Woah, I'm teaching!

Wow, what a whirlwind! I am teaching this semester for the first time and am loving the classroom experience, however, the at home work is a doozy! I am spending most of my free time preparing for the two classes I teach a week! I do work everyday as well at the college in a different capacity in addtion to teaching 2 night classes. I am teaching Digital Imaging Fundamentals and Art History I. This semester will prove to be very challenging, but I know it will all be worth it in the end and if given the opportunity, teaching the same classes next semester will be much easier :-)

TADA! done

Our MFA Thesis Show, Brass Tacks, was a great success! I have completed my thesis defense, which also went well. I am sad to be done, mostly because now I have to work a full time job, haha! But...I am happy because I can move on to a new chapter in my life. I did get a job, however, it is not full time :-( It is a job and that is what matters! I hope to pick up a class or two to teach in the evenings as well. The future is unknown, so we shall see as it unfolds. Here is my artist statement for this installation:

I have little to no memory of my childhood. I can only remember a handful of events. These memories are kept hidden somewhere in a tiny corner of my brain and only come to me in bits and pieces. It’s like when you wake up from a dream and only know part of the story line, the characters and places, but not what they look like or any bit of detail. I don’t remember birthdays, family vacations, friends, favorite outfits, teachers, my home, or even my sister living with me. What I do remember is creating…

I have always made physical things and was somewhat of a child inventor. My mom is an interior designer and my dad owns a body shop. They have owned their own businesses and worked in the same shop together for as long as I have lived. I had to go to the shop every day after school and keep myself occupied. I would use my dad’s old parts, tools, and junk to build things with. I would make elaborate strange tools and simple machines or modify and build on to ready-made machines and tools. Most of the time, the things I would make had no purpose. The process of building was more entertaining to me than the end result. I would also use my mom’s old wallpaper books, carpet samples, Formica samples, and any other materials I could find from her office to create. I made touch and feel books with interior scenes; a room with a saran wrap window, a floor with real carpet, wall paper for the walls, and I clothed the people who inhabited my spaces with fabric. Having both parents in creative fields lead to a creative life.

My current work, The Memory of Forgotten Things, acts as a substitution for my lost childhood memories. I have created an environment in which bits of my memory are combined with created memories. As the definition of dream states, “dreams are a succession of images, ideas, emotions and sensations occurring involuntarily in the mind.” I wish to transport the viewer into the dreamlike space I have constructed with found objects and multi-media materials by offering an immersive experience into my world.

Hopefully that will help put my installation into context for those of you who are not familiar with my work and what it all means. I am not sure where I will go from here with my art because for the first time in my art career, I had a personal meaning and connection with my work. It is deep and personal. Of course, you can't always make work that is so deep and personal, unless your life is very dramatic and kind of messed up, lol. I guess a lot of artist's lives in the past have been, which makes for good work. I think I will just make things, as I always have, and hopefully a deeper meaning will surface in the process. 

For now, I am excited to get all dressed up and pretty with my new work clothes and shoes and play professional. My new job starts tomorrow and I am ready to go!

A whale of a time!

I don't know if you guys remember, but I had put up a picture of my unfinished whale sculpture in this post and finally finished it for my final MFA thesis show. I am so glad that this whale now has a purpose and meaning! It was horrible to make because of the styrofoam, which I will never use again, but turned out to be rewarding in the end. Needless to say, I will happily never be carving styrofoam again! We have a little over a week until the opening of our MFA show "Brass Tacks" and you are not going to want to miss it.

For more info check out our website.

Everyone in my cohort is super talented and the art is extremely diverse. Not one of us is doing the same thing, so our show is going to be great :-) I will be creating a giant installation that you need to see in person to really get the whole experience. For now I will leave you with one tiny element of my installation, the whale (crappy iphone pic in the studio)-

Well, Hello!

Yes, I am still alive and did not fall in a deep dark hole! Ha ha! I have just been immersed in my thesis work (the paper and the art). I feel like I am a little behind, but I should be just fine. The theme of my thesis is the lack of my childhood memory and my art being a substitution for that lost memory. I have not come up with a title for the thesis yet, but maybe it should be something like "Lost Memories" or "The Memory of Forgotten Things"? Who knows!?

The problem with writing papers or making art is that I always think too much. This may come off as procrastinating from the outside because what people don't know is that I am not putting off but thinking about how I will write or how I will create before I do it. I have learned though, that starting the task rather than thinking it to death is more productive. You can think about doing something all you want, but you really have to do it to work through the details. (Note to self- practice what you preach!)

My current work acts as a substitution for my lost childhood memories. For my thesis installation, I have created an environment in which bits of my memory are combined with created memories. As the definition of dream states, “dreams are a succession of images, ideas, emotions and sensations occurring involuntarily in the mind…” I wish to transport the viewer into this dreamlike space by immersing them in my world.

My first TV appearance

I was interviewed in December for the show pARTicipate: The Cultural Advantage and the film has been edited and now available online and on Orange TV between programs! I was a little nervous and realized that I didn't smile enough, but I guess thats ok. I also couldn't seem to find the right words for some answers because my mind went blank, but I did the best I could do.
Tada!

pARTicipate!-The Cultural Advantage - Brittany Metz

It's coming along!

The theme has been defined---------- Memory and my lack of memory

a 6 page outline so far that I will keep adding to, in hopes that it will form a paper :-)

Thesis, Thesis, Thesis

I am so nervous about this semester! I first need to make some work for the thesis show and then write the thesis paper! Ugh, this is going to be hard but it will all be over around the end of March, which is actually pretty scary because we all didn't realize that the show was like half way through the semester and not at the end. Buuuuuuut, this means that after the show we have a month-ish where we don't have to do much of anything and focus on getting jobs!!!!! I am stuck right now on the theme of my thesis or should I say the thesis of my thesis. I should be meeting with the chair of my committee any day now and will be pointed in the right direction. Until then, I will start writing the portion about myself and my past because that is something I know somewhat about (haha, I don't have the best memory, it's kind of sad).

Unlike the my peers, I have never really had a strong theme or series in my work. I am always all over the place and always will be. For those of you who know me, I don't really like talking about the meaning of my work and most times do not think that I have an intended meaning in my work. My work has always been about process, materials, color, texture, and design. I guess I shouldn't try to force anything else and just write about exactly what I just said. I am an honest person and am not good at "BS-ing", so it might be in my best interest to be myself and write what I know. This will make it easier to defend my thesis. Oh yes, did I mention that we have a thesis defense. This is when you stand in front of your 3 committee members who try to attack you and question you to death about what you wrote. That is what I am most scared of. I not a great writer and I am an even worse speaker! I will get through it, I always do. I just want to get through it with the least amount of stress possible, which means no procrastinating and being completely ready for what is coming way before it gets here :-)

Wish Me Luck!