Co-Ad Sandbox (Benji)
Month: January 2021
Co-Ad Sandbox (Sacha)
CAT SHOW BY SACHA
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Joelle Carey
Joelle Carey
Our young traveller, mushroom, begins her documentation around this strange abandoned town. Decaying before our very eyes as Mush and Earth overtake and consume the environment around mushroom. The process to document such changes are a feat of themselves, but what little souvenirs they were able to gather from the sites were worth it.
The MushRoom Collection represents a lot of the struggles I’ve had to overcome as an artist as far as my own insecurities towards my work goes. A love and appreciation for two very different mediums is part of the fabric that lines this project; as digital illustrations have been a long standing part of my practice, but I found a deep interest in papermaking through printmaking.
Over the course of the past year or so, part of what has been the driving force behind my pieces have been finding ways to combine a part of my practice that I consider my comfort and my home, with another part that allows for a lot of physical experimentation, as well as translating those works to a digital format. This is also why the main themes of the MushRoom collection revolve growth and decay of the digital image as well as organically. Within the spaces that mushroom navigates consists collages of different images and sites of abandoned buildings and watercolour paint textures. The use of abandoned buildings as the site for the space that mushroom navigates illustrates the spaces in which abandoned buildings and towns inhabit; dying or deserted of inhabitants but somehow still overgrown and containing it’s own narrative. Through the use of an Artificial Intelligence learning software called Playfor, thousands of different blends of images were collapsing and growing into one another to create the base of the spaces that mushroom tours. Afterwards, I play with the idea of digital decay further through the method mentioned prior, creating digital paintings on top of it and superimpose images of the paper that I made throughout the digital collages. The growth aspects come from not only the the vegetation that sprouts up throughout the different environments and mushroom themself, but also the animations paired with each of mushroom’s framed photos. As the scene comes to life in these AI animated paintings it becomes a true cycle of decay and regrowth.
Overall, the MushRoom Collection really highlights the personal struggle that I have had with my art practice, throughout my academic career. Showing how while I will find my own working in potential state of decay, that there is always something interesting to find and explore through something abandoned.
Flynn Forester
Flynn Forester
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In this release of 15 plexiglass trading cards, Flynn Forester has captured the essence of some important people that have made their mark on his being. Each person has been embodied in their own limited edition card. Each participant shared an object of importance with the artist and is represented by the text on the back of the cards. The colors used for each portrait are symbolic of the role they play in the artist’s life such as: parental, instructor, friend, and sibling. The symbolism reflected on each card is the visualization of the energy that each person brings. The series will expand as time continues.
Paper prints are available at the bottom of the page.
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EMAIL FLYNNFORESTER@GMAIL.COM TO PURCHASE
full set of 15 - 6 left = $120
individuals = $10
edition of 5
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Emily Graf
Hands in Your Food
Emily Graf
Food is a source of nutrients for the body. Food is so much more than this.
It is something that brings people together, something that we hold very close to us.
Food is something that we cherish because it isn’t permanent, it can be taken away from us. We hold onto something that won’t be with us forever, like people. Our friends, family, teachers, we hold them close. As I explore my relationship with food I realize my connection to food is not as positive as most. Struggling with eating different textured foods I found myself becoming pickier and pickier. Only liking a few foods I began to struggle with my weight and how I viewed my body. I was no longer comfortable in my own skin, I began to loose who I was. My art is a journey, it helps break down barriers that I wasn’t comfortable in before. I am no longer afraid of my connection with food
Kayla Hill
Using my camera as a framing device, I investigate human identity in isolation. Focusing on the matriarchs of my family, I explore my projections of their personalities. I sit in my grandma’s and mother’s spaces, wear their clothing, and attempt to embody their being.
