Thursday, April 18, 2019

Aundrea Frahm

In the archives of studio seminar lectures given in past semesters, I found a presentation by Aundrea Frahm of the Art Ed. department at BYU. Her giant kaleidoscope, titled "We Revolve Ceaseless" was on display in the MOA between 2015 and 2016, if I remember correctly. I adored this piece when I saw and interacted with it, and was very interested to hear about what went into the creation of it.

The first thing that struck me was how helpful working with others was to the creation of Frahm's artwork. She mentioned how in constructing kaleidoscope, someone walked by, asked about it, and recommended someone who could help her build it better. She contacted him, and he ended up helping the piece function better! Students designed a 3d model of what the metal parts by the motor would look like, a friend of a volunteer had access to an industrial sander and wanted to help, and a store donated the mirrors to her when she pitched her project to them. Asking and finding people who are willing to help was really important to the project, and makes me feel better about attempting projects that I do not have the physical abilities or means to make myself!

Aundrea mentioned in her lecture that collaborating with other is important to her because she likes giving other people different experiences that they wouldn't get otherwise. She said people she works with - often engineers - say they are not artists and can only draw stick figures. To this Aundrea thinks, drawing is just one avenue to art - art can be bread baking, construction, anything. That point of view is really related to contemporary art, I believe, and new forms that artwork can take. Sure, art that can be shown in galleries is slightly more limited, but the idea of finding art in many different practices I believe will really help develop the creative mind!

Aundrea's advice to artists is to just make work! Good work, bad work, important work, non-important work - just make a lot! I think this makes sense because earlier Aundrea talked about how she had the idea first and inlaid meaning and contextualization into the work later in the process. I thought these two ideas work together well because sometimes I start making work that feels silly or unimportant, and as i work on it, a deeper importance or meaning can come through. So doing work, whether it is good or bad can help in the creative process and in coming up with ideas or what is important to you that you want to talk about.

No comments:

Post a Comment