Author: cademiddaugh

For this project, I cut my hair really short and wore all black to see what people would think my name and major is. The people that I talked to were very kind to me. I talked to Shalee and Shyann Reynolds who are twins that both compete on the track and field teams. Shalee thought my name was Alec and that I was a technical engineering major, while her sister, Shyann thought that my name was Eric and that I was a business major. I did not notice a change in the way that people talk to me while wearing different clothing and with short hair. I though this was a fun project, getting to know new people is always fun.

Artist: Christopher Capinpin

Exhibition: Animal Hybrids

Media: Colored pencils, Strathmore Paper

Gallery: Gene Bianchi Community Center

Website: None

Instagram: None

Chris is an undergrad student perusing an art degree. Ever since he was young he has aspired to excel in his art. One of his biggest inspirations is Japanese art. He says that there is a lot to take away from their grasp of an art style. He finds that the easiest way to express oneself is through art.

In this work, Chris used his strathmore drawing paper to envision a piece of his creativity. By using colored pencils, he created a rough but clean colored texture using the type of paper to his advantage. He primarily used muted colors to bring everything together as a whole.

In his Animal Hybrid, Chris had the idea to combine three different creatures. He wanted to make something cool but funny, so he chose a dragon, an iguana, and a corgi to be fused into one. He told me that when he made this he had creativity on his mind, and he wanted to release it all at once. And thus his Animal Hybrid was born.

Chris’ Animal Hybrid is both fun and creative. I really like the way that he used the texture and color of the paper to help him give his drawing a texture of its own. This work reminds me of both my dog and my neighbors lizard. It reminds me of my dog because she has short and stubby legs like the corgi does in the drawing. It also reminds me of my neighbor’s lizard because the iguana head is giving the same kind of stare that the lizard would.

I wanted to bring the Huston Astros’ cheating scandal to light in my edition of shocking art. While I was working at Blair Field, I noticed that there was a trashcan in the visiting dugout, and while that may not be an unusual sight, it made me think about how the Huston Astros used trashcans to gain an unfair advantage in the 2017 MLB season. In case you don’t know, the Astros placed a camera in the outfield at Minute Maid Park, their home stadium, and used the live feed from that camera to steal the opposing teams signs. Once the signs were stolen, the person watching the monitor with the live feed would bang on a trashcan to inform the batter what pitch would be coming. One bang on the trashcan meant a fastball was coming, two bangs was a curve ball and so on. Seeing the trashcan and shovel right next to one another really reminded me of this controversy. I chose to do this idea because baseball is something that I am passionate about, and this scandal is one of the worst in the history of baseball. There are some baseball pitchers in the major leagues that have said they would rather face a player that was using steroid than face a batter that knew what pitch was coming. I hoped to communicate that cheating is something that will always happen. It doesn’t matter if it is professional sports, or taking tests, there will always be cheaters. If there was no description, I don’t think it would be the most successful just because not everyone follows baseball and would understand the reference. If I did this again, I would try to do something that more people would understand and be effected by without having to read the description. Another idea that I might want to explore through shocking art is how much sugar the average person eats in a day.

I chose this story because I love baseball and our Long Beach State Dirtbags were starting a series against the number 17 team in the nation. I thought it would be fun to go to the game and take some meaningful pictures while there. I fell like I did a good job taking some pictures and telling a condensed story of the game that happened on Friday night. My favorite image would have to be the first one of Blair Field. I think that the worst image is the one of the scoreboard after the game. It is important to the storytelling, but as an image it is of poor quality. Next time I would try to take some better, more crisp pictures to make for an even better photographic story. I would like to try to do a photographic story of all the CSULB NCAA teams, that sounds like it would be a fun thing to do.

Alyssa Stroud is an undergraduate student in the 3D media program here at California State University Long Beach. She was a part of the Metal Group Show in the Max L. Gatov Gallery. She work with Copper to create the piece she had displayed in the show. She does not have an Instagram dedicated to her art, nor a website.

Her work that was featured in the gallery was titled Gilbert Globorin. There are two pieces to this work of art, the larger of the two, while still very small, is a round oblong with a hole in it. The second piece is almost mushroom like and fits perfectly in the hole that is in the larger piece. Both of these pieces are made of copper and are bumpy to the touch. If one was to come into this gallery and look around, the work would not be the first thing that they would see because it is small and needs to be approached to be admired.

During our conversation, I asked her if there was any meaning behind her piece, or if she was trying to explore any ideas. She told me that there was no real significant meaning behind the work because it was an assignment that was given to her by her professor. The requirement of the assignment was to make a metal container that didn’t look like a container. The smaller piece of Gilbert Globorin is the lid that fits into the larger piece seamlessly.

This work kind of reminds me of a UFO at first glance. The shape and texture is similar to that of science fiction film UFOs. This is interesting to me because I am an aerospace engineering major, and I have always enjoyed watching Sci-Fi movies. I think the piece is a good work of art in addition to it being a very good take on a project that requires the work to be a secret container.

