Looking at Language

OS28 students are currently in their last rotation of the Focus units, intensive two-week courses in History, English, and Science. In English class, students are working with the theme of personal memoir, and exploring the art of bookmaking. 

Katie W.

What makes a book a “book”? For this English project, we are studying a book as a sculptural object, an artwork that can be a vehicle for a compelling story and can be aesthetically pleasing in its visual form. Over the weekend, students were invited to consider various experimental visual techniques used by writers to carry forward a message or change the way we look at language. In short, this was an opportunity to “reinvent” a found book…to make it new! Here are a few examples:

Zoe H.

Emily Rose N.

Nora S.

Annie C. 

Sprung Spring

Spring on the Oxbow campus is fantastically beautiful. Thoreau might call it a "delicious" time of year, and rightfully so...the trees are blooming, the birds are singing, and the gardens are booming. The greenhouse is full of tender new green life. It happens every year, but it never ceases to be a surprise.

This hasn't been the rainiest of winters, but it certainly was a cold one, and for a while there it felt like nothing would ever grow again. Then, seemingly over night, there is so much to eat. Look at the leeks! And the arugula! And the broccoli is huge! And the hens have started laying again! Delicious indeed.

Self Portrait

Here at Oxbow we like to ask big, juicy questions. Essential questions. These questions provide entry into research, and the impetus to begin art making. One question that gets asked a lot, perhaps to the point of exhaustion, is "Who am I?" It starts before a student even arrives on campus -- as part of the application process, prospective students are asked to create a self portrait in any medium. That's it -- no other guidelines are specified. It's an assignment that requires the asking of other (sub-essential, you might say) questions: How do I present myself to the world? How do I want to present myself to the world? What are my passions? What role do I play in my family / my school / my community? And so on. 

The theme of "self portrait" is revisited several times throughout the semester, both in art projects and in humanities coursework. In the New Media studio, students in the Narrative unit were at it again, creating short films in response to these questions: Who am I? Where have I been? Where am I now? Students were asked to think of their film as a "poetic interpretation of the self," and to use a combination of moving images, still photographs, sound, and text to create the narrative of their self portrait. Emily Rose (from Massachusetts), Vasaris (from Illinois), Lesedi (from Texas), and Stanley (from Massachusetts) each took a very different approach to the assignment, and have generously offered to share their films. 

EMILY ROSE

VASARIS

LESEDI

STANLEY

Light, Composition, and Honest Expression

Lucas Foglia, drawn by Izzy P.

This week marked the finish of the semester's first visiting artist residency. Lucas Foglia, photographer extraordinaire, spent ten days working with OS28 in and out of the studios. OS28'er Izzy introduces Lucas: "Lucas Foglia’s work has roots from his childhood spent on his family’s farm not far from New York City. His most recent work, titled “A Natural Order,” focuses on the details of lifestyles alternative in their essence, by sustaining themselves close to the earth. From images of coal-miners to families living in wigwams, we can reflect on our own lives. We ask ourselves why the images provoke feelings of strangeness, familiarity, or quiet beauty. The poignancy of Foglia’s photos are snapshots from weeks on the inside of individual lives--an existence based on a genuine connection to the land. Currently, Foglia teaches at San Francisco Art Institute, and is showing his work in six countries this spring." 

Over the course of several days, Lucas asked the students to make 300 photographs of "things that interest you." Students then carefully reviewed their stock of photos, searching for a common theme, and curated a suite of 20 images that embodied and demonstrated that theme. Their final task was to write an artist statement. Izzy writes, "From the beginning of the week with Foglia to our final presentation, it was enlightening to see the evolving interest and sophistication that took place in our photos. Lighting, narratives, composition, honest expressions, and 
complexity were reoccurring themes that Foglia pointed out in our photos and had us 
strive for."

Liz, Maximum, and Joanna have offered to share images from their final suite of photographs. Excerpts from each student's artist statement accompany the images. 

LIZ

I am an artist because art is a way to communicate my feelings of my past.

I am drawn to the decaying of life and objects that I  find in my world. While I find parallels between destruction in the world and my own life, I can express things more positively through my artwork in ways that help me and my community. 

JOANNA

I am drawn to the idea of movement amidst stillness. We can never freeze a moment in time with our bare eyes, but in this series of photographs, I attempt to capture these instants. 

Our memories are often blurred, and there is very little we can do to preserve precise details. I seek to create an unreal ghostliness and eeriness through photographing striking settings while juxtaposing harsh lines with fluid figures.

MAXIMUM

Everyone’s perspective changes how he or she views the world. 

For my project I wanted to expand on my curiosity about how depth of field and focus affect an image and how it is perceived. I explored this through experimenting with multiple perspectives and different depths of field.