Two videos I made

Around this time last year, I created these two videos for student projects.

Urban Street Patterns from Elizabeth Kuehnen on Vimeo.

I became fascinated with the correlation between the growth of streets patterns and the veins in a leaf, and created this short animation to illustrate the academic paper that proves the theory. This was for Visual Language with Professor Alex Liebergesell, completed in November 2010. I used Flash, a painstakingly tedious program, to create the animation.

This project uses my photography and video clips of New York City to tell the story (to extraterrestrial life forms) of our struggle here on earth to maintain fragile beauty in an increasingly man-made world. For Design Technology with Professor Mark Sanders in October 2010. Side note: I taught myself After Effects in one weekend in order to complete the video. Thank you Lynda.com!

Mm-Hmm David Wilson

Advent 1 – Oscar Cash from David Wilson on Vimeo.

Yes! I love this, something to make the countdown to Christmas so much more fun. Director David Wilson is making short videos every day of advent with previously unreleased tracks from 25 different artists. This is the third one so far. Such a simple idea but deeply unusual at the same time. I love the oddly real spinning swan.

Metronomy – The Bay from David Wilson on Vimeo.

Also amazing is this recent video from Metronomy. It’s like he took everything that was good from cheesy feel-good 80’s music videos and made it better. So hot.

Barrio de las Letras

Ok, here’s a little anecdote about my neighborhood, Barrio de las Letras. A bit north of me, in the Plaza de las Cortes, is the Palace Hotel and every day at noon and 8pm on the corner of the hotel, you’ll see an odd little show with figures and loud chiming bells. The figures were made by the Spanish cartoonist Antonio Mingote to represent Goya, the Dutchess of Alba, King Carlos III, the bullfighter Pedro Romero, a peasant and a toy dog. I had no idea that this was here, but when I was walking by the other day I saw a tour group waiting across the street, just staring at this building and I thought I’d wait around to see what happened. The carillon started chiming and these figures appeared from their hiding place behind the doors. I tried to get a closeup shot of the figuras goyescas in all their glory.

Also in the Plaza, across from the Congreso de Deputados (Congress building), is this fabulous statue of the writer Cervantes. Cervantes is quite an important figure in my neighborhood, since this is where he lived and wrote his masterpiece Don Quixote. Side note: in the apartment where we are renting, our landlords have a secret stash of the book – probably four copies – under the bed. I feel like I need to read it now, even though I know the gist of the story. We also saw the amazing statue of the characters Don Quixote and his sidekick in the Plaza de España this past weekend. Definitely worth a visit.

Hans Christian Andersen, while not such a fan of Madrid, has this to say about the statue of Cervantes: “The whole monument is wanting in grandeur; one is inclined to pass it carelessly, supposing that it has been erected in memory of some military commander who has no particular claim to our admiration. But when we heard the name, we arrested our steps and gazed at it with the deepest interest; for in that figure which we saw before us we beheld a king in the glorious intellectual world, one whose works are immortal, whose name is honored in every part of the earth where literature flourishes. While in the full vigor of manhood, he bore the chains of a slave; in battle, he offered to his fatherland, Spain, his left arm: his contemporaries left him to suffer from want; they treated him with scandalous indifference; they could neither comprehend him, nor appreciate him. Now, however, a monument stands in memory of him.”

Don Quixote has been published in more editions and translated into more languages than every book on earth except the Bible. And the writer lived his life in poverty. No one even knows the exact location of his grave. All they know is that his bones rest somewhere within the Convent of San Ildefonso de las Trinitarias, which is still inhabited by cloistered nuns. However, there are many plaques and markers throughout the neighborhood that provide bits and clues into the story of Cervantes and the meaning of Don Quixote.

This ornate plaque commemorates the spot where Cervantes lived and died.

In the early 19th Century, the businessman Luis Franco was going to tear down the building in order to build a higher income building in its place. The city historian, Don Ramón (who I mentioned in my earlier post on the Houses of Malice), with the support of King Fernando VII objected to the demolition of such a historically important building and attempted to but it. He tried to explain to the owner that the building should be preserved and turned into some sort of literary establishment in honor of its famous history, but Luis Franco wouldn’t sell. He said, “Of course I know exactly who used to live here, Don Quixote. I read his book every day and I have the pleasure of owning his house. Only I will make the decision of what happens to it.” Needless to say, the building was torn down for this new one now in its place. When they asked Luis Franco if he would at least put a plaque up to state that Cervantes once lived there, he replied, “A plaque for Cervantes? I don’t even know who that man is!”

