The print is 59×70 inches 150×178 cm. There are three layers of printing. The back layer is on non-woven sewing transfer tissue, the middle layer is on frosted Mylar and the top layer is on transparent drapery fabric. It is printed with water-based screen ink.
Waterbased screen print ink on fabric.
The image on the left is of a chair, draped with white cloth and back lit, and then photographed. The printed image is the shadow of the chair. The image on the right is a fragment of a photograph, of Dukhobor women marching in protest, taken from the television screen It is printed in four colour separation.
Screen print on a transparent panel (white) and on a cotton panel (beige). City of Ladies is titled after Christine di Pizan’s illuminated manuscript The Book of the City of Ladies (1405).
From Wkikpedia (the reader can verify the information with further research of their own) The Book of the City of Ladies is an allegorical society in which the word “lady” is defined as a woman of noble spirit, instead of noble birth. The book, and therefore the city, contains women of past eras, ranging from pagans to saints. The book includes discussion between Pizan and the three female Virtues which are sent to aid Christine build the city. These Virtues – Reason, Rectitude, and Justice – help Christine build the foundations and houses of the city, as well as pick the women who will reside in the city of ladies. Each woman chosen by the Virtues to live in the city acts as a positive example for other women to follow. These women are also examples of the positive influences women have had on society.
Pizan asks the virtues if women should be taught as men are and why men think women should not be educated. Other questions that are explored are: the criminality of rape, the natural affinity in women to learn, and their talent for government.
For this piece, I photographed the women in my “stitch and knit” group.
The centre transparent panel is of the women with their back to me as I photograph them. Viewers walk around to look at the other side and are surprised that they still see the women from the back.
The beige panel is of two of the women, one of whom is looking at me as I photograph them. The other, who is a runner, put on a pair of shorts that she sometimes runs in. The shorts have the questionable distinction of sporting a fake bare bum. The other image, at the other end of the panel, is of one of the women’s daughter-in-law who also has her back to me. The rest is for the viewer to figure out.
This morning I listened to an interview with David Hockney on CBC radio
http://www.cbc.ca/q/add_category/2011/10/20/david-hockney-on-q/
about his iPad paintings on exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum. I visited his website and found his delightful drawings done with the brush app on his iPhone and iPad. Here is his website for you to go and visit.
http://www.hockneypictures.com/home.php
Also check out the ROM website.
http://www.rom.on.ca/hockney/exhibition.php
The show is up until January 1, 2012
Photos by Marnie Blair
Melaina Todd, 4th year BFA student, in the above images is printing a large woodcut by using wooden spoons to burnish the paper. She is assisted by several students and passersby as she makes the print. The print is visible in the background as she is rolling up the plate in the first image. In the second image the print becomes visible through the rice paper as it is burnished. To make a wood cut, areas of the wood panel that the artist wants to remain white are carved away leaving a plateau that is inked up when a roller covered in ink is passed across the surface. In this case the panel is printed by pressing paper onto the plate via a burnishing action using the flat part of a wooden spoon. The plate was printed in Student Street on the Thompson Rivers University campus.
The idea of incorporating artistic observation into scientific inquiry is not a new one for Dr. Lyn Baldwin, Assistant Professor of Biology and Botanist at Thompson Rivers University. She has kept illustrated field journals for 15 years in a tradition that hearkens back to such illustrious names as Charles Darwin and Leonardo DaVinci.
For Baldwin, her journals have become a way to maintain a connection with the subject of her research. “My journals are the place where I can cast off the tyranny of hard numbers and testable hypotheses and revel in the intricate wonder of the natural world. They are also the process by which I find my own place in the world… my own complacency is transcended each time I pick up my pen or dab with water colors.”
As an artist Baldwin is no slouch, and her beautifully watercolored observations can be enjoyed on the web (http://www.tru.ca/faculty/lbaldwin/Field Journal/Journals_Home.htm) and have also been appreciated in public exhibition.
In addition to her own research and artistic interests, Baldwin is deeply committed to her teaching responsibilities, and has been curious about the impacts of incorporating an artistic component into traditional scientific study.
“Good observations are often fundamental to good science, and drawing has long been recognized as a tool to develop students’ observation skills” explains Baldwin. But she was concerned about the levels of anxiety that assigning drawing tasks to her students created, and it was this concern that lead to an interdisciplinary collaboration and, ultimately, a publication in the Journal of College Science Teaching.
In an attempt to alleviate some of the anxiety experienced by her students, Dr. Baldwin collaborated with Ila Crawford, a fine arts instructor also employed by TRU. Their collaboration formed the basis of a preliminary discussion of the impacts of providing drawing instruction to science students to increase their confidence in the execution of assignments that require drawing, and to observe the benefits, as perceived these students, of incorporating drawing into science courses.
While the published results are preliminary, Baldwin and Crawford are quite confident that artistic instruction connected with a field-journaling component within undergraduate science courses can assist students in learning how to more completely observe specimens.
“By far, the greatest number of students reported that the illustrated learning journal provided them with greater awareness of the detail and/or variation in the morphology of individual plant specimens. Undergraduate students often have difficulty in understanding variation in organisms, yet this concept forms the bedrock of any discussion of evolution through natural selection.”
Baldwin and Crawford plan to continue their collaboration in order to observe the relationships between the types of journal entries and student achievement.
This piece is a response to an assignment in Art Foundations. The students were asked to select 20 magazine pages without thinking too much about what they were selecting. They were then asked to edit them down to twelve using a more discerning and analytical approach. Finally, they were asked to make an intervention in the images to re-direct or undermine the original message. The student who did this piece used the hotdog, shown in the baggy to the right in the photo, as an iconic paintbrush and painted the US flag across the twelve images. The hotdog has smears of the colours still on it. He used the hotdog as an emblem of extreme consumerism and consumption, typical of western, and specifically US society. The presence of the hotdog makes the piece.
Bo Yeung’s installation for fourth year critique has the best wallpaper I have ever seen. Bo has inserted herself, in the guise of various family members, in an array of photos hanging on the wall. Ashok Mathur (Canada Research Chair in Cultural and Artistic Inquiry at Thompson Rivers University) is her fourth year advisor and is standing to the left in the photo. In the fourth year of the BFA program at Thompson Rivers University students work in a studio setting for 12 credits under the supervision of one of the faculty. They meet as a group once a week, in a seminar course, and discuss theory and practice.
