When and how did you get interested in Media Arts?

Two or three years ago my friends and I got invited to go party on the train tracks with the Barnum and Baily circus, so we went rode our bikes down to the tracks and met up with the people who play the part of clowns and Burlesque Dancers and such. Well long story short, we ended up partying to hard for the circus to have them eventually kick us out which then ended up into a brawl where the train master hit my friend C.J. in the face. I don’t remember much what happened after the fact, but I think that had something to do with me ending up in Media Arts. I wonder what Michelangelo Buonarroti would do in that instance. These times are weird. All times are weird.



Tell me about your recent piece entitled "Equals".

Well, it’s a three channel installation in which I worked with the composer Daryl Seaver(shes a music library monk). It’s about how things can be the same but different, and how one thing can be everything. From a man and a women bumping into each other, to having connected personal moments and then becoming disconnected. The same action and same shots being repeated but what happens when the roles are switched. From colors from within the scenes becoming matte colors that frame different channels that go in and out of sync which could be the same image manipulated different ways within the broken narrative and outside of it. The idea for the sound was that we would have two speaker channels that would be synchronous to the visual and then a separate track on the two speaker channels behind the viewer, so that every time you watched the same piece you would be watching a different piece from before. Eisenstein said something along the lines of you have to hear the visual and see the music. Watch it for yourself, I’m not that good at explaining my work, or else I wouldn’t have to make work, I could just write it down on paper and hand it to you. You need to ask yourself the questions.



What is your process, is it different from doing a drawing or sculpture?

Yes. It’s takes pieces from drawing and sculpture, but the main form of the medium for me is space and time and how I position the viewer within that context. It’s more like writing poetry or a composition. I come up with an idea or images and then write them down and then from there sketch out the piece and figure out everything from the positioning of the viewer and how they will view it optically, like mannerism painters such Gian Paolo Lomazzo who were concerned about perspective, to also what the viewer will hear the order they will hear things and the space between that frames the individual parts and also the whole. Then from there attempt to make what is in my sketchbook real. I always think as big as I can and then condense down because of logistics. While I am in the process of creating the work it can come out exactly what I have in my book or totally different, I am open to mistakes and ‘chance operations’, haha, because I feel that is part of life as well in making art. That’s why I spell my name with a j instead of an I for my work because I like the idea of having a misspelling becoming the correct spelling, even your name/title isn’t perfect. Everything is a paradox. But anyways, from there I go into the editing room and review everything and make the final adjustments and tweaks, like writing a rough draft and finalizing. Then its up to the viewer to get lost in their head, and hopefully leave with more questions than when they came in. I hope that answers the question.

Any plans for after school?

Graduate School! More School! Haha. I would like to become a professor so I can keep making work as well as being a career artist. I like the idea of having students. I envision it like Socrates and his disciples, even though I’m nowhere near as genius as that man but ha you get the picture.

What planet would you move to if you had to leave Earth?

Well, If I had to leave, I’m assuming that world is in pretty bad condition and everything and everyone is going to have to start over. For sure I wouldn’t be making art, I’d probably take over one of Jupiter’s moons, if I had the chance.

Kevin (Kevjn) Kelly is 21 years old, a senior at the Hartford Art School who also works at the Hans Weiss Newspace gallery at Manchester Community College. On his free time he enjoys listening to birds, going to gift shops, and preparing meals for the kids.

What do you study at the Hartford Art School?

I'm an Illustration major.

Tell us about your two pieces you had in the Goldfarb Exhibit? Does your experieneces outside of art impact your work, in what ways?

Although different in medium, both of my pieces in the Goldfarb Exhibition deal with the underlying ideas of my overall body of work. The Sky and the Sea is part of a group of paintings that depict individuals in the midst of heading somewhere. This painting is not meant to neglect the destination necessarily, but more importantly to call attention to the journey in itself. It was made for the cover of an album of music I wrote and recorded, illustrating the ideas and themes presented within the music. As an artist, there is nothing stopping you from conveying your train of thought. Different mediums are just different outlets that allow for a new look on a set of circumstances in order to more fully understand them as a whole.

At this point, that is why I make art. It is an attempt to capture an instant that embodies a period of time
in my life, it is putting something down so to have and to hold, to reflect upon and learn from. There will never be only one way to do this, only a better way.