Nonetheless, a plaque was finally put up in 1834, and later on the name of the street was changed to Calle de Cervantes.

The plaque reads:
Here lived and died
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Whose genius is admired worldwide.
Died in MDCXVI

 

Quotes from Don Quixote in shiny gold letters are ingrained in the sidewalks throughout the neighborhood. This is on Calle Huertas, around the corner from our apartment.

And this is one of the doors of the convent behind which lie Cervantes remains, however their exact location is a mystery.

Research credit to Ocultos Madrid by Mark and Peter Besas

I’m really interested in things that make us see our surroundings in a new way

I’m at an interesting point in my move to Madrid. Somewhat of a turning point. I feel like I’m at home here now, almost two weeks into my internship at Base, know where all the good supermarkets are, and feeling more positive about life in general. Since I arrived two months ago I have been working steadily on a project that I’ve started to call “Esto es aquello”. I read Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, which turned me even more onto the idea of the poetry of the street, and got me thinking about how we define ourselves in relation to the space that surrounds us. I wish I had read that book before my last semester of school! (Edvin my thesis advisor was right.)

The way we see our surroundings depends so much on our point of comparison. In the Garden of the Gods the viewpoint over, through and around these monumental rock formations changes the way we experience the landscape there at the base of the Rocky Mountains. Like the artworks I’ve posted on this blog, these forms are a tool to analyze the colors and shapes, lines and planes of our surroundings. By offering this frame/lens/viewpoint, we offer a way to experience the landscape with a point of comparison. The comparison itself can be anything: color, material, shape, angle, scale, etc.

I began making prisms – collages of the city – to express how we see the world, turned inside out and twisted, reflected. In the meantime, at the Thyssen I came across Paul Klee’s Rotating House and I could have looked at it for days. I do look at it just about every day. In this flat painting he is able to express so many words.

Paul Klee, Rotating House, 1921

This project is so much more related to my Times Square project from earlier this year than I thought. I wanted to create a distinct feeling of being inside a close, intimate space and looking out or framing what it beyond. We want to create a protected space for ourselves, from which to look out of and to perceive things separate from ourselves, in order to understand ourselves better. For example, looking down the triangular space of the street it seems to lead endlessly into expansive possibilities. Certain viewpoints are symbolic and meaningful for us for different reasons.

Defining space with buildings is related to the search for who we really are – to understand more about ourselves we need to understand more about what surrounds us. Then I realized that instead of seeing everything as separate, it’s more about seeing ourselves in others and everything around us. Like Mr. Maharaj talks about in this book. Instead of “this and that”, it’s “this is that”. OR “esto es aquello”. An early visual representation of this idea.

It’s about my experience in Madrid at this moment. It’s not about NYC except that the idea of “this” and “that” can be thought of as a comparison of the two cities I’ve lived in.  It could develop into a mythological story, maybe about the angel… and the windows. About knowing Madrid – knowing where I am. Maybe it’s all about being a foreigner and the loss of self that occurs when you live in a foreign culture. Kind of like a video component to Ella. It’s a little tied in with the “Hidden Madrid” idea – inside/outside, understanding the dormant layers of history and the structure that ties it all together.

Also, I found two notable studios in the UK (in my search to get a j.o.b). Grrr is a collaboration between a painter and a typographer. They say this wordy yet fascinating morsel about their work: “Our practice is centered around an anthropological study of layered narratives found in naturally occurring intersections between the metaphysical and the terrestrial. By examining and documenting the fabric of the journey through a continuous dérive, a body of interconnected knowledge is gathered.” I also really like the language of Introspective describing his exhibition: “Space between is a graphic exposition of the built environment. This is a participatory visual activity around spatial perception, it considers how space might shape and be shaped by our experiences of it.”

