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Sunday I will present my Senior Recital and I’m scared.

I have never been one to get nervous before a performance: shaking and breathing heavily as I struggle to get the nerve to walk out on stage. Or to panic the night before, jumping out of bed to check my score unsure of whether it was an eighth or a quarter note rest.

No, I have never had these concerns. Of course I’ve gotten the usual butterflies but I have always refused to acknowledge them as nerves. No, I never get nervous – only anticipatory.

Yesterday, nerves and that little voice in your head that says “I can’t” got the better of me and I struggled to get my head in “the right place”. I wasn’t able to function as a person, let alone as a singer, and for the first time in a long time I was scared: scared of the future, of jaw tension, and tuning, scared that I would forget the words to pieces memorized weeks and months before, and scared that I wouldn’t be enough. Enough of a singer, enough of a performer – simply that I wouldn’t be good enough to met the expectations of family that has financed my education, friends who have heard incessant chatter about Anna Netrebko for the past four years and my own lofty expectations.

For me, the difference between this recital and every other performance that I’ve done is simple and boils down to two main points: the sheer quantity of music and the fact that on Sunday it will be just me on stage. On Sunday there will be no costumes or sets to hide behind, no co-star to steal the lime light and no blocking to distract from the fact that it is Alexandria up on stage – not Phyllis or Brooke or Servillia. This vulnerability is what frightens me. If the audience doesn’t approve, there is no character or director to blame – just me.

I know that things will be fine on Sunday – better than fine. I am well prepared and love the music which I am presenting. Now all that remains is to turn the lingering butterflies into anticipation for what is sure to be an amazing day.

Check out the Ann Arbor Film Festival this week. The AAFF is one of the premiere experimental film festivals in the Northwest.

Experimental cinema, unlike Narrative or Art film, lacks a consistent set of artistic practices. By nature, experimental film eschews coherent meaning, lengths, times. It is far easier, therefore, to define experimental cinema by what it is not than by what it is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YhmrD7J7ZI

In Europe, post world war one, Surrealists such as Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel argued used the ability to jump across varying imagery and soundscapes to explore the dreamlike and ephemeral quality of film. Un Chien Andalou is a classic Surrealist film which delves into the Oedipal complex, social anxiety towards violence.

In the US, Stan Brakhage, a reclusive filmmaker refusing to engage in the dominant narrative practices of Hollywood, worked with film reels by hand – adding ink drawings or even moth wings onto the film strips to explore how abstract imagery could be interpolated over elapsed time – literally decorating time and space with his creative vision.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaGh0D2NXCA

The Canadian film board subsidized work for many talented animators. Norman McLaren is a particularly prolific figure in Canadian experimental and animated film, working for over 30 years with hand-drawn film strips.

I highly recommend attending the Ann Arbor Film Festival this week to see how these early experimental artists’ legacies have continued to influence a broad-based and versatile form of self-expression!

As a senior working on his thesis project in the Stamps School of Art & Design, I’ve been (obsessively) thinking about different ways to display artwork. Outside of the traditional gallery setting, the general public has more access to art than ever before – most artists have portfolio websites, or galleries documenting exhibitions in their spaces, in addition to physical forms of “takeaway” objects meant to summarize the work through postcards and artist books.

This past weekend marked the opening of Stamps MFA exhibitions – the third year students’ shows taking place in the Stamps gallery spaces (Slusser here on north campus, and Work down on central), as well as a warehouse in Hamtramck and a smaller gallery further inside Detroit; while the first year graduate students showed their initial ideation processes and studies in the faculty studios on Green Rd. here in Ann Arbor. On Thursday, the school provided a bus for us undergrads to travel out to Detroit to see the two separate venues, spending about 45 minutes at each location before concluding the adventure where it began outside of the Michigan Theatre.

