STEVE HOLLINGER

ERICA VON SCHILGEN

Artist Talk

Erica Von Shiling

Ericas work explores the topic of memory. She uses found objects of her grandmothers and manipulates them with delicate hand cranks. Each of her pieces hold a graceful and delicate beauty and they are interactive! She uses collage as a means of looking back at the past. Her work is a reflection of her past.

Artists Talks

I went to see an artist talk by kinetic artist, Steve Hollinger at the Photographic Resource Center. Steve is a kinetic artist working with flip book animation and other small kinetic sculptures. His work is very inspirational. He has a strong ability to convey motion beautifully. Aesthetically his work is very beautiful and has a certain raw, decaying feel to it, which I find resonates quite well with my work.

The piece below is entitled " When it crumbles the birds fly away"
The imagery is of smoke clouds and flowers demolished houses, birds, the sky, and a t.v.
The piece metaphorically memorializes a couple of recent events and birds ascend into to the sky symbolizing a new beginning..

Artist Statement Revised

As an artist I have a unique opportunity to attempt to transform all of life’s experiences into another medium. All that I see,
feel learn and explore is meaningful not just for its intrinsic value but also for its potential to be incorporated into a new
vision. The creative process has provided a heightened awareness of my surroundings and the possibilities they offer. Within
each experience the possibilities for artistic transformation exist as potential awaiting interpretation. I believe that the
inspiration that a teacher can provide to a student is essential to creative development. That idea has inspired me to
continuing learning and sharing knowledge to others. The idea of having a community of purpose keeps the process more inspired and alive. When I am creating art I need a motivation to really feel I am part of the piece. My motivation usually stems from personal experiences. Memory plays a huge role in my artwork. The idea that memories hold the potential to transcend time or disappear into nothing keeps me dedicated to preserving their life through different mediums in art. I work primarily two and three dimensionally but am starting to work with time as a medium. I am interested in the way that the element of time can change the meaning of a piece. Using video manipulation I am able reinterpret my memories and transform them into something more truthful. Kinetic art enables me to show an action or involve my audience in an interactive manner. While I value my new interest in time based art I feel as though the same principles carry forth in my 2d and 3d work. Most of my two dimensional and three dimensional work emerges in an improvisational manner, in my collage work, I start by layering and overlapping pieces and build off of each piece with pure instinct. I often do not plan a piece before I start. I believe that this approach allows the work to stay truthful to inner feelings. Memory and personal experience are unifying themes throughout my artwork. However, science, and nature are also themes that I feel are essential in my work. Working in multimedia has allowed me to explore numerous different outlets for creative expression. Performance allows the experience of an event in the moment. Actually becoming involved in every aspect of its resolution both mentally and physically redefines the parameters of art for me. Although I believe that freedom and expression are essential to an artist’s ability to grow, I feel that technique and craft are equally important. For this reason I seek the more rigid approach of craftsmanship within my metals practice. The skills acquired have enabled me to develop a strong understanding of all properties of metal and the capabilities they hold. More importantly, the discipline has helped balance my work.

Artist Statement

As an artist I have a unique opportunity to attempt to transform all of lifes experiences into another medium. All that I see, feel learn and explore is meaningful not just for its intrinsic value but for its potential to be incorporated into a new vision. The creative process has provided a heightened awareness of my surroundings and the possibilities they offer. Within each experience the possibilities for artistic transformation exist as potential awaiting interpretation. I believe that the inspiration that a teacher can provide to a student is essential to creative development. That idea has inspired me to continuing learning and sharing knowledge to others. The idea of having a community of purpose keeps the process more inspired and alive. When I am creating art I need a motivation to really feel I am part of the piece. My motivation usually stems from personal experiences. Memory plays a huge role in my artwork. The idea that memories hold the potential to transend time or disappear into nothing keeps me dedicated to perserving their life through different mediums in art. I work primarily two and three dimensionally but am starting to work with time as a medium. I am interested in the way that the element of time can change the meaning of a piece. Using video manipulation I am able reinterperet my memories and transform them into something more truthful. Kinetic art enables me to show an action or involve my audience in an interactive manner.

guitar cabinet

So I started working on the guitar cabinet today. Its going to take me longer than I thought but hopefully I can get most of it done by Wednesday. I'm still not sure what to put for the imagery on the front, Maybe a tree growing, or a abstract tree roots kind of taking over the guitar. I'm not sure.

