False Dichotomy is beginning to truly take form! I have artists agreeing to show, essays coming in from respected members of the fine art printmaking community, and a site in place! There is a lot to do: I have to find funding to print a decent catalog–but I feel so renewed. I have not been able to make a lot of work myself this year, but I can contribute through facilitation and research!
I am currently working on an app for anyone who wants to learn more about Typography. It draws upon the research I have done in classrooms around New York City, the photos I compulsively take of found type, and what I know of interaction design. This effort is all coming together under the title Type for All, an all encompassing welcome into Typography using key hand skill-based lessons and living examples from the streets of Brooklyn. The resulting tablet app is being prototyped and tested this year. Origins: Letterform Tracing When I started teaching Typography 1, I was shocked to find most of my students had no real hand skill training: they had no confidence or endurance when it came to learning how to see or draw letterforms. I have to act fast. Tracing letters was doing nothing to help them. I finally realized that using a scaffolded grid exercise could give just enough support to the students as they realized their own ability and gained confidence. My original writeup of my work Origins: Handcarved Type I also discovered …
I have started an internship program for City Tech students at the Gowanus Studio Space: two students from the Communications Design Department are currently working hard and learning much in the way of printmaking in return. The interns do 7 hours of work in exchange for a set 3 hour block of time in the print studio. We are still tweaking the details, but this mix is working. I hope to get the internship recognized by the City Tech Communication Design Department as a viable opportunity so I can get the students college credit.
As I develop my practice as a design educator, I find there are some core ideas that I find I must get across to my students: Work with the tools you were born with before the ones you buy Play without fear every single time Good enough is not good enough when you can do better Give a damn every day and you can change the world This all really started back when I wrote my Master’s Thesis in the form of a personal manifesto for the 2D Design program at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Here follows a shortened version: MONSTRESS MANIFESTO Repeat each day you are a cultural producer. I state the (personally) obvious. I remember the audience is my equal. I remind the audience we all choose what we believe. I invite evaluation and interaction. I sell no empty dreams of Perfection. I believe and believe. I CHANGE THE WORLD. This creed has served me well as a professional, as a parent, and as a citizen. It has been the core ethos I …
I and Dr. Xiaohai (Richard) Li are starting a collaboration at the New York City College of Technology and have dubbed this effort EAT Lab: we are hoping to blend our separate disciplines into a cohesive whole, wherein we will create projects that incorporate emerging technologies using the criteria of installation art in order to create truly moving and potentially transformative experiences. We are still developing the idea, but steam is certainly building. Our mission: EAT Lab exists to use emerging technologies and the sensibilities of art in order to build novel experiences while enabling the user to become full collaborators.
Monstress Productions the name under which I create my conceptual art and design work. Established in 1996 as a zine label, it has grown to encompass several pursuits: printmaking, interaction design, and education among them. I create work that bridges the haptic and the virtual in order to change the world, one person at a time. I do this with my series of conceptual paper/interaction products, which I have been making for about 15 years now. These pieces have slowly grown to encompass interactivity in the form of websites and phone apps as I have sought to combine all of my skills. I work to connect traditional fine art printmaking with newer technologies, always drawing a correlation between the physical and the conceptual. In order to make this work, I studied propaganda, advertising methods, packaging traditions, and western product design. It seemed logical to learn the most pervasive means of spreading ideas in our culture in order to disperse a few of my own. I moved on to Utopian theories, confidence games, placebo studies, and good old …
The Ennui Free project consists of a printed sign and an accompanying website. The user hangs the sign up in a prominent place and begins to mark off the days spent ennui free. On days where he/she is struggling, the user goes to the website for suggestions on how to maintain the ennui-free state. The user is invited to contribute his/her own suggestions, which are then added to the database. Medium: Screenprint, website Completed: February 14, 2013
Here & Now is a multifaceted project: the user receives a sticker set, imprinted with the words Here and Now. He/she then places these prominently around his/her life. Later, these stickers serve as prompts to snap to the Here & Now, thus helping the user to develop present-mindedness. There was also an iPhone app: the user would take a picture of the sticker in use, geo-tags and labels it, and thus record his/her Here & Now for others to see. These were then stored on the website as an ongoing record of the project. Dimensions: 3.5″ diameter, closed Framed: 12″ x 12″ Medium: Letterpress, diecut, website, phone app Completed: August 2012