WIP

More progress, but still not sure if the top study is complete.  I know I will continue to work on the blue painting, but I don't know what step to take next.  Guess I will have to meditate on it again...

* * *

Progress is a bit slow, but I have some ideas about what I want to accomplish with these studies.

I found that connecting perspectival lines to varied grid sizes can create more illusionistic depth.  I'm also interested in creating more optical tension via transparency and allowing the ground layer of grids to compress three dimensional planes.  I will also be working with ideas of mirrors to reference reflection and deeper connections between the surfaces of planes.  The color palette will become more silvery and dull.

Spilling paint to create more entropy.  Eventually, I want to have less control over the chaos that I am responding to with geometry.  I'd like to work with natural forces (other than just gravity) to create changes from which I can map literal patterns and structures.  I think this is the stepping stone piece to realizing that potential.    

Another goal for these works is to loosen up and lose control.  I'd like to learn to make geometric works that are more gestural, painterly and mobile, but still have the solidity to work with bodily subjectivity to create contradictory contrasts of space and surface.  Kind of like Richard Diebenkorn.

Questions: One of the incredible feats of painting is the ability to convince the viewer of illusions - that somehow, the paint is transformed into the subjects it describes.  It is even more remarkable to be able to convince them of illusions of things they've never seen with their own eyes.  I feel that my paintings are more meaningful in how they express the illusions of ideas that are not observed in nature (illusions that use a mix of memory and imagination to reconstruct theories, philosophy, spirituality, music and emotion into visual experiences).  If I make paintings that reference the metaphysical, how does working from observations of natural change also relate to painting?  Would it be necessary or authentic to use painting as a medium to restate nature's supreme eloquence?  Perhaps it's about picking apart layers of change to reconstruct an authentic understanding of natural processes?  At that point, does painting become a responsive act of curiosity and learning?  It seems so close to science, yet it's also so expressive and authored...  What do I want to say with this new goal of using geometry to respond directly to natural change?  

*With regard to natural change, I will not learn anything new if I continue to make paintings about what I believe to be true about nature.  I have to see it for myself - I have to lose control and collaborate with nature.  I have to know what's true, before I am confident expressing it...  Perhaps the geometry lies between nature and the painting.  It just might be a bridge of understanding.*

New Collaboration Project/Self Portrait WIP

Okay, so first off, I'd like to announce that I'm working on a collaboration project with my buddy, Laura Kinser - and I've got a few preliminary sketches to show off!  For these works, I juxtaposed Laura's original rust prints and their digitally warped counterparts.  Then I attempted to map all of the correlating points on the contours of each image by overlaying tracing paper and drawing over them.  The result is a scrunched polygonal waveform.  You can observe the change that occurred between the original print and the warped scan by looking at the sides of the waveform.  They also feel kind of like constellations or maps of continental drift.  I'll have more information on our plans as the project develops!

You can visit Laura's websites here:

http://cargocollective.com/knzzrstudio

http://knzzrprocess.tumblr.com

Secondly, I'm keeping up with self-portrait sketches and plan on uploading more of them on a regular basis.  Here's my most recent work in progress:

:)

Primary Website Temporarily Down

Hey everyone,

Unfortunately, my primary website is currently down due to server issues.  Please refer to my Cargo Collective and MNartists websites if you would like to view my work.  Here are the links:

Cargo Collective: http://cargocollective.com/zoeshulman
MNartists: http://www.mnartists.org/work.do?action=list&rid=254465

I appreciate your patience and will get this issue resolved as soon as possible.

Thank you,

Zoe Shulman

New WIP and TRON

Refined, primed, ready to go!

