sarahshoemakerphoto-blog

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Dis/ Unity

I did not make it to this event because I thought that it was Friday, Saturday and Sunday instead of Thursday, Friday Saturday. I was planning on going Sunday until I realized it ended Saturday and I worked Friday and Saturday. This was my mistake and mess up of days. 

Based on the trailer that I saw, it looked amazing! I’m very upset that I missed it because it looked like something that I would have really loved. Especially seeing all the performances by various artists. 

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Biennials, Festivals & Fairs

I clicked on the Art in Odd Places link because the name stuck out to me the most. When I got to the website I was excited when I read “Presenting visual and performance art in unexpected public spaces”.  I’m extremely fascinated with this festival and would love to experience it in person! I looked in the past years and clicked on 2017 just to see what happened recently. I noticed that each year has a different theme which I think is really cool. This event happens every October so maybe I’ll check it out next year as a birthday gift to myself. 

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Institutes of Contemporary Art

I clicked on the New Museum link because I’ve always wanted to go to New York City. The first thing I saw when I got to the website was an exhibition “Trigger: Gender is a Tool and a Weapon”. I clicked on it instantly to check it out. I did realize that the youngest artist featured in this exhibition 1987. I think they could've included younger artists. I think that having a wide age range in this exhibition could make it better because each generation has different views on political issues.  

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Commercial Galleries

I clicked on the Pace link and found Song Dong’s Usefulness of Uselessness. The first thing I noticed about Song Dong is that he is a video artist. Along with installations I really enjoy video art. I googled him and found him on Artsy.net. I’m really intrigued by his work and plan to do more research on him.

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Other Art Spaces

I’ve noticed a trend with how I pick which link I click on, I decide based on how the site title sounds. That’s what I did with this section as well. I clicked on the first link, Mattress Factory. I love installations so this site definitely is standing out to me and a place that I would love to visit. I clicked on the exhibitions link because I’m always curious about what’s going on at the moment. I found Dennis Maher’s installation, “A Second Home”, which is on display now until August 2019.  I like that it doesn't feel like an art installation and instead feels like a home. 

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Untitled was a movie that was very relatable as an artist. Ever since I started school at Iowa I’ve been asked “What is art?”. Every studio art and art history class, theres always been a discussion about what art is, with examples to encourage discussion and make every student think about their own opinions about it. I’ve always thought that everything is art, even the simplest things that may seem to not have meaning at all. After watching this film in class, it made me question my own opinions a little more. I think it’s great that they joke and poke fun at the art world because a lot of artwork doesn't make any sense. It brings light to a world that can be so serious at times. 

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Awards, Grants & Fellowships

I clicked on the Turner Prize link because it’s something that I’ve heard of before, but I’ve never known what exactly it was. When I clicked on the link it took me to the Hugo Boss Prize instead, so I decided to just read and learn about that first. I like that this prize is for contemporary art in general and can be won by any artist in any medium. I clicked on the history of it to learn a little more about it and found that the top six finalists have a group exhibition and then winner is decided after that. I thought that, that was pretty cool because that way more than one artist gets recognized for their work. 

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Podcasts, Blogs & Magazines

At first, I felt lost with which link I wanted to click on first. So, I clicked on the one that I’ve heard of before but haven't used much of. I click on Artsy and immediately went to the ‘artist’ page. I started scrolling through the artists until I stumbled upon a thumbnail that stuck out to me. I found Herb Ritts who is a celebrity photographer who I have never heard of. He took a lot of photos of nude models, which is something that I’m always attracted to. I love the human body and love when photographers photograph them in unique ways that anything but sexual. Many of his photos are abstract forms of the human body and I really appreciate that in his work, I’m glad that I stumbled across him.

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I clicked on the Yellow Door Gallery link simply out of curiosity because yellow is one of my favorite colors. When I got to their website I read the homepage and was instantly intrigued because it’s held in a private home. It seems so simple and I love that!  After exploring the website a little more, I learned that they put on salons. This is something I never heard of before and they explained it to be “as a place and forum that brings people together through shared experiences with visual, aural and performance art”. 

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I decided to click on the Walker Art Center link because after I graduate in May, I’m moving to Minneapolis, MN. When I got to the site I went straight to their current exhibitions. Based on the colorful thumbnail, I was instantly attracted to Allen Ruppersberg: Intellectual Property 1968–2018. After reading the short introduction of him and his work, I Googled him because I wanted to know more. One work that I found to be visually appealing is, The Never Ending Book Part 2/Art and Therefore Ourselves, which is an installation of thousands of photocopied pages from the artist’s collection of books. He installed this in a theatrical environment of props and posters; the pages were stacked in boxes and free for viewers to take home and create their own unique “books”

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Residencies

I started my research with residencies because that category stuck out to me the most, as I will be graduating in May 2018. I clicked on the Salem Art Works website first and I was really interested in the EAP until I came across the facilities that are included in this program. These facilities seem to only include hand building work (i.e. ceramics, wood work, etc.). My work as a photography/intermedia artist usually doesn't include hands on building.

From there, I decided to Google search Intermedia MFA programs. I clicked on Concordia University, mainly because I had never heard of it so I was intrigued.I also looked at the University of Maine (I’ve always wanted to visit or live in Maine). After reading and exploring both school’s websites, I’m more lost than I was before. I’ve come to the conclusion that I don't really know what I’m looking for in a grad school program. I also decided that I’m going to take a couple years off after graduating in May to really find myself and my art before furthering my education.

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Feminist Resources

Audre Lorde’s The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House

Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power

Aurora Levins Morales’s Radical Pleasure: Sex and the End of Victimhood 

bell hooks’ Cultural Criticism & Transformation

Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses

Combahee River Collective Statement

Dorothy Allison’s A Question of Class

Judith Butler documentary

Leslie Feinberg’s We Are All Works in Progress

Paula Gunn Allen’s Who is Your Mother?: Red Roots of White Feminism

R.W. Connell’s The Social Organization of Masculinity

Sandra Lee Bartky’s Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power

Sandra Cisneros’s Guadalupe the Sex Goddess

Sojourner Truth’s Ain’t I a Woman? 

Susan Bordo’s The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7Wg55wZWh8

The pressures put on women to be completely hairless come from many different directions in their lives. Magazine and commercial ads, YouTube videos, men and even other women. For the America’s Most Wanted project I explored just how much pressure is out there. I started by making a Facebook post asking my fellow peers how they feel about body hair on women. I then took it farther and downloaded and created a Tinder profile just to ask men what their opinions about it were. I got a wide range of opinions from Facebook and Tinder, but I felt as though I wasn't fully getting straight answers, especially from the Tinder guys, so I made an anonymous survey on Survey Monkey. I had a separate survey for men and for women. I got over 100 responses from women and 50-60 responses from men. Because it was an anonymous survey, I felt like I got real opinions from everyone, which is what I wanted from the start. With found videos from YouTube, I created a short one minute video to highlight just how ridiculous ads and other music videos are. In a gallery space at VAB I displayed my video on one wall and surrounded it with the printed Tinder, Facebook and Survey Monkey responses, along with many found images from Google. 

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Women’s Body Hair

Hey everyone! I’m doing a project about women’s body hair and I need people’s opinions about it. I made a survey and I would love for you all to fill it out for me! There's a separate survey for men and women.. (women fill out the women's survey and men fill out the men's survey). p.s. it's anonymous Women's Survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/ZVJR7YD Men's Survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/ZWJQ92G Please feel free to share this as I need as many filled out as possible. Thank you in advance! 

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aint legit until you can sustain a small family