Friday, May 2, 2014

Artist Lecture: Jill Wissmiller

4/17/2014
Jill Wissmiller is well known for her current portraits made out of glitter. She is the head of the digital media department in Memphis College of Art. Although she is well known for the glitter portraits, she began with shorts and movies. In her lecture, she talked about her short films/scenes that she's done. Boots showed how important anger is. The audio in this short was hard to hear and understand. Hair Horse was about how women cannot control their lives, so they control their hair. Jill had never directed humans before this, so directing herself was the first step. Tiny Hatchet Hidden in Muff was about a different kind of anger. It implied violence. The short was unsuccessful because there was too much reading involved in it. There was a back story about what lead to the short that lost the viewer. It took too long to read and digest. Welcome to Cooksville was a feature screen play that had been shot in only four days. In those four days, she managed to kill off all of her characters in the story. The film had too much excess, she tried to cram too many things into one film. This made the film loose sight of what it was trying to do. The film had no soul, but Wissmiller said that it taught her a lot as a director. She then went on to the eight different article types, the different kinds of columns one may see in a magazine. She demonstrated these through shorts.
The Quiz was the first article type, and she choose to focus on "Do you love your breasts?" The short consisted on a little girl grinding the breasts off of a Barbie doll on the sidewalk. The little girl was trying to make the doll look like herself. The Quick Fix Way to Improve Life Enforcement article translated into a girl who thought her boyfriend was cheating on her. In order to make him love her, she does a bunch of voodoo tasks in order to fix the relationship. Jill didn't cover every article, but they both were interesting.
In closing she talked about her glitter works. She choose a guy from her high school, and had him dance in a cowboy hat. She also had her good friend Lily think about a love gone wrong. It turned into projecting the image onto a glitter surface.

Final Project: Carson Cards

For the final project, I was allowed to choose any project I wanted to work on, as long as it included certain tools. Wanting a break from all of the conceptual mundane projects, I chose to create something just for fun; greeting cards. I began by researching pickup lines and sayings. Once I choose a few, I illustrated them and scanned them into Photoshop. I cleaned up the outlines and colored them separately. I decided I wanted to put the watercolor like strokes on the inside of the card without an outline. On some of them, not all, I wrote the pick up line on the inside of the card interacting with the design itself. The shark card is the only one that is without a pick up line on the inside since it is in the shark’s mouth. The cards are about control. When making the outlines for the cards, I had to be careful in making the outline clean. When it came to coloring the cards, I let go and didn't worry about coloring outside of the lines. The two of them together create a balance that relates to the final days in the digital class. It relates to how important it is to have control and
determination in your life but how you also need to live and have fun. I feel like the outlines, the color, and the subject matter all communicate this idea. I feel like each design is successful on it’s own, but it looks even better together; as a series. Three of the cards are marine animal related, while one is unrelated. The ice cream was meant to confuse viewers. The piece relates to control and letting go.