Day focuses on how periods of time affect and play off of each other through the interaction of sewn swatches of fabric. The movable part establishes a relationship between the piece and the viewer who, through this connection, is covering the piece with a curtain. This act is intended to create an awareness of the fleeting quality of these passages while at the same time stressing the individual’s responsibility to and control over them. This quality, like in The Sky and the Sea, serves to call attention to the present moment and our command over it, wherever we may be adrift.



If you were to ship yourself in a package in the mail, to where would you address yourself?

If I were to ship myself in the mail I'd be addressed to: The moon.

Skylar Hughes studies Illustration at the Hartford Art School and comes from Connecticut.
He was recntly in the Goldfarb Exhibit at the Joseloff Gallery.

What do you study at the Hartford Art School and what year are you?
I’m currently a junior working for a B.F.A. in photography. I’ll be graduating in 2011.

Why photography and sculpture?
Sculpture was completely a new experience for me entering the school. I enjoy creating sculptural work but essentially I do it because for recreational reasons. It’s the complete opposite of photography and allows for my mind to think completely different. Sculpture has the capability of being therapeutic and allows for my mind to wander off and be detached from the daily commotions of life. Photography on the other hand is the opposite. It has been with me prior to entering high school when my sister allowed me to complete her photo assignments while she was going to high school. Photography allows for me to find a distinct connection with people around me. Creating photographs is addicting to me, almost like collecting baseball cards. I’ve created this self-prophecy in which I need to collect all these weird characters around New York City and have them by side, sort of a social acknowledgement of my upbringing as a New Yorker. In the case of photography I don’t think I chose to do it, it managed to find me. Photography allows for personal reflection, and although I completely value the opinion of all my viewers, ultimately I started to photograph for myself because it simply made me happy and kept my mind focused growing up. In the future I will always do photography and if my craft allows for me to make money while staying true to my myself, I couldn’t ask for more,

The whole idea of science and art side by side, working systematically together is very fulfilling. Photography is both technical and creative and without knowing one side of it

What is your current work about, any themes or central ideas?
January 12th, 2010, Ellen Carey’s “Picture Editing” class from the fall 2009 semester will be showing in Silpe Gallery at the Hartford Art School. My work, along with others students who participated in the class, will be showing. It was Ellen Carey’s first “Picture Editing” class so I hope everyone can make it and see what we’ve been working on. My current theme is anti-establishment portraiture. The direct response to the hippie movement was punk rock and rock & roll. These two groups of people are significant in our countries history because they are a reflection of the overall mood of our America at the time. I walk around New York City with my medium format Hasselblad and try to locate these sort of anti-establishment characters. After getting involved with a person in conversation I try to photograph them in the way I portrayed them. All my new work is done in color and printed in a darker, saturated tone to underscore the visual drama of my characters. The photo shoots are all brief and done one the street, unrehearsed, New York City being my backdrop for production.


Any advice for younger students interested in photography?
Giving advice to younger students is like giving them my ATM card pin; they’ll end up taking my money in the future. Just kidding. Photography isn’t like other fine arts, there’s a scientific approach as well as a technical approach. A photographer needs to constantly re-invent them selves by doing research on their peers and the art world. If you are having a mental block and aren’t sure where your photography is going the key is to keep shooting and looking at your contact sheets. You don’t know when and where the spark of inspiration will come from. Before deciding your major ask yourself why take a photograph, why not draw or paint it? Also don’t choose photography because you simply think it easier to take a photograph rather than drawing or sculpting because its not. You need to be assertive; photography takes time, patience, commitment and a tough skin


What's next for you and your work?
There are a few themes involving portraiture filtering through my mind at the time, the problem is choosing one. The anti-establishment portraiture is an ongoing project and I will continue in that area until I’ve exhausted its fullest potential. I might take a break from this particular theme when I graduate but I don’t predict an ending anytime soon. I’ll definitely continue shooting and exploring color. As for me, the future is unknown; I’m graduating in 2011 and hopefully continuing with my photography while maintaining a life-supporting job. Showing in fine art galleries is always going to be my priority and after taking a break from school I’ll go to graduate school and get a M.F.A in photography. I have two phobias; New York City rats and the future. I do have goals but not concrete plans; life can change with a snap of the shutter.