Today I am starting a new project. I will continue to work on my memory project but I am starting a project that i've been meaning to work on for a while. My boyfriend's guitar got destroyed in a bad car accident a couple of years ago. He gave me the pieces incase I wanted to do something with them. I am starting a series of memorials from that event. Last semester, I worked on a peice entitled " Reliquary" dedicated to the memory of his mother, whom he lost in the accident. The finished piece is pictured below. The piece was designed to symbolize a last embrace between the three of us. There are three hinges that open up to a peircing of a gate, the inside of the box contains light that shines through the gate and on to the ceiling. The design is intended to represent life, death and light as a symbol of hope.This new project is going also going to be about hope and rebuilding. With the remaining pieces of his guitar I am going to fabricate a case with cabinets. The house that he's lived in his whole life is being knocked down and replaced by his neighbors house. The transition is going to be hard and hopefully he can use this new cabinet in his new house. I will also put lights inside the guitar cabinets and have the guitar sort of become a reliquary for the things he decides to put inside it.

So, Newest development.... my dancers will be on the ground holding pieces of red yarn, connecting to eachother, random dancers will hold flashes or mini cameras and when connections are made, they will use the flashes to demonstrate those connections. This is what I want it to look like :

The image is of the neuro connections that the brain makes when it is remembering something.

So, I started the process of collecting T.V.s. I have 18 already so i only need 3 more. I also am trying to find DVD players. I met with Dana, my SIM teacher and he told me how to actually get this project on a role. So thats basically what I need to do. I am signing out the Installation room, and the week i get back from Spring Break I'm basically going to finish up the project, and then bring in the dancers. I've decided that they dancers are not actually going to be dancing. Maybe I'll have them under a white sheet moving slowly, and then all of a sudden these threads of yard start seeping from underneath the sheet, and they start pulling them from one end of the sheet to the other. Maybe the sheet is transparent so you can actually see them moving. I think while the videos are progressing slowly continuously, i will have them make subtle movements but once the malfunction hits the strings or fabric ( I think it would be good if they could rip the fabric and have it make that ripping noise) will split and they will need to actually start trying to combine them together, making new connections, ect. Anyways, I want the whole thing to really be very aesthetically beautiful. I want the T.V.s to sort of make a sculptural landscape behind or in between the dancers. I think that the aesthetic qualities will need to be worked out with the dancers in the room. As far as the technical aspects go, the easiest solution is to actually plug and un plug the t.vs. as they are playing, there will be some flickering gliches from unplugging but i dont think it will take away from the piece.

According to Wikipedia, memory is an organism's ability to store, retain, and subsequently recall information. The project I'm currently working on is intended to serve as an example of how memory is so malleable and is rarely ever truely accurate. I have a collection of videos from my life so I am able to actually look at my life in the 3rd person. Still, I cannot remember what it feels like to actually be in those moments. I am recording parts of my life but only from an outside perspective, which is odd because they are events that i have experienced. In order to show my relationship to the videos in my life and the changes the videos make to my actually memory, or lack of memory, i have to first understand the process of remembering and do research on memory itself. Accordig to a website entitled, "The Brain from Top to Bottom" short turn memory is the ability to hold on to a piece of information temporarily in order to complete a task. It causes certain regions of the brain to become very active, in particular the pre-frontal lobe. While, long term memory, is transferred through the hippocampus which is located in inner fold of the temporal lobe.All of the pieces of information decoded in the various sensory areas of the cortex converge in the hippocampus, which then sends them back where they came from. The hippocampus is a bit like a sorting centre where these new sensations are compared with previously recorded ones. The hippocampus also creates associations among an object’s various properties. When we remember new facts by repeating them or by employing various mnemonic devices, we are actually passing them through the hippocampus several times. The hippocampus keeps strengthening the associations among these new elements until, after a while, it no longer needs to do so. The cortex will have learned to associate these various properties itself to reconstruct what we call a memory.
That being said, we still can never really know how accurate a memory is. Even with time recorded, it is impossible to record the feelings of time in anything except your brain, and even your brain, may not remember feelings accurately.

old work

Here are some of the projects that have led to my current project:

Discussion

I think the discussion went really well. The class offered some great ideas and I am excited to start working. I found some suggestions very helpful. I am thinking about starting to photograph inanimate objects in different situations to start prompting ideas. I think its interesting how an object holds the ability to be viewed with emotions. A wilted peice of pizza can be viewed as sad, and a ripe shiny apple, happy. I am a bit hesitant to start this assignment however because I have some ideas for a body of work that is unrelated to this subject. I want to focus my work around concepts of time, memory, and relationships. I think I have the ability to incorporate some of these concepts into this idea. Perhaps I can record how a object changes with time, its relationships to other objects as well as how the enviorment and surroundings can change how the object "feels". However, I want the end result to have some humor but also to contain some important information reguarding the human condition and the attachments that people make to their possesions and the value that they hold.