While I can enjoy drawing, it is a very frustrating activity for me. I am not good at drawing in any regard and that makes me frustrated when I try to draw. If I practiced for a long time I’m sure that I would get better at it, but I cannot see myself practicing drawing because I get irritated while I am drawing because of how poorly I execute the ideas that I have in my head. I am an aerospace engineering major, and I can see it being important and useful to sketch in that profession because blueprints are a huge part of success in the engineering field. When drawn by someone that has talent in drawing, it can be much easier to communicate through drawings, but from someone like me that does not have much experience or talent for drawing, it is much harder to try and communicate through drawing.

With the help of my group, we found art through this sculpture. As we were walking around campus trying to find something that spoke to us, we came across this sculpture near the bookstore. We had all seen it before, but had never really ever payed much attention to it. For this reason, we decided to use it as a part of our project. One of us had the idea to use the sculpture as a part of our frame, and the group collectively agreed that it was a good idea. Our frame focuses on an area where students like to sit with their friends and hangout, or enjoy a nice meal. The beauty of this piece is that its form, aesthetic, and contents are ever changing and up to interpretation. When I look through our frame, I tend to notice the tree, and how green the leaves on it are. With time, however, that will change. As the tree grows more, the leaves will eventually no longer be in the frame, but the students and the area behind the tree will stay as a focus long after the tree is gone. The form and aesthetic will also change with seasons, as winter comes, the tree’s leaves will not be as green, and the aesthetic will no longer have a vibrant summer feel like the picture above has. It has always been art, putting some tape around a certain part of this sculpture helps to focus in on a certain part, but it was art before the tape was put up, and it will be art after the tape is removed. It will always be art depending on how it is perceived, some people will see it as art and others won’t. However, that does not make it any less of an art piece than a famous painting. Art does not only reside in the body of an object, it also resides in the idea of it. All objects can be art, for example, as a fan of baseball I see art in a batters swing and in a pitchers wind up, not only do these motions spark a feeling of enjoyment in me for certain players, but for all players. Taken very literally the body and technique of one player is no more art than that of another. This example also helps show that art does not have to be a physical object because I personally see the fundamentals of baseball as art. Art solely resides in the experience of a viewer. For me, watching a baseball game is like watching art, I sit down and take the time to enjoy myself and analyze what is happening in the game for its entirety. In my experience, many people my age don’t like to watch baseball and don’t enjoy it, however this does not make it less enjoyable or artistic to me.

The experience I had while finger painting was soothing, and relaxing. Feeling the paint on my hands and watching as the paint glided over its canvas was almost hypnotizing. The difficulty of the task was almost exactly as I had imagined it, easy. I just let go and let the paint do the talking. The experience of not having to paint a subject was freeing. Just letting my hands and the paint create whatever they desired to was nice. My finger paint work is somewhat similar to other abstract works that I have seen, however, it is very different from paintings with subjects like George Washington crossing the Delaware.

Cleaning Peter Kowlaski’s NOW and it’s surrounding area showed me how important it is to take care of art. It made me feel appreciative of little things and reminded me how nice it is to enjoy a clean area. Art comes in many different forms. For example, art can be as simple and calming as cleaning the steps outside of an art museum like Mierle Laderman Ukeles did, and art can also be as dangerous and exciting as flinging molten lead against walls as Richard Serra did. While both of these acts are art, they each place different emotions inside me. Richard Serra’s work is more thrilling to me, while Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ work is more soothing to me, personally. While the two acts are very different for the more obvious reasons, there are some similarities. Both of these acts show what kind of person their respective artists was, I believe. From an outsider’s point of view, Richard Serra is a manly man that is trying to show how tough he is by flinging molten lava. On the other hand, Mierle Laderman Ukeles is a more down to Earth, feminine person, doing what she thinks is the right thing to do and showing the beauty in it. While this may be the deepest similarity that I can see, it is not the only one. Both of these works took place at an art museum, which is a surface similarity. I wanted to bring this very shallow similarity up, however, to talk about how both of these works should be considered art anywhere, and not just at an art museum. In my opinion, art is what the the artist intends it to be. For example, I work for the Athletic Department at CSULB, and a responsibility that I occasionally have is to clean the basketball floors. When I am doing this task, I am doing it as my job, and not as art. However, if I intended it to be art, it could be. I think that if Mierle Laderman Ukeles decided to get a janitorial job for a few months and intended for her tasks to be art, it would have been considered art. The canvas or whatever medium is being used does not have a certain power to make something art. It is solely the intentions of the artist that makes a work art. From a painting on a canvas, to painting a house, to throwing molten lead at walls, and to cleaning steps, anything can be art if that is what it is intended to be.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Jennifer Lopez have not made me think differently about “Women’s Work”. I think that all work is work, and that if it’s intended to be art, than it is art. Art doesn’t need to be Napoleon on a horse, it can be anything that it’s creator wants it to be.

If I were to go to Hollywood Boulevard to clean a star, I would clean the Los Angeles Dodger’s star. Not only are the Dodgers my favorite sports team, but they also do all kinds of charity work around Los Angeles and help out people in need.