A Year Spent Alone allowed me to explore my relationships and surroundings during the pandemic. No longer having the same regimented routine, my life felt less robotic and allowed me to look inward. In A Year Spent Alone, I explored relationships in the canon of my life experience in my work. Emotions, cultures, and environment can all play a part in someone’s true self. As an artist I like to spend time studying my subjects and their systems, resulting in a sense of urgency and intimacy in my work. When examining the different experiences of people in my life, I celebrate the subject. I am essentially interested in creating pieces that make the audience question what life is like for other people. What is identity and what does it mean to truly mean to know someone?
I invite the audience to see what I see. My goal is to create art that makes other people question their identity during times of isolation, perhaps imagining a world outside the immediate one. This project is a mixture of identity, personality, environment and the relationship between three. I wanted to focus on three different people living through the quarantine, Clotelle Hill, Audra Hill and myself. Who are we really? How much of our personality is dependent on others and how much of it comes from ourselves? My family makes me who I am. The deepest unconscious part of the mind is said to be inherited. Looking at things in new ways can result in different ways of thinking. I try to implore that thought process in all the work that I make.
Tanner Kazio
Tanner Kazio
Summary to “My Best Friend Mary”
Follow a Little Girl as she uses her imaginary friend to help her walk through and comprehend losing her mother to illness. Along the way the story flips back and forth between present time and flashbacks to better understand why it is that the Little Girl’s imaginary friend looks the way they do.
Tanner Kazio – Artist Statement
I spent this past year unlearning a lot of standards that we have set as a society to help me to rebuild how I want to see the world. Of course there are some negative and ugly things in the world, but something I’ve realized is that a lot of kids have this beautiful blindness to that ugliness. They haven’t learned that you’re supposed to act a certain way, think a certain way, so they can have a positive experience wherever they go because society hasn’t told them what is good and bad yet. They are free to try certain foods, watch a movie, or go someplace without the burden of prejudice or bias.
To an artist, a clean slate or blank canvas if you will, is a daunting starting point. However, in life it can be a beautiful place to build. The danger comes when we think our canvas has run out of room. The funny thing is, our canvas is never full and it can always be painted over to bring about a better and bigger picture. For as long as we are alive we should be learning, experiencing, and listening. If you are too stubborn and closed minded to do any of that then what is the point of your eyes, ears, tongue, hands, and nose. Use your senses to enlighten yourself so you can live a full life.
I’ve been trying to see how kids react to things by joking with my little cousins and asking others what their fears were growing up. I’ve used these answers to help with studies I’ve done using charcoal, chalk pastels, and colored pencil as you can see in the background here. For the comic I did it digitally to try and focus on the massage and composition of frames. I am trying to look at the world with a fresh start, so I have been digging deep into my inner child and trying to take things on with a blind optimism. I also tried tackling some harder hitting topics like love, loss, and even roles that larger structures like religion can play in our lives in my original comic “My Best Friend Mary”.
Chuang Liu
Walking Along the River
Chuang Liu
I was taking a walk along the Raritan River near my apartment. The trail was in the middle of the river dividing the water into two sections. A Mallard flew from one side to the other. The residue of broken shellfish was left on the section of trail that was paved by stone. On my way back, I found a boning stainless steel knife stuck by its point on a tree. I took it home.
Fish
Digital Image
2021
Untitled
My eyes took about two to three minutes to adjust in the darkness. My vision became noisier, similar to an image taken with high ISO. The first action I did was to make sure that I wouldn’t spill the water I use to clean brushes. The light outside almost became too bright. I arranged the 21-milliliter 48 colored acrylic paints into a line from lightest to darkest. The canvas’s dimension of 8 inches by 10 inches was a perfect size to hold in the dark.
Untitled #1
Digital Image
2021
Untitled #4
Digital Image
2021
Untitled #2
Digital Image
2021
Untitled #5
Digital Image
2021
Untitled #3
Digital Image
2021
Playing with Snow
Try to hold a piece of ice along with the video until you can no longer endure it.
Where the Fly was
Since I was cooking, I opened the balcony door to ventilate my living room. A fly got in and landed on a wall near me. I went to grab my camera and the fly was gone. I imagined where it could have landed and traveled around my living room.
Each of my projects is a different kind of activity for the viewers to take a closer look at the surroundings, to consider their perspective, and to empathize with others.
