Are you ready for the Pin Swap and Pin Auction? by Teresa Burgher

Are you ready for the famous Lute’s Casino pin swap? I am. Last year I did a post with pictures of my favorite pins. This year I just wanted to tell a brief story about my pin process for any newbies who are interested in getting started and getting involved.

First, take any idea that seems doable and get cracking. You will need more time than you think to fabricate even the simplest of pins. I am a notoriously untalented craftsperson and have made some of the faultiest pins ever in the history of the Yuma Pin swap. Since any pin that someone is kind enough to share with me is a total gift I am inclined to the egalitarian principle of first come first served, and give my pins to the first fifty people who ask.

In fact, I set that number and goal years ago when faced with the daunting reality of coveting pins from some of the most talented makers in the country. That is why they invented the auction. It is an amazing way to help the Symposium stay financially solvent AND a terrific way to acquire the most beautiful pins from the event. It kind of put the pin slobs like me on an even footing with the pin elite and has allowed me the pleasure of dabbling in the fierce hot competition of bidding for my favorite pieces.

Last year I was actually pleased enough with my pin, a screen printed silk flower with political undertones, to keep two of the best and offer them to the pin auction. I was thrilled that someone bid on them and took them home.

This year I’ve made four pins as a set. I set out with the theme of ‘35 Pins’ in honor of our 35^th anniversary. I was going to make all of the pieces out of 35 safety pins. My idea took on several permutations and in the end I fell short by one and finished 34 pins with some kind of reference to the number 35 or pins. Anyway, it was fun.

That leaves me with 30 to trade. I’m trying an economic principle of supply and demand. I hope it works and that due to the short supply, someone will be wild to acquire my auction pins and they will demand a higher price. But let’s get real, and please, take pity on my pin pride! On Friday night when you see my bid sheet is blank, throw me a bone and bid my pins up. I’ve got some serious competition, and every bid is for a good cause.

So, if you are new to the Symposium, or if you have been dragging your feet, it’s not too late to make a few pins and get in on the fun. And for the thirty of you who get to registration early, well, I’ve still got a pin for you.

--Teresa Burgher

Executive Committee, 

Yuma Symposium Board of Directors 

Julie Anand

Yuma friends,

I decided to use this year's post to describe a collaborative project I worked on over the summer, Río Canciòn. I received a grant from Arizona State University's Global Institute of Sustainability to travel to Honduras to work with my brother John Blake Batten of Guaruma, an environmental education non-profit http://guaruma.org 

Over the course of a week, we made art with about one hundred youth of the villages of Las Mangas and El Pital, about an hour up river into the jungle from La Ceiba on the Carribean coast. We made Mundos Pequeños—tiny microcosms of found materials and modeling clay to explore ideas of scale. 

I also introduced the students to cyanotypes, a turn of the century method for making blueprint photographs, so that they could experience analog light phenomena and explore patterns in nature printing plant material from their surroundings. We talked about Anna Atkins, quite possibly the first female photographer, who used this method to make the first book illustrated by photographs in her Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions. I was interested in having these kids recognize that people can study plants for a living and also in gesturing to female empowerment by referencing a botanist/artist from 1843.

 

Students made both blueprints on paper and also contributed their blueprints on cloth to a collaborative tapestry. 

Ultimately, we had enough funding to bring Camillo Lopez and John Blake Batten of Guaruma up to Arizona for a culminating exhibition at ASU with outcomes from the workshops as well as over a hundred of the student's digital photographs of their incredible ecosystems. 

It was truly a wonderful collaboration and I am deeply impressed with the vision of these young people and with the work my brother is doing in Honduras. Wanted to sing the praises of Guaruma.org and share an experience with you all. Can't wait to see you once again at our community shindig!

 --Julie Anand   ASU Professor and Yuma Symposium Board Member

Rocky Lewycky

 Hello from the Santa Cruz redwoods!

A couple weeks ago, I received an email from Peter and Kit Jagoda.  Here’s an excerpt from the message…

 “Your exhibition was shared with me by Ron Milhoan. Ron is a friend of 

 my husband, Peter Jagoda. Peter started the Yuma Art Symposium

 35 years ago. Are you familiar with it?”

Is it a small world or what?  

