Artist Lecture, Umbrico.

Yesterday was the lecture for the photo based artist Penelope Umbrico. I have to say that she completely kept my attention the entire time with her inserting work and intelligent way of speaking. She seemed happy and generally excited about her work, which always puts me in a good mood and sets the tone of the lecture. The works that stood out to me the most both ascetically and conceptually were the sun and the TV projects. I think that I was most fascinated by these because they are based off of ideas that I myself have been working with. Ideas of appropriation and use of Internet and mass distributed images is the basis for the google maps project that I have been working on. The sheer beauty of the final suns image projected on the large screen was so overwhelming to me, it reminded me of a Rothko painting.

Works that are a collection of seemingly ordinary pieces that come together to create a whole body that is on it's own ascetically pleasing have always been interesting to me. The content and idea are there at the beginning but when put into a physical form the presentation and ascetics becomes a entirely stand alone aspect. Jenny Holzer also comes to mind when thinking about this topic. The idea was clearly there at first, but the beauty that the final pieces gave off seemed almost like a perfect after thought. The amount of avenues that Penelope has the possibility of exploring with her work is amazing and have inspired me to look further into this direction myself.