Aranworld

Author: sweater-maker

  • Paper Dolls

    This started out as a fun idea. We took a photo of us wearing skin tight clothing and then Jennie added clothing made out of pieces of fabric.

    As you can see in the photo, she did not just cut out flat pieces of fabric though for the skirt. She actually sewed tiny skirts so that in the final product there was a 3-d quality to the paper dolls.

    This turned out to take so much longer than we imagined it would, mainly because I was unable to really help in the process. The end result was an amazing card that people loved. However, we both agreed that we would never do something like this again that required so much individual work for each card.

  • Snowglobe

    Snow globe. This was our first card using digital photo collage. This particular year, Jennie made a snow globe for our niece that instead of having a snow-man in a snow globe had a snow-girl in a snow globe. So, we had these materials lying around and decided to try getting into the snow globe ourselves.

  • Bubble Gum Extravaganza

    As part of a performance art class taught by Kevin Radley, I put on a Bubble Gum Extravaganza. This was an All-American celebration of excess using bubble gum as the ingredient. My jean jacket was made in collaboration with classmates who all chewed up bubble gum and then placed them on my jacket to form a reproduction of the Star Spangled Banner I had recently seen hanging in the Smithsonian.

    The public performance included two contests. In one, contestants were asked to fill their mouths with as much bubble gum as possible. The person who put the most bubble gum in their mouth was awarded a hand crafted gigantic ceramic model of a wad of bubble gum entitled El Bazooka.

    For the bubble gum blowing contest, we had a panel of judges and the winner was awarded a framed Bazooka Joe comic.

  • The Great Race

    This was a large scale installation for a class title Site Specific Installations taught by Anne Healy. This is probably the best class I ever took in all my schooling. For this project, we had to build an architectural model of our project and then propose the project in front of the actual buildings & grounds crew of UC Berkeley to get permission to go ahead with the project.

    For this artwork, I noticed that there were a series of paths cut through lawns and hedges and ivy that allowed students to reduce the length of their path between classes.

    I connected these paths of efficiency with white athletic field chalk highlighting how students had formed a maximally efficient pathway through campus.

    Then I created small signs that told students at each of these cut throughs how much time they were saving by using the short cut.

    I also spent some time standing at some of these cut throughs handing people stickers to let them know how much time they saved by using that particular shortcut.

    I have to give a huge thanks to Michael Cuesta who helped me with the logistics of drawing the line on the morning of the project’s installation. By the end of the first day, most of the signs had been stolen.

  • Food Line Mural

    While I lived at the Casa Zimbabwe housing co-op in the 1993-94 school year, I used some of my work hours to paint a mural along the wall where students normally stood and waited for dinner to be served. I populated the line with a variety of familiar pop culture characters. The ones who might be least recognizable now are the one eared bunny and the two guys wearing fez hats. These were characters created by Matt Groening for his “Life in Hell” comic. These were much more familiar back than they are now.

  • Two Chairs

    The assignment were artistic chairs for a mixed media sculpture class.

    The work were two children’s chairs with radically lengthened legs. I used pvc pipe to lengthen them which meant that they were somewhat fragile. There was a very real chance that had someone bumped into them they would have fallen over.