm not City Hall Material

2008-02-19T13:04:00.001-08:00

I was asked a few days ago if I would be willing to loan out one of my paintings to hang on the walls of Claremont's city hall. It happened to be the one with the nude in the desert with the 'thing' in the background that was a few posts earlier. This surprised me, considering this is city property and they were cool with blurry-looking nudes. Turns out, they weren't cool with it, when one of the council members toured through our studios to give approvals and said the painting wasn't 'neutral' enough. It would have been a kick to see that hanging in the entrance hall and have it be the first thing you see upon entering, but I guess it doesn't compare to this:

Yay I'm a student again!

2008-01-27T01:37:00.000-08:00

It's been close to two years since I've been a full time student, and finally my time has come for a second chance at even more school and more debt. Unfortunately, my time has been divided between moving in to my new studio, building stuff, and job searching to pay for life things. So I guess not as much time for painting as I thought. Still, if you see me at any given time, you may see me grinning ear to ear like a moron. It'll probably wear off as the semester rolls on. Unfortunately, all I have done so far is a painting of Gengis Khan with a french mustache and portraits that I painted off of dvds...

Shanghai byebye.

2007-12-22T03:40:00.000-08:00

I'm gonna be touring around Beijing and xian tommorow to give Billiam a bit more of a historical context to his first visit to china. Shanghai's quite cosmopolitan compared to Los angeles in a worldly cultural sense, but doesnt really represent the rest of the country, because it feels so modern and integrated with foreigners. Shanghainese are also really rude and cant give directions worth crap. That's my two cents on shang hai so far. I don't have much internet access other than leeching off my brother's labtop so I'll have to make this rather quick. He was nice enough to put my midterm animation project up on youtube, so here it is, with flaws and all. Still, I like the concept and experimental approach.

After the tour, next is camping in hawaii. Very excite. gotta paint as much as I can in between.

out of loop

2007-11-27T00:18:00.000-08:00

man, when I figure out how to post videos on this, I will show you all my labor on this terrible thing called 'after effects' that I have been struggling on.

In the meantime, enjoy a still or two.. or three.

Life-Dracula.

2007-10-17T14:57:00.001-07:00

It's pretty sad that I don't have much of an inspiring life to paint, so I must live vicariously through other people's excursions for inspiration. Stole the pics off of rox's adventures in Burning Man 2007. I liked the idea of a thing on the horizon and the naked guy wearing shoes in the desert next to it, so decided to combine them both. I actually photoshoped the texted in because I haven't figured out how I wanted to do that yet.

... almost....

2007-09-26T23:34:00.000-07:00

So just one more of these to go and I'll be done with this blasted self-imposed project. I wanted to see if I could do four paintings of similar theme, in this case, a photo booth, without becoming so sick of the repetitivness that I would scrap the whole thing... I think I'll take leo's advice and make the fourth painting a person leaving the booth.

bad times, good times.

2007-08-27T13:08:00.000-07:00

got inspired to do these during an emotional slump of sorts. I don't like how either of them turned out, but I liked the concept of the one with the girl blind folded and tying herself up which I filched from an old college classmate back in michigan. She did an awesome big oil painting of a girl blind folded and tied up looking away which really accurately describes me in a nutshell, despite probably being about her own demons. Art's funny in that way isn't it? I really hope that girl hasn't drunk herself to a lullish stupor due to her depression and instead makes wonderful paintings to channel her energies into. the other one with the dog is a unsuccessful attempt at 3 point perspective, but I like the dog, so I put it up anyway.

new yawwwk (murky crappy apartment)!

2007-08-13T19:43:00.000-07:00

So the new york wig wearing photos didn't turn out so well, since there were tons of orange streaky light leaks and underexposed murkiness going on, but somehow I thought it make for a cool moody type of setting. combined a few somewhat visible photos here and there and started with this, so we'll see what happens with it when I'm finished..

This should be called the 'billiam art' blog.

2007-08-01T00:52:00.000-07:00

I just got back from michigan/new york and must say that I haven't been making anything worthwhile since leaving... but this drawing amused me, I was pleasantly surprised to learn from my mom that there is the chinese word for 'naked' in the text, so maybe somehow the text and image actually might be somewhat relevant.

Internal battles.

2007-07-09T16:08:00.000-07:00

The ideal

The reality

fun sketches

2007-07-02T21:48:00.000-07:00

So when Meg and I went to the south pasadena public library, we decided to buy some old books for 25 cents each to use as sketchbooks. This one here is some japanese novel that's small enough to fit in my purse and has thin thin bible-ish sort of texture for the paper. I thought it might be a good idea to integrate some of my sketches with the spot illustrations that were already there so I came up with these three beauties... yes I know, don't be jealous of my inherent genius with the paint marker and pen. The one with the bikini is a self portrait.

okay, update...

2007-06-28T11:04:00.000-07:00

Okay, since I no longer have a digital camera to document anything with, I'lll put up a painting that I'm not so sure will be going on the website or not, since I'm not all about doing fan paintings.. But here's one of Bob Dylan, by request of Bill.

Watercolor interlude

2007-04-03T21:27:00.000-07:00

I got sort of sidetracked as I often do with projects and decided to play with watercolor for a bit. Not very satisfactory, but I guess it was sort of fun. The first was inspired from waking up with bill, and the other two are of my shitty bosses as sort of a vent.

The Family project

2007-03-29T00:00:00.000-07:00

I got this little gem from the art center library that was selling out-dated books that no one would have a use for except for freaks like yours truly. 50 cents is what I bargained for, I think. This book was made by time-life under the guise of objective socio-anthopology/ethnographic/whatever type of viewpoint, except that it was made in the early seventies, so obviously full of shit and biased. In any case, I was hoping this book could give a good study on the essence of family and how society pushes every one to live up to a certain ideal. I don't have much, but I wanted to go for a ghostly sort of family portrait/olan mills gone wrong sort of feel. so far it's been a year, and I still haven't come up with much...