Author: druzzi

sophomore studying Art & Design looking to start a conversation this semester about what art is, what it may be, what it can be, etc., in hopes to expand people's knowledge on how art consumes our lives

AAFF through a B&W lens

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This past week, the Ann Arbor Film Festival(AAFF), “the oldest avant-garde and experimental film festival in North America”(just to point out), was held at The Michigan Theater. I am currently taking a first year seminar on the Ann Arbor Film Festival, so it was only right if I volunteered. I signed up for normal shifts where I had to hand out audience ballots, check tickets, count how many people attended a competition, etc. In addition, I also signed up to be a photographer not out of having experience, but rather just my enjoyment of taking pictures.

In my film seminar, we just finished up a project on the archives of the festival–held at the Bentley Historical Library on North Campus–where I found numerous film strips of black and white candid pictures. These images reflected the joy and energy of the festivals community and it was my goal to try and capture shots just like them.

On Tuesday, I was nervous, excited, and felt like I was going to vurp(a term I learned from the magical movie Wreck It Ralph! hehe). Just bringing myself and my fujifilm x100f I was scared I was not going to get the right pictures, however my motivation triumphed my fear. Furthermore, the energy of the room was immaculate that there was no way not to capture unique shots. The lobby of the theater was filled with filmmakers, professors, cinema buffs, and AAFF super fans. Everyone was talking to someone and the whole place was filled with laughter and interesting discussions of what was to come.

After putting on my badge(my lanyard that said photographer), I felt invisible to the community, which was PERFECT. I got to dip into the AAFF lifestyle while not actually having to be in it but rather observe it. Behind the lense, I felt pretty powerful and also like I was watching history happen. This experience was extremely special to me and I hope to work further with the festival and maybe eventually be apart of the community in addition to observing it.

Please look at my pictures on my website and like them so I feel accomplished and so this blog can be inspirational 🙂

https://breeandruzzi.myportfolio.com/photographs

SHORT observation on my perspective of lyrics

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I don’t know if this is extremely unusual but when I listen to a song, I tend to be initially attracted to it based off of its beat and sound rather than words. I listen to feel some sort of connection inside of me. I imagine water inside of me doing a dance. It crashes and swirls as the beat drops and picks up again. I also enjoy the feeling of a speaker playing music. Some of my friends have cylinder speakers that have circles on the ends of them, which move to the beat of the song. I can’t remember how it happened, but one day we started placing the speaker on our chest to feel the thud of the circle. My heart and chest were pounding, and all I wanted to do was dance to the “pound” of the beat instead of worrying about the lyrics.

For Arts Ambassadors this week, we hosted Omar Offendum, a Syrian American hip-hop artist, designer, and poet, for Dinner With An Artist. Throughout the dinner we talked about his unique cultural story and his career but what struck out to me is when he made a comment about how, “Music isn’t just that lyrical today.” As a hip-hop artist and performer, he creates music to inspire not just with his beats but with his words. At the end of his dinner he showed us his music video for, “Close My Eyes”, which “is a lyrical / visual reflection of immigration, fatherhood, mortality, Syria, America, & Mother Nature” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o4hVgPnFpE). He is an artist who seeks action with telling his story mainly through words. The formulation he creates helps him come to terms with what is happening and has happened in the world, as well as giving him ideas to create change.

In addition to his music video, we watched him perform live for us. Both the video and performance were incredible and mesmerizing poems. His tempo and annunciation of some words while fading or talking quickly over others allowed the audience to hear what he wants us to pinpoint. Furthermore, his imperfect rhymes and story he chose/chooses to tell make the song absorbable. While watching him perform his art, instead of listening to the beat first, I listened to the words to carry me through.

Our Dinner With An Artist event with Omar Offendum enlightened me with his story but also about how I need to be more aware of what I am listening to. That is not to say I am completely drawing back from my usual listening style, but instead, I am going to try enjoying and appreciating the song for both its lyrics and “pound”.

P.S. Please check out Omar Offendum’s music. Click here to view, “Close My Eyes”.

 

The Confusion of Making Something Instagrammable

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Right now in my Stamps “Methods of Inquiry” class, we are working on a project about making Stamps more “Instagrammable”. “What does this mean?”, you make ask, and to that I give you the answer, “I have no dang flabbit idea.”

At first I believed this meant cleaning up how Stamp’s markets themselves online. As a genZ child I understand how organizations, businesses, and schools brand themselves based off of how they display themselves online. I know what reaches out to the ideal audience because I am a part of that group and know what I as well as others seek for. Many people look up schools to see if they have an aesthetically pleasing account and show them what they are looking for and are interested in. When looking at Stamp’s page, you see randomly scattered low quality images of events happening at Stamps and also “Stamps Takeover” posts where they have an artist or student take over the instagram for an amount of time to share their own work.