Kit and Peter run a nonprofit animal sanctuary: River's Wish Animal Sanctuary.  We share a connection as my current show aims to elucidate the brutality of animal factory farming.  Later in our conversation, Kit asked me if I was going to include this project at the symposium.  So Kit, yes, I will talk about this piece in my lecture.  Here are some images of my current show, “Is It Necessary?”, up through February 23^rd at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History.

 










“Is It Necessary?”
Installation at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History
2013/14

 










 
“Is It Necessary?” (Detail)
Installation at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History
2013/14

A recent article published by C-File (Global Community for Clay and Ceramic Creatives in Art & Design & Architecture,) illuminates the show and accompanying "Liberation Project." 

Here's the link   http://www.cfileonline.org/exhibition-rocky-lewycky-necessary/

I’m looking forward to my visit in Yuma!  See y’all soon.
-Rocky Lewycky

   2014 Yuma Symposium Presenter

Stephen Robison

Wow its getting closer and I am certainly looking forward to a good time.  I have heard that it is and that Yuma is a great symposium.  I have only been to AZ once to present at a wood fire conference in Flagstaff.  I am privileged to be a part of The Great Yuma Symposium.  I was so excited about getting there I accidentally booked my plane ticket a day before it starts!

So they say the devil is in the details.  Dang, if I would have just checked the dates before booking. But since I don’t believe in the devil its cool, I will relax and enjoy Yuma.  I think the beauty in life is the intricacies and the details. They are often more hard to discern but for me the challenge of details are where much of both the ugliness of life and the beauty of life lie. To see the big picture details are needed.

So the images I am posting are details of my work and the collaborative work I do with my partner Kathleen Guss.

 

The work is primarily fired in atmospheric kilns such as wood fired or soda fire kilns and generally there is no glaze used except for liner glazes, but I do use a variety of metallic oxide slips to work with the surface. 

 

These details are from pieces that are all made from different clay bodies, but fired in a similar atmosphere. They have layers of ash and sodium that create crystals that are varied in their chemic make up due to the wood used and the metallic oxides inherent in each individual clay body.

 

Both the science and serendipity, or the control and lack of control of the process of wood and soda firing are focal points that continually hold my interest and offer somewhat unlimited areas of investigation into surface.

 

Some recent work is using laterite, which are soils that formed in hot and wet tropical areas and are very rich both iron and aluminum.  The reticulation of the surface creates a skin like tension and a surprise of some brilliant copper penny looking crystals are two areas of investigation. On some forms the metal from the laterite rises to the surface to form more drastic reticulation.

 --Stephen Robison  35th Yuma Symposium Presenter

"Hello New Friends!!" by Robin Lasser

Hello new friends!

Late last night I arrived home from India where I am working with four artists from Bangalore and three artists from the Bay Area to embark on a project titled: “The Distance from Me to You.”

I am looking forward to discovering you and your work in a few weeks, as this is the first time I have attended the symposium.

I will be presenting my collaborative photographs, video, installations and public art created over the past decade.  These works explore environmental, cultural, and social issues in the context of the relationships of our bodies to the land.

I will share two projects with you now. “Dress Tents: Nomadic Wearable Architecture” in collaboration with Adrienne Pao and “Refuge in Refuse: Mandalas and Zoetropes from the Albany Landfill” in collaboration with Judith Leinen.

“The Edible Garden Dress Tent” 30 x 36 chromogenic print by Robin Lasser and Adrienne Pao, 2013

 “Ms. Russia: Camera Obscura Dress Tent” 40 x 48 chromogenic print by Robin Lasser and Adrienne Pao 2011

Dress Tents are a fusion of architecture, the body and the land played out through living sculpture, moving images and photography. The wearable architecture is installed and worn in the landscape in order to be photographed. Humor is s paramount in these photographs, which are meant to be alluring and whimsical. In other instances, the installations are per formed and displayed in a gallery or museum as interactive living sculptures. On occasion the Dress Tents are

commissioned as semi - permanent, interactive public art installations. The Dress Tent project investigates desire from a female centered perspective and uses seduction as a vehicle to explore the relationship between the body and the land.

