Blog #7, Week 8

This week our guest speaker was Anna Kivarkis and she gave a presentation on crafts and methods of production. Although her presentation was a bit quicker than the previous guest speakers she still showed us a lot of great slides of different artists and their work involving their specific craft or method of production. There were five categories she talked about in the process of production: handmade reproductions, reproduction, mass production, production line (limited multiples), and finally post production. She showed examples of artwork in each category. I really found interest in the handmade reproductions of a specific artists work. Gijs Bakker creates costume jewelry and more specifically he recreates mini copies from original pieces of beautiful and historical pieces of jewelry. What was interesting about his work though is that even though he creates handmade fake versions of authentic jewelry, often times he incorporates real gems, diamonds, etc into the fake piece of jewelry that is mostly made up of laminated plastic or other materials. Also he is known for recreating a piece of jewelry and then creating a miniature version of the same piece of jewelry and combining the two for instance a beautiful broach with the same broach layered on top just smaller. I thought that was so creative and clever as well as very pretty. In another category, production line (limited multiples), I really enjoyed looking at wire art by Bittima Dittlemann. Even though it looked like simple pieces of wire conformed in different shapes with jewels in the wire, I thought it was very cool. The way she got the wire to shape with the jewel was by putting it in to the oven! How creative is that. I also liked it because it looks like artwork my grandparents have that I always liked looking at whenever I would go visit them. I made a nice connection with it. Anna mentioned a design group called Droog, which she said many of the artists who she talked about were apart of. It seems like an awesome group made up of artists who all have similar interests and have been successful in getting their work out there which is cool. 

Switching gears, we were also required to read about and look at the work of John Feodorov, a painter and drawer. I thought his work was capturing because although his work involved the drawing and painting of people, the people he drew were more abstract and not portrayed in exactly a normal sense, which I really appreciated. My favorite of his work was his "emergence" series. He painted multiple canvases of similar heads surrounded by different sceneries. Although it didn’t look completely life like, I could still see detail. I also was very interested in reading the titles of his work. I love when an artist creates a piece of artwork that you cant exactly figure out what’s going on or what the story is and then when you read the title something clicks and you get what they were trying to tell the audience! I also thought it was interesting to compare his “emergence” work with another painting he called “protecting the world, or not so subtle allegory”. The reason I compared them was because although it was obvious that the same artist painted the work, the second piece, “protecting the world, or not so subtle allegory” was so much more detailed and though not completely lifelike, it was much similar to a real person than the heads of his “emergence” work. I thought that was very interesting how he changes the people in his work.

Connecting Anna Kivarkis’ presentation of crafts & methods of production artists to John Feodorov, John also creates artwork other than painting and drawings. His work titled “Animal spirit channeling device for the contemporary shaman” is an old kids toy turned into his own piece of art. This particular piece reminded me of some of the work I saw in Anna’s presentation. Like for instance when Artist Ted Noten had people create things out of gum wrappers. Both Noten and Feodorov had the idea of creating something out of an already created object or material.

This week was a great week. Anna Kivarkis was interesting but I do wish she showed some of her own work. Of the two I’d have to say I enjoyed John Feodorov’s paintings from his website the most. I was really drawn to his work. I hopefully will be able to see more of it in the future!

examples of costume jewelry