When I got this project, my first ideas were to not stray from what they were already posting but instead to post them in a more visually pleasing way, especially because we are in an art school. I thought of the profile picture, bio, and not just the pictures themselves but how they looked as a collection on the school’s feed. After drawing out ideas of creating a more aesthetic art school page, I asked my professor how they were and he told me what I did NOT want to hear, I had interpreted the project wrong.

Great.

He explained how he meant that he wanted me to create a unique event or a unique sculpture for Stamps that people would want to post about. So, instead of making Stamp’s Instagram better I needed to make other people want to post about it on their own accounts. After hearing this(and still being confused), I started coming up with ideas of community themed projects to create a long continuous trend for making Stamps Instagrammable hoping this war right. I was then assigned a team in part two of this project and we came up with a comfortable study space with a cafe for people to study in and do teamwork while sipping on some nice cold(or warm I don’t judge) java.

On Wednesday, my team and I gave a presentation on our idea and my professor was confused on the overall process of our idea(which made me nervous I would have to rethink the project all over again) but came to really like it when we showed him all the space had to offer including a sticker wall, cafe, couch seats, moveable tables, and a rug(success). The rug was a real winner for him. I thought the space needed a rug instead of concrete floors like most rooms so that students could study in a more home like room. Whether or not one thinks about how the floor’s material affects our mood, it does indeed change our thoughts on if we want to stay some place or leave. The color also changes our perspective of a room but I have not gotten to the point of what color I want it to be. I believe warm tones would bring a weird aesthetic to the room and I think I will end up with a dark navy but who knows. Tomorrow we have a poster due and will receive feedback on it before a final review of our entire project. Wish me good luck my friends and thanks for listening!

 

P.S.

Although I now understand what the project is and how to complete it after my confusion of the assignment, I still can’t get my mind off of how the real Stamps Instagram looks. Therefore, if any of you Stamps employees are reading this, hire me. I would love to help recreate the page with current posts enhanced.

Sincerely your curious, odd, and wonderful student,

druzzi

 

Jessie Reyez: The Strong Voice We Didn’t Know We Need.

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If you are a casual listener to pop radio you have probably heard the song Figures. However, do you know the artist behind the smooth and powerful melody, Jessie Reyez? This brilliant and blazing woman was born and raised in Ontario, Canada, by Columbian parents. Her father taught her how to play guitar at a young age and in high school she started writing songs. When she was seventeen, Jessie endured her first real breakup and poured her emotions into her writing and music. She has written about the pain and hurt she experienced and how she wants to reciprocate it but doesn’t. Although never going through a harsh breakup, listening to these songs makes me feel like I have. The vibe and mood combined with her well written lyrics allows me to connect with her experience and connect it to myself. In addition in some of her songs, one can see her strong personality, and how she is an individual who cuts negativity out of her life and carves her own path.

Reyez has a raspy voice that can change from a low smooth sound to a soulful high pitched ring. Some may find her voice annoying and others will listen and hear an exposed and organic god-like sound. Her songs are poetic and her decisions of where she sings low to high makes each song powerful. In the song Apple Juice, the rhythm she created and the words she sings makes you want to sway and shout out the lyrics. Jessie Reyez’s songs can vibrate through your whole body and her words make you feel understood and connected. Her recent EP release, Being Human In Public, is a raw depiction of her emotions. I 10/10 would recommend listening to it in a car with the windows down and driving over a bridge. Shouting the words is also encouraged.

Jessie Reyez creatively writes her songs while staying true to herself. She adds artistic flare with her unique voice but also by incorporating her true feelings although they might be judged. In addition, on her recent EP album, she has a song Sola, sung and written in Spanish. Although in another language, an individual can easily infer it is Reyez by not only the sound but her style and message. I cannot speak or understand Spanish but Sola is one of my favorite songs by her. Her emotion and melody make me feel pain and love. I like to close my eyes and sway when listening to the soft and bold piece.

Reyez has attracted fans internationally through her feminine bops and powerful responses about life. She has been nominated for many best new artist of the year awards and has won the Juno Award for Breakthrough Artist. Her followers have escalated to one million on instagram in the past year, and she will continue to grow with special character.

vegetable soup and the game telephone

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It is day 2 of break. I am currently at my grandparents, listening to Italian music(on Alexa because they are cool), and watching my grandma cook me vegan options for dinner(vegetable soup). We talk about things going on and every so often she will say things like, “You can’t have ham either right?”, “No milk?! What do you drink or even eat then? Almond milk, that’s disgusting.”, or “Can you have cheese? Oh my goodness what am I going to give you for lunch then?” I am sitting at a nearby table as we talk, typing away on my computer about things on my mind.