De Chirico, the Situationists, and architectural morphology

It was exactly one year ago today that I posted this brief synopsis of the history of Situationist International. And coincidentally I found myself reading the situationists and the city (ed.Tom McDonough) on the metro today. In the first essay by Ivan Chtcheglov, one of the first to put the theoretical ideas of the Situationist movement down on paper, he refers to a painting by Giorgio De Chirico, Melancholy and Mystery of the Street.

Side note: I found the book at a shop in New York that I only discovered two days before I moved to Madrid. Van Alen Books at 30 W. 22nd Street is a required stop for anyone interested in architecture, and the design of the tiny store itself is uncommon. It made me kind of sad to be leaving nyc, so I made sure to buy two books as inspiration for my new adventures. One is the situationists book I mentioned and another titled An attempt at exhausting a place in Paris by Georges Perec, in which he sits at different locations in Paris and records his observations of otherwise overlooked details.

Giorgio De Chirico, Melancholy and Mystery of a Street, 1914

De Chirico painted urban spaces that seem to contain the dual sentiments of emptiness and possibility. He is a visual narrator of the hidden layers of the city, using strong symbolism and oddly placed shadows for emphasis of the ominous – or promising – aspects of the story. I wrote about his American contemporary, Edward Hopper, here. Both painters capture the essence of the street to convey a distinct emotion, and through the artists eyes we uncover hidden aspects of a place and understand it on a new, previously unseen level.

After reading so much about the Situationists, I’m longing for Paris. BUT, being that I am in Madrid, these concepts can easily apply to the urban milieu “aqui”.

SI fought valiantly against the sterile modernization of urban spaces in and around Paris, through artwork, performance, film and architecture. They were preoccupied with the history of the city, as successive layers of each generation add to or cover the remnants of the past. Clean, unfriendly and overly geometric architecture doesn’t add any life, character or play to the city, and in their opinion, suppresses the potential for creative living.

In the introduction of the book, McDonough describes their views: “…cities were for them profoundly historical landscapes, whose current appearances were shaped – as geological strata underlay physical landscapes – by the successive events that time has buried, though never completely effaced.” Their desire to reconnect with the history of the city, in particular the radical and revolutionary legacy, reminds me of my thesis exhibition that told the story of the 1920 Wall Street bombing. Seeing that event as a precedent for the current events is timely, considering that the attack targeted J.P.Morgan bank as a symbol of unfettered capitalism.

America’s First Age of Terrorism, an installation that
tells the story of the 1920 Wall Street bombing.
Images from my thesis installation at Pratt.

Also, I learned a new term to describe this idea: architectural morphology. A micro level of urban morphology, it is the study of the layers of history and forces that have created the built environment. Love it.

Poster-girl for organization

I worked at RxArt this past summer, and among many other things I created this poster for the fundraising gala. I was the only designer on staff and didn’t have a ton of feedback from colleagues, which I found difficult after a two year program of endless feedback and critique. But sometimes it’s nice to work solo, not all the time but completing this project on my own from initial concept to press check was quite fulfulling.

RxArt is an organization that curates contemporary art installations in hospitals around the US, and their annual fundraiser is a major event in New York City. This fall it was sponsored by Chanel Beauté, and featured an art auction with work from Dan Colen, Miranda July, Terence Koh, and Yoko Ono to name a few. A very cool organization doing very cool things, and I am so happy that I’m able to be a part of the family now. I have another project in the works, that is a redesign of the press package – an abbreviated version that has taken the form of a deck of cards. We’ll see how it goes!

All of the current information about RxArt is found on the front of the poster, which folds out twice for the full read (or the two-page option shown above), then Rob Pruitt, who generously donated the zebra artwork for the cover of the Between the Lines coloring book, agreed to have it printed full-bleed on the back for an added bonus for attendees of the gala.

The poster was found in the Chanel gift bags as guests were leaving the gala. I thought it would be so fabulous for people to have a great time at the party, then get home and say, “let me read all about this amazing organization” … And so my vision of this unconventional poster came to life. It is inspired by the immediacy of a newspaper (or newsletter) because it contains all of the most current news, and the poster on the back gives it that extra dimension. This is an organization devoted to great art, after all.