Images from the Refuge in Refuse: 

  Mandala  “Grim Salutes the Sunrise” in collaboration with Judith Leinen, 36 x 36 

chromogenic print on aluminum by Robin Lasser and Judith Leinen, 2014 

Mandala, “Tamara Disappears Behind Mad Mark’s Castle Window”

36 x 36 chromogenic print on aluminum by Robin Lasser and Judith Leinen, 2014

The Refuge in Refuse: Homesteading Art and Culture project is an interactive, mobile, transmedia collection of visual and sound data reflecting the intersection of architecture, art, ecology and people homesteading on a decommissioned shoreline construction dump located in Albany, California.  For more than two decades artists, recreationalists, and the homeless share the bulb exploring borders between public and private urban space.  The project utilizes sound (stories), video, photography and sculpture.

The Albany Bulb is a landfill peninsula located along the east shore of the San Francisco Bay. This year the Albany City Council voted to begin transferring the land from the city of Albany over to the California State Park System. Transferring this land will also mean that over sixty people who have long been camped at the Albany Bulb, will be made, once again, homeless. This upcoming eviction will bring changing tides for a group of people, a body of water, and a spit of land.

The word mandala is Sanskrit for whole world or healing circle. The mandala is a representation of the universe and everything in it; it is the most basic form in nature. They are a meditation on and celebration of the myriad ways residents use their creativity in response to life on the brink of change. The mandalas also serve as zoetrope image portraits. Zoetrope means “wheel of life.” A Zoetrope is a device giving the illusion of motion.  When spun on a disc, powered by citizens riding a bike made from metal scraps gifted to us by campers at the Bulb, these series of still portraits in the round come alive, the animations reveal creative actions by residents who in time of crisis choose to live creatively by painting, performing, cooking, and community organizing.

-Robin Lasser  2014 Yuma Symposium Presenter

Scott Kolbo

I have not had the chance to attend a Yuma Symposium in the past, so this will be my first trip. I have been working hard to come up with an easy and succinct way to explain what I do with my animated projections and to get those of you who are brave enough to attend my session involved in a big collaborative drawing. Some time ago I got the idea that it would be interesting to have a swarm of birds swoop in and lift one of my reoccurring characters (called "Heavy Man") off the ground by grabbing his clothes with their beaks and levitating him for a few seconds. The idea was much easier to come up with than it was to execute, but I have been using low-tech animation and special effects tricks for a few years, so I thought I could pull it off. I generally begin my projected pieces by documenting some sort of a performance or action in the real world... In this case I fastened some fishing hooks up to thin monofilament and used a series of pulleys to lift various portions of the models clothing. I recorded this event with a DSLR camera and then went to work editing the video. I deleted the background and adjusted the colors to get a clean image with no wired visible (take that hollywood). 

After the video was edited and ready for some birds to show up I started animating a swarm of crow/starling flying creatures that could lift this poor sucker off the ground. Let's just say that animating a flock of birds was more work than I expected... I Know......I Know.....

After some trial and tribulation I finally figured out a fairly simple and straightforward technique for creating this kind of animation (which I am excited to share with you at the Symposium). Now I can make swarms of birds attack anything I wish - which has led me to some of the pieces that will be on display in the presenters exhibit.

Once the video and animation elements are ready to go I project the moving images onto a piece of paper or panel and create a drawing that interacts with the projected imagery. I have also been experimenting with adding drawn elements on top of television monitors and other electronic devices. I love the way that the fuzzy and "cheap" digital imagery interacts with the sharp and organic hand drawn lines and tones. 

There is a tension inherent in mixing the two media that I find fascinating. I believe that it springs out of my background in traditional printmaking and I hope that I will be able to sell some of you on this argument when we meet face to face in the near future. 

 I wish you safe travels and many adventures along the way. See you in Yuma.

- Scott Kolbo  Yuma 35 presenter

 Click here to view Scott's Web Page

IT'S GETTING CLOSER! by Kat Cole

IT'S GETTING CLOSER!  Although we still have a little more than a month before we all get together again in Yuma.  This will be my 4th Yuma and I am so excited to be presenting to so many friends and colleagues.  Bring on the tacos.

When I was asked to speak at Yuma I had yet to make my 8^th move to the great state of Texas, Dallas specifically.  In each of the last 5 moves, over eight years, I have used my studio methodology and work to create tangible representations of connection to these places.  

In my newest works I am contemplating the glossy urban city outside my high-rise window.  It is a jumble of buildings in steel and glass.  I will be talking about and demonstrating steel as a material in jewelry, the use of liquid form enamel on its’ surface and the very exciting possibilities of surface, color, and scale.  

Kat Cole

Yuma 35 Presenter

 Press Here to view Kat's website

 The Land Below

Structures

The View