My post(ramble) today is about one of the subjects on my mind right now, history. Enjoy!

History is one of the most significant topics to be educated about and don’t get me wrong I love history but it is without a doubt one of the weirdest concepts to me. We need to know about our pasts in order to learn how to create a better future but I am always curious if what we are taught about history is the truth.

As a kid, everyone plays the game telephone. Someone starts off with a saying and everyone whispers into the next person’s ear what they heard. By the end something like “chicken noodle soup” can turn into “fruit of the loom underwear”. I used to love it because I enjoyed how each time the original saying got altered in some sort of way. With history books, media, and news, I am constantly interested if it is created from a continuous game of telephone and if the only people who can seek the actual truth are the individuals who were involved in the event.

In a conversation with my uncle yesterday, he began to ask if I knew that before the horrible Transatlantic Trade occurred, that poor people from multiple countries were the original individuals to first work in the colonies. I told him I had known that and he told me he had just discovered this. This discussion began me going off into a spiral of what I have and have not been taught. All the little events or even secrets not contained in documents, on file, and unable to be taught to anyone. Or the stories recently discovered, taught to the younger generation but not to me. My deepest concerns and curiosities are about all of the things the first Americans did on the colonies and what people have done to less evolved cultures that I don’t know about or will never know about.

A couple of weeks ago in my Art History lecture, my professor explained how in many famous artworks cultural appropriation can be found. In Pablo Picasso’s, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, one can easily see the five nude prostitutes he had painted but if you were to look at their faces what would it remind you of? We were told that Picasso studied many African masks and he had been inspired by them to paint these women with faces like the masks. In previous art history classes I was taught that his form of cubism created these faces. This was the first time I was educated about how he had taken someone else’s culture and profited off of it by making it look like his own style. I wondered how many other artists had done this and how we could ever find out if we didn’t have a direct link.

I would count myself as a student or rookie in learning and talking about stolen cultural identity and other topics relating to examining history. I believe no one really questions our history but rather if they do in conversation, they shove it away quickly because it is confusing. I have done this multiple times because looking at history under a lens is difficult and sometimes leaves me with unanswered questions. I think in the future many should question what is truthful and try to gather all the information we have to connect the dots of our past. Although I don’t know much about this topic as you can probably tell, this doesn’t stop me from being interested about it and branching off into thought about it, even when my grandma is cooking me soup.

All Aboard!

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By far one of my favorite things that comes along with being a student here is going to the Penny W. Stamps Speaker Series on Thursday nights at the Michigan Theater. All Stamps students are required to go every week, and others outside of the Art and Design school are welcome to come to the free event as well. The speaker series was founded by alumna, Penny W. Stamps, and it is a collective of professional creators from a wide range of art fields. The Stamps Series always creates some sort of inspiration and that is one of the many reasons why it has a special place in my heart.

This week a Seattle based artist, Clyde Peterson came to speak. His medium is usually animation but he dabbles with multimedia work to spread word of his stories and his music.

Routinely, before I go to the lecture I look up the artist who is speaking. Clyde is a part of the transgender and queer community, has created an animated feature length film, and has won a bunch of awards. I was excited for this lecture, and as soon as he stepped on stage and began his casual conversation like speech I became thrilled. His way of speaking was refreshing because he wasn’t talking down to anyone in the audience but rather with us. Clyde began to tell stories of his college life and how he began as a filmmaker and animator. He has one specific project that stood out to me the most called, Boating With Clyde.

It began 10 years ago and rather than his animation films this is a “nautical adventure series” created by Peterson, that presents musicians and artists from all over the world on the waterways of Puget Sound in Seattle(https://www.clydepetersen.com/bio). The area where the shows take place only allows row boats, so Clyde decided to create a community that bonds over making music on the water in this uncomfortable yet beautiful place. He took videos of these performances and made the project be an installation at a gallery by “tricking” them with creating a set for the film. After the first gallery accepted Boating with Clyde, it was easier to get more opportunities for this project. Clyde explained in his presentation that he loves engaging with the project, hence why it has gone on for ten years. He goes in and out of working on this project but he always seems to come back to it because of his love for what he and others have built off of it. He has a “do what you want and love” personality, which has made him struggle with money at times but overall enjoy what he is doing with his life. Clyde Peterson, is an inspiration because of the way he freely has chosen to live life and create art.

Although I have mainly talked about Boating With Clyde, Clyde Peterson has also created many other unique projects which can be found on his website. In addition, checkout his instagram @fuck_you_im_clyde_petersen !!!