Ali Marshall
Haptic
Ali Marshall
“HAPTIC” explores the tension between physically perceived and mentally conjured colors. I wanted to run my hand along the boundary wall between the natural and the formal to find some crack where the ineffable flows through. Since I began at Mason Gross, a Cezanne quote has echoed in my head, “ I must tell you that as a painter I am becoming more clear-sighted before nature, but with me the realization of my sensations is always painful. I cannot attain the intensity that is unfolded before my senses. I have not the magnificent richness of colouring that animates nature.” I feel the struggle Cezanne describes in my bones.
With this collection, I endeavored to hone my own perception of color. I began by visiting three of my favorite parks four times over the past semester, and I supplemented this field work with study of classic color theorists. During my exploration of color theorists like Johannes Itten and Josef Albers, I stumbled upon a text by Albers that defined haptic sense, which he describes as “the discrepancy between physical fact and psychic effect.” Although Albers wrote about the difference between a color you want to create and the actual color you make, his description haunted me, especially as I processed how I’ve perceived time through my COVID quarantine. My haptic sense of time has altered – this past year felt like both the longest and shortest of my life.
I decided to combine my four seasonal visits to each park into a single piece. Through this combination, the past year blends into one overarching experience of space, time, and color. The focus shifts from pure translation of natural colors to a formal contemplation of my own mental process as I take my perception, convert it into color, and blend it across the past year. The holistic result embodies my haptic sense of the experience, the gap that runs along that boundary wall between the world that is and the world we depict.
“07716”
Oil on Canvas, 20in x 30in
Hartshorne Park, Atlantic Highlands, NJ
“07732”
Oil on Canvas, 20in x 30in
Fort Hancock, Sandy Hook, NJ
“07738”
Oil on Canvas, 20in x 30in
Thompson Park, Lincroft, NJ
Click each piece for more process photos.
Artist Statement
Ali explores color, texture and process through her work at Mason Gross. Rather than highlighting her life outside painting, Ali focuses on the labor of painting itself as her subject. Laid bare on the canvas, her struggle to create is both universal and deeply personal. Since COVID-19 forced her out of her studio, acrylic landscapes have seeped back into her work; in that way, Ali has come full circle, back to the landscape and architectural paintings with which she began. Landscapes have always been an important subject matter for her because they mark seminal moments in her life. After dropping out of her first college, Ali meditated on the rolling hills and cornfields through which she drove on the six-hour journey home. Her COVID quarantine has only sharpened her desire to explore her surroundings.
With her thesis, Ali combines her distinct practices of landscape painting and textural color explorations in her preferred medium, oil. Committed to the exploration of haptic perception of color and time, Ali organized, planned and supplemented her research to create a pseudo-scientific process she then applied to her work. Through this process, Ali meditates on the tension between her natural surroundings and the artificial nature of painting itself.
Tara Mastromihalis
Tara Mastromihalis
From a Distance
“For a knowledge of intimacy, localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates.”
― The Poetics of Space
Artist Statement
Over the course of my studies in painting, I’ve uncovered my interest in architectural subjects and how they are observed and function in everyday life. I approach painting with a formal, observation-based process that incorporates the complexity and manipulation of color and contrast. I’ve found that this method has evolved into my own visual experience while working with geometric forms.
My work embodies a collaborative standpoint through the source material. In the last few months, I’ve compiled a series of imagery from those willing to provide me with their scenic and architectural discoveries, as I was seeking views of the world outside of my own. Since the beginning of this series, I’ve reached out to both strangers and friends for material with the intentions of creating a range of site-specific content that speaks to their aesthetic interests. Each individual was assigned to capture moments of architecture that took the form of color or contrast their surroundings. Once presented with these photo references, I found myself responding visually to the content, following each with sketches and the manipulation of color, temperature, and flatness. These preliminary steps have ultimately structured my decision-making through repurposing each composition. My studio practice has developed as a space in which I can further analyze and appreciate the places we call home.