Jake Wise Fine Art

Throughout this unit i have research deep into the detrimental issues of climate change, pollution and so on.. feeling like creating work based on these issues is doing some good for society and most probably doing some good for myself, helping me think that i am giving a little bit back to the world. But i also feel that all this research and immersing myself into this black hole that is climate change is some what unneccessary, not in the sense of that it isnt important but in the sense that will people listen? or am i just preaching to the converted. The unit has been a roller coaster and my work have somewhat reeked the benfit of this as it has allowed me to fully explore the boundaries of what art can be, from traditional methods of printing and painting to taking influence from land art and those who use their landscape to create their work, using it is a basis and connecting with nature rather than using it as influence for a traditional, utopian painting.  I feel that a...

The Dark Mountain Project is a network of writers, artists and thinkers who have stopped believing the stories our civilisation tells itself. We see that the world is entering an age of ecological collapse, material contraction and social and political unravelling, and we want our cultural responses to reflect this reality rather than denying it. The Project grew out of a feeling that contemporary literature and art were failing to respond honestly or adequately to the scale of our entwined ecological, economic and social crises. We believe that writing and art have a crucial role to play in coming to terms with this reality, and in questioning the foundations of the world in which we find ourselves. THE EIGHT PRINCIPLES OF UNCIVILISATION ‘We must unhumanise our views a little, and become confident As the rock and ocean that we were made from.’ We live in a time of social, economic and ecological unravelling. All around us are signs that our whole way of living is already ...

Blued Trees Symphony The  Blued Trees Symphony  launched on the Summer Solstice, June 21, 2015, with an overture in Peekskill, New York. It is now installed in many miles of proposed pipeline expansions, and each 1/3 measure of those miles has been copyrighted for protection. Variations of each movement are based on an iterative score created for the overture.  All installations are created at the invitation of landowners . The overture was accompanied by an international Greek Chorus at a total of twenty sites internationally. Individual trees were painted and musical variations of the score were performed to echo the theme of connectivity to all life. The score is simultaneously spatial and acoustic and will conclude with a coda, a final movement that recapitulates and resolves previous themes, on the American presidential Election day, November, 2016. The Peekskill site was chosen because the pipelines would be 105 feet from the infrastructure of the failing India...

Who Are the Yes Men? We’re just two guys, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, who—thanks to a network of ultra-capable friends and allies—infiltrate conferences, produce fake newspapers, and do various other weirdness in order to expose the wrongdoings of miscellaneous, mostly corporate evildoers. Oh, and we record the whole thing to get it out to the world through social media, news channels, and our own movies. We call this sort of thing “laughtivism” because, well, it’s funny. And it’s activist: the theory is, we’ll laugh bloodsuckers into oblivion and thus save the world. It doesn’t always work—the world still needs some saving—but, you know, the arc of history bends towards justice, even when it seems to be breaking. On this site you’ll find stories from our past adventures, revealing some of the dirty details so that you can pull off your own. (And if you ever wonder “How did they do that?” just ask! We’ll be happy to add more details to satisfy demand.) Laughtivism i...

Summary: Bishop defines relational aesthetics through the lense of critic/analyst Nicolas Bourriaud, and concludes after respectfully explaining his (and other related) descriptions of and rationales for relational art with the deeper question: “If relational art produces human relations, then the next logical question to ask is what types of relations are bing produced, for whom, and why?”  Put another way, is dialog for dialog’s sake always good? Is more always better?  Outline: In this essay, discussion of relational aesthetics is anchored by examination of Nicolas Bourriaud’s 1997 collection of essays  Esthetique Relationnel  , which Bishop says represents an important first step in identifying recent tendencies in contemporary art. It came at a time when many academics in Britain and the U.S. were reluctant to move on from the politicized agendas and intellectual battles of 1980s art and were condemning everything from installation art to ironic paintin...

But now "art is a state of encounter" and an exhibition is an "arena of exchange" [p.17-18]. In some sense, art has always been relational to varying degrees and Bourriaud references Duchamp who suggested, "it's the beholder who makes pictures." [p.26] However, rather than creating a passive object that one hopes will connect with viewers, an artist today focuses more "on the relations that his work will create among his public and on the invention of models of sociability." [p.28]    Also differing from art of the past, and Modernism in particular, were the often grand and ultimately unrealized Utopian aims. Art today seeks to form micro-utopias, harking to Felix Guattari's advocacy for "microscopic attempts" on a community level to bring about social change. [p.31]  Bourriaud calls artists "tenants of culture," [p.14], which I quite like, and also says later that "form" in this type of artwork becomes ...

Joel Sternfeld is well known for large-format color photographs that extend the tradition of chronicling roadside America initiated by Walker Evans in the 1930s. Sternfeld's projects have consistently explored the possibility of a collective American identity by documenting ordinary people and places throughout the country. Each project he embarks on is bound by a concept that imbues it with subtle irony, often through insightful visual juxtapositions or by pairing images with informational text. Another characteristic aspect of Sternfeld's work is that color is never arbitrary; it functions in highly sophisticated ways to connect elements and resonate emotion. Sternfeld earned a BA in Art from Dartmouth College in 1965. He began making color photographs in the 1970s after learning the color theory of Johannes Itten and Josef Albers. He initially made street photographs with small- and medium-format cameras, but by the time he produced what would become a seminal project, ...

One of the founders and most prominent practitioners of the "land art" or "earth art" movement,  Michael Heizer  has, since the 1960s, challenged the art world to escape the confines of the gallery or the museum and inhabit nature itself -- and dared viewers to experience art on a super-human scale. With colleague Walter de Maria, Heizer went west in 1967, and created a new genre of "land art" or "earth art," which used the earth as its medium. Far from the cramped studios of New York, and outside the confines of the museum's white walls, his works reached unprecedented size, culminating in what is perhaps his most famous work,  Double Negative . He collaborated with many of the early earth artists, even appearing in Robert Smithson's film about  Spiral Jetty , perhaps the most widely recognized example of earth art. Double Negative  is Michael Heizer's first prominent earthwork. It consists of two trenches cut into the eastern...