Also, TRON <3 <3 <3

...and THIS:

http://youtu.be/5HAvSjHyLe0

(and this!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDhbxUJnpHM&feature=youtube_gdata_player

*Autechre* :3

Urban Maps

I found these urban maps in the back of an empty planner at work.  Each map represents a different international city.  I'm really intrigued by the structural differences in each map - some are nebulously interwoven and organic, while others are centralized, rigid and concentric.  I wonder what mixes of sociology and environmental ecology lead to the development of these geometric structures... do these concepts lay hidden deep in the networked pathways of our brains, or do they emerge from the ebb and flow of human relations?  Perhaps a little both... nonetheless, I find the complex connections to be very stimulating.      

New Woodblock Gestures!

Carved, glued, ready to go!  Just have to make sure some edges are nice and flush with the surface, then I'll be ready to paint this guy!  I'm excited about sanding back into the grid and finding some other organic forms within the woodgrain.

So, the plan is to sand down the big wooden block so that it becomes an organic form.  I will be spilling paint on this little guy once I get the block carved into the right shape.  Then I will try to map the resulting entropy - oh my!  These are just some compositional warm ups to get my imagimanation going.  (Wow, it feels good to use a router and all my big power saws again!)

The little golden rectangles kind of look like little amoeba-guys, don't they?

*Meep* :3

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Updated Artist Statement

My work employs painting, drawing, printmaking, live art and performance to explore subjectivity within an ever-changing world.  This work ranges from deconstructed landscapes, to multiples, to time-based abstraction.  I am interested in drawing attention to and confusing a viewer’s awareness of their own body’s movements within different spaces.  To achieve these aesthetics, I combine unconventional materials and techniques to activate unique surface qualities that emphasize the viewer’s physical relation to the work and enhance its overall illusion of movement.  By building, carving and sanding on wood panel, applying high gloss resin, gel medium, quartz powder and living material (such as grass) I create materiality and contrast within a painting’s surface. 

Using geometric forms, ranging from simple concentric squares to complex fractals, I compose formal painting elements into ordered and chaotic measures of time and rhythm.  By contrasting layers of illusion, flatness, dimension and physicality, I create optical tensions within the viewer’s perspective that enhance these rhythms.  As a result, the viewer may experience recognition, confusion, order and a chance to decipher space, yet be overwhelmed by flatness.

The Cyberspaces are a series of wood panel paintings that map the metaphysical spaces described by cyberculture theory.  My intention was to construct a multi-dimensional space that could be accessed through bodily subjectivity to simultaneously bend, disassemble and reconnect linkages within an ever-changing network.  To achieve this, each panel employs linear and fractal geometry to weave a complex coil of contradicting illusionistic, sculptural and architectonic spaces.  By presenting the panels face up and activating the surrounding architectonic space, I increased the dimensionality of the surface and created a topological movement within each composition.  As a result, the rigid Cartesian grid becomes an aerial landscape in which the fractal’s emergent complexity bends various levels of relief into shape-shifting territories.

The geometry behind my work was inspired by painters Frank Stella, Richard Diebenkorn and Sean Scully, academics like René Descartes, Michel Foucault, Benoît Mandelbrot, Elizabeth Grosz, Michel Serres, Jacques Derrida and Donna Haraway, and a diverse array of subjects, such as: linear perspective, maps, dialectics, panoptic vision, order and chaos, Fibonacci sequences, surface roughness and fractal dimensions, architectural spaces, territory, nonlinear spatiotemporal paradigms, contextual framing, deconstruction, cyberculture theory, feminism, Zen solids and voids, mazes, church interiors, cave painting and gestalt and color theory.  Some of my underlying themes include looking at complexity via self-similarity (the concept that the whole has the same shape as one or more of the parts), subject/object relationships, relativism, dimensional multiplicity, contradiction, impermanence, blurring the line of authority and presenting painting outside the context of the wall.

In the future, I plan to continue my investigation into the relationship between illusion, flatness, dimension and physicality within different spatiotemporal paradigms.  My next projects will continue to integrate geometric structures further into my process.  I see great potential to challenge my ideological preconceptions by attempting to map the entropy of organic forms within nature.