The first stop was the giant Hamtramck warehouse space, where the work of artists Joshua Nierodzinski, Natasa Prljevic, and Cosmo Whyte will be up for the coming weeks. The art itself was well done, consisting of paintings, an installation of images, sound, and video, as well as a multimedia collection of prints and sculpture. However, I couldn’t help but feel more overwhelmed by the building itself, only three rooms of which were occupied out of what must have been thousands of square feet and at least ten floors of space. I don’t think it made the work look bad by any means, but perhaps it would have had a bit more of that “wow” factor had the warehouse not dwarfed the focus of the show itself. For me, the saving grace of the exhibition was an artist booklet that was put together by a local publisher in collaboration with the artists, which included more detailed explanations, process photos, and high quality documentation of the work. In contrast to the warehouse-turned-gallery space, it seemed obvious that the format and size of the book was created to fit the art inside it, not the other way around. And for a small fee ($20), anyone could essentially take the show with them and revisit its contents whenever they wanted.

I was immediately struck by the possibility of a book acting as an almost custom, portable gallery space. Of course, art is always better when experienced in person, but especially for someone who was able to make it to the actual exhibition, a book serves as a trigger for the memory of the tangible objects and images it represents. Working in tandem, it seems to be the perfect combination. So much so that I’ve since decided that in addition to the thesis paper I’m required to write about my “project”, I’ll be putting together a sort of thesis zine to act similarly as a takeaway of the work, including process images and writing that the viewer wouldn’t get otherwise.

Sometimes I have nightmares that all the gallery spaces will be filled up, torn down, or taken over by the wrong kind of crowd and that my work will have no place to go. It’s comforting to be reminded that art can live in between the public and private realms of culture, and that if nobody wants to show it, I can at least clear out my room for a photoshoot and pass out booklets to my friends and family. That is, until I’m able to open up a gallery myself 😉

http://www.nierodzinski.com/

http://www.natasaprljevic.com/

http://www.cosmowhyte.com/

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We stare down what looks like a tunnel void of anything but an eery bluish light. The camera tightens in and what is revealed to us isn’t a dark deserted road, or orbs of light, we’re looking at something a little more frightening: a single person with his face in the palm of his hand sitting on a living room couch. The music video is set up in a ghostly glow with us encircling and frequently squared , face-to-face with Earl Sweatshirt. Earl is talking to us, one-on-one. He’s imploring us to hear him out. We follow him as he staggers, one hand graced with a lit blunt and the other tracing a guiding wall. The video for Grief by Earl Sweatshirt was dropped on March 17th and has already racked up over half a million views. Additionally, the album art as well as the single were dropped (reportedly too early) to iTunes on the 17th available for pre-order. The point of this post? The album is expected tomorrow March 23rd. I implore you: buy. the. album.

Earl is a talented, unparalleled, and extremely young rapper than I am in awe of every single time I turn on Chum and now when I turn on Grief. The young rapper was discovered by rapper/producer/designer Tyler, the Creator as early as 2009 (which would put him at a mere 15 years-old at the time) and immediately turned on to Odd Future’s unreleased mixtape. Earl’s beats are enough to make you swallow–hard. They pump your heart for you with their deep thuds and swirling mids. Grief in particular forces me to close my eyes every time I press play. The second the song begins the true sound of his mix cannot be described in a word any better than Grief. The sound is somber, it’s brooding, its brow-furrowing. You want to take up the same posture as Earl when you see the way he’s doubled over on what could be his mother’s couch. His genius is only further by his lyrics:

We had females come in every hour on the dot
And the shit sound like a gavel when it knock
Focus on my chatter, ain’t as frantic as my thoughts
Lately I’ve been panicking a lot
Feeling like I’m stranded in a mob
Scrambling for Xanax out the canister to pop
Never getting out of hand, steady handling my job
Time damaging my ties

The young rapper, now 21, is about to drop his second LP in a few hours. The artwork is as dark and brooding as the music video: a black plane lit only by white ghostly light in the distance. The track list is reported to include:

1. Huey
2. Mantra
3. Faucet
4. Grief
5. Off Top
6. Grown Ups (ft. Dash)
7. AM // Radio (ft. Wiki)
8. Inside
9. Dna (ft. Na’kel)
10. Wool (ft. Vince Staples)

If you’re about truthful lyrics, about a young man fighting demons with art, about truth and perfectly-under-hyped music, I cannot point you towards Earl Sweatshirt enough. Whether you like rap or not, our peer is turning out truly astonishing beats and lyrics. Tyler was right to take him under his wing. SONY is right to have signed him. He is a poet, tortured like any other and more than deserving of kudos.