Coloured Persepctive: Installation Project
This project was geared towards designing an artistic instalation somewhere around the University of Guelph campus. My design featured a column with a stained glass leaf atop of it, in a variety of four colours, to cast colour upon the grey picnic area. Inspired by works of Olafur Elaisson and his study of light and colour. Created using SketchUp software.
"Olafur Elaisson works heavily with the use of colour, natural light, and the perception of the viewer. All of these elements drew my attention to his work and I wanted my sculpture to reflect some of the key ideas he proposes. The area outside of Zavitz Hall with the picnic-style tables does not offer any shade, except for the umbrellas that campus only puts up a few months out of the year. My original idea was to have a sculpture to produce a sense of shade and colour. My idea developed into large streetlight forms with a shape on top of them resembling a leaf. The leaf would be stained glass, each one coloured either red, yellow, orange, or green. They would hover above the tables in that area and the sunlight would shine through them, casting coloured hues in different parts of that area. To support the leaf would be two prongs, hiding beneath the leaf. The material for the entire supporting structure would be metal, the leaf itself being stained glass. The purpose of my sculpture is to have the viewers perception changed of their surrounding area. The picnic table area is mildly mundane, but with these sculptures it could add a splash of colour to the grey concrete- even in the cold of the winter."
Inspiration:
Drawn Quarters, 2021
An amalgamation of conscious and subconscious exploration, these works connect on the basis of shared group experience over the course of an extremely tumultuous year. Each artist has worked tirelessly to form a unique collection of pieces that speak to their own interests, musings, pain, and expressions.
"Olivia Krampien is a student-artist working on exploring the settings developed within the subconscious mind. Through dream analysis and careful rendering, she brings eerie yet beautiful settings to life. Facing these settings has brought harsh realities to the attention of the artist, forcing her to look deeper into the cause and meaning behind these dreams.
Mental health is something that affects nearly 1 in 5 Canadians, according to the Canadian Mental Health Association. For those who experience struggles with anxiety, it is not uncommon to have this anxiety work its way into the unconscious mind, causing disturbing dreams and nightmares. Olivias works focus on the settings in which these nightmares took place. Repetitious dreams of running, hiding, and escaping often resulted in the cold sweat of an early morning panic. Cold metallic factory buildings are met with armed soldiers, isolated cabins offer no comfort or refuge.
In this series of both digital and graphite drawings, colour plays a large role in mood. Pale blues and dark hues bring an anxious atmosphere to the artists works, while vibrant oranges bring curiosity and moments of reassurance. The artist invites you to become aware of her process, leaving rough lines visible in a character sketch, suggesting the familiar practice of bringing graphite sketches into the digital world to be rendered. Each of the three locations, the cabin, the factory, and the beach house, explore different ways of rendering an environment to provoke an aura.
This collection of artworks will serve as a personal time capsule for the artist; a reflection on a time in which her mental state was fogged by the crippling environment she was immersed in. With her anxiety lessening, these repetitive dreams have since come to an end, making the creation of the art pieces crucial before they fade from memory with time."
Skate culture is a subject I studied throughout the year 2021. Its practice, origins, art-forms, unspoken-etiquettes, and legacies. Throughout my studies I created a collection of multi-media projects, such as drawn digital art, scholarly essays, and a zine.
Throughout the Fall 2021 semester at the University of Guelph, I created a website and blog to publish my studies. These research assignments included interactive maps, networking systems, timelines, and scholoarly papers. View the blog here!
A digital drawing created with the idea of reduction lino-block printmaing in mind. Each colour would be a different layer to pull off of the block.
For my final assignment for CTS*2010 Digital Approaches to Culture, I chose to create a narrative using a zine.
A zine is an old tradition where an artist creates a simple, fast, completely unprofessional and unpolished book or magazine. They were intended to be copied several times and sold for next to nothing. Zines include both text and images, self-made drawings and cutouts from newspapers or magazines. Zines are small in size, they consist of eight pages are have a do-it-yourself quality. They started to appear in the 1930s and held anti-authoritarian messages. I thought it was a neat opportunity to tip my metaphorical hat to the origins of zines by using skateboarding as my theme because the sport holds some of the same rebellious, anti-authoritarian themes. It is also interesting to note that the historical value of zines is now being recognized, thanks to the ease of circulation via the internet. The sci-fi fascination of the 60s (Star Trek), the punk scene surrounding the 70s and 80s influenced popular zines such as Slash, Dazed, and Sniffin' Glue, focusing on the culture surrounding punk music, and the grungy, dirty zines of the 90s. Today zines cover ever theme imaginable, with the influence of social media and the ease of shared information, zines are not limited to one aesthetic.
Throughout the construction of this zine it was so cool to see how skateboarding has morphed and changed over the decades. In the 60s, the teens that essentially invented the sport were immediately slapped on the wrist because their 'hooligan' activity would interrupt traffic and lead to lots of injuries, especially because of the clunky clay wheels. Its resurgence in the 70s is what made skateboarding globally recognized. This is where large companies started popping up and capitalizing on the skate craze. Inventors and innovators made the boards slick and modern, and new polyurethane wheels enhanced the abilities of the board. Skateboarding really evolved from a hobby to a sport in the late 70s and throughout the 80s when legitimate competitions were circulating globally. The punk scene in the 80s led to the stigma surrounding skaters and their image. I argue, though, that the 90s was the prime decade for rebellion among the skating community. Cities were littered with 'no skateboarding' signs, every shop owners worst nightmare was a group of loitering, pot-smoking skaters outside their storefront. It is kind of funny to reflect on that, as I am a product of the 2000s, it is hard to imagine that many kids outside to begin with.
The days of kids and teens wreaking havoc throughout town died in the early 2000s, and especially now in 2021, the culture is completely different. Skaters aren’t bad anymore, they are not out smashing windows and tagging walls. Instead, our modern day of skate birthed a new culture, one of inclusion. While half of the people on social media are skating for the aesthetic (do it for the gram), everyone genuinely has good intentions with the sport. As of 2021, skateboarding was included in the Olympics for the first time in history. It is now a respected sport, whereas in the 90s there would be no way in hell it would be part of something so official and traditional as the Olympics. Skaters were punks. Well, skaters are still punks, but they are good people. People of all age, race, gender, size are in skateparks. You cannot lump skaters into a category anymore (one of male-dominated vandals) because absolutely everyone out there is different. Videos circulate around the internet of teenage boys holding the hands of little girls trying a ramp for her first time at the skatepark. Strangers helping strangers. This is the skateboarding culture of 2021, one that has changed and morphed over the decades, and I am so excited about it.
