Esoteric Echoes

     Andy Goldsworthy is a British sculptor living in Scotland who creates Land Art.  In Rivers and Tides, a soul-stimulating film  shot in four countries and across four seasons  using natural materials such as driftwood, ice, mud, leaves, and stones.  His choice of medium is specific to hearing the messages from nature, Goldsworthy said amidst his earthwork, "The stone speaks through its weight disbursement". At this moment the art becomes a meditation Goldsworthy has the audience acknowledge the need for total control is equal to the death of his work.      Below is a small collection of his earthworks compiled into a three-minute video.  If you are a student at CSUS and want to watch the whole video go onto Elaine O'Brien's Art 112 Contemporary Art Videos list.  Scroll down the page and then you click the fourth video Rivers and Tides .  For those not enrolled I found a 45:07 minute video on a French-designed site...

" Identity" 12:22    https://art21.org/watch/art-in-the-twenty-first-century/s1/louise-bourgeois-in-identity-segment/ "I need to make things. The physical interaction with the medium has a curative effect. I need the physical acting out. I need to have these objects exist in relation to my body." Louise Bourgeois      Louise Bourgeois is an artist I admire for her healing and nurturing attention towards her work, which in return I receive her love put into the installations and sculpture she does. Born during World World I, her work started in the 1930s until heart failure in 2010.  The theme of Bourgeois works is through autobiographical lenses; The New York Times  said that her work "shared a set of repeated themes, centered on the human body and its need for nurture and protection in a frightening world."  Her art's driving force comes from childhood trauma, a reflection of abandonment from her unfaithful father and her mother's death at 22....

      Dave Thomas is a Producer and Director of Nickelodeon’s TUFF Puppy about a secret agent labradoodle fighting for injustice within the city and The Fairly Oddparents focusing on a 10-year-old boy bullied by his babysitter under the care of two magical fairy godparents granting wishes with a twist of consequences .  Thomas has a special place in my heart sharing a collective memory.  A  bowl of Trix cereal or Toaster Strudel while enjoying  Saturday morning cartoons  of the 90s;   The NeverEnding Story (1995-1996), Pippi Longstockings (1998), and Fairly Oddparents (2003-2011) are a few shows watched at my home and Thomas was involved with.  Below I posted a couple episodes of the shows I mentioned above.  Enjoy and let these videos take you back to a time of innocent thinking and believing.     Dave Thomas has been nominated for many awards; Primetime Emmy Award for show Wander over Yonder about two kids hel...

  "Transcode is numerously trans, meaning it enacts and explores trans in its subjects, methods, themes, and forms." Chelsea Thompto, Transcode Manifesto     Chelsea Thompto is a  transdisciplinary artist and educator involved in relationships of art, trans studies, and technology in the contemporary world.  She uses coding to emphasize how technology, specifically AI, eliminates human beings' intimate interaction.  "Each step is less about the body and more about what can be extracted from it," Thompto expresses in her Landmarks Stages project.  This statement reaches a depth of understanding trans theory from Thompto's eyes; the AI's embedded algorithm deprives an individual of their unique and nonlinear journey.      Transcode is a language open to the space of movement and refuses constricted knowledge-based decisions.  The word 'trans' means 'across and beyond' with Thompto's voice and support from her trans community, she...

           Sara Garzon is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History and Visual Studies at Cornell University.  She specializes in modern and contemporary art with an emphasis on the growing world's impact on humanity's future through the eyes of Latin American contemporary artists.  This method allows multiple individuals to come together as a whole in representing the different perspectives created through their personal experiences.  This allows art to have power in changing the world; it encourages the breaking of colonialized form by understanding or representing the past to help in educating those towards the future.  Garzon wants us to ask questions; Where is the future?  More importantly, whose world are we to imagine?  The collection of artists; indigenous, Black, Queer, and feminist use their stories to provide a uniquely personal point of view to these questions.   A question for Sara: In what ways do you h...