Troy Monroe will be a giving a talk in Koopman Commons on February 19th, at 6:00 PM in association with the opening for the Creative Grab Bag exhibit in the Silpe Gallery at 7:00 PM the same night.

What did you study at the Hartford Art School and when did you graduate?
I studied Visual Communication design (graduation in 2003).

What do you do now, please tell us about your current work.
I've settled in to what I would consider the ideal job at co:lab (based in Hartford), which is a design studio, brand house and identity foundry. We create and then weave together all sorts of things that have graphical and language roots such as identity systems, collateral, advertising and interactive media. We start with concept and allow the execution to grow out of a really smart idea. When we meet folks ready to engage and be a part of process we help them celebrate their evolution.

We're also working on a major initiative called Design is Love. We're building a site where our industry is encouraged to be creative, share perspective in a meaningful way and link creatives to those who need our talents most, non-profit organizations.


Any thoughts or advice for current students?
Work as hard as you think possible, then work more. Students at the Hartford Art School have the unique opportunity to surround themselves with peers and faculty members who are willing to support and (more importantly) push them to find greatness. Take advantage of the experience and the chance to learn on the academic side.

And to the VCD students: Take it seriously. Make the commitment to design early on, Understand that there's more to the craft than just making things pretty.


What else do you do besides art and design?
Life is rooted in art and design. Everything we do, from the time we wake to the time we return to bed, allows us to draw inspiration. Whether walking in the woods (with my wife / daughter and two boxers) or thinking about future plans for a modern house, I know there's a strong possibility that those experiences can shape my next idea. I try to look harder and understand more, all while enjoying the pleasures found in the details of daily activities (which include reading, exercising, eating, laughing and dreaming).

What did you study at the Hartford Art School and when did you graduate?
I studied Visual Communication Design and graduated in 2007.

What do you do now, tell us about your current work.
Right after I graduated I got a job at Plaid, a design and branding agency in Danbury, CT. It's a pretty awesome job. I've been fortunate enough to work with some really cool clients like Capitol Records, Segway, and TX Watches. I recently redesigned my agency's blog BrandFlakesForBreakfast which was a great experience. We got tons of postive feedback on the redesign. I've also had a chance to be a part of PlaidNation which is a summer tour going into it's third year. We take a Plaid van and drive across the country visiting agencies and brands and cool creative people. It's a pretty ridiculous experience. I designed the vehicle graphics for the 2007 and 2008 tours.

I also do some personal work. I recently started blogging a bit. The big project I've done for the past two years has been my calendars. In 2008 for every month I hand-drew a calendar, colored it in Photoshop, printed a ton of copies on my home printer, and mailed them all to my friends. It was a great experience, but a lot of work. For 2009 I just did one hand-drawn poster and had it offset printed. A few are still for sale on Etsy.

Any thoughts or advice for current students?
Don't ever be afraid to make work. Make a to-do list. Be confident in your work and don't second guess yourself based on other people's opinions. Be harsher in crits. The simplest solution is the best solution. Do what you love not what might get you a job. Have real opinions. Get on Twitter. Know what's going on in your industry. Network. Go to every opening, event, lecture, show, etc. Have fun.

What else do you do besides art and design?
Most of my non-art time is spent on my music. I make electronic music as Pop Heroes. It's kind of a one-man band thing. I write and record using my computer and a bunch of synthesizers. Occasionally, I'll go out and play a few shows in the area. There's also been a pretty nice overlap between my art and my music. I've been able to design album art, t-shirts, websites, posters, buttons, and everything else for Pop Heroes which was also the basis for my senior project. It's great to be able to create the visual side of a project as well as the musical side.

Matt Hunsberger is a designer and musician originally from New Jersey currently living and working in Connecticut. Matt attended the Hartford Art School and now works for the greatest agency in the world, Plaid in Danbury, CT. When he's not being awesome at Plaid, Matt creates a wide array of personal artwork, blogs, performs music as Pop Heroes and can be found on Twitter.

You designed and started the Media Arts program at The Hartford Art School, can you give us a brief background of what the program is about?

Media Arts is a kind of hybrid department which focuses on the inter-relatedness (is this a word?) of video production, digital imaging (including photo), critical theory/visual culture studies, physical computing (the interface between the physical world and computers) and interactivity (be that web based, performance or installation). Since the area of study is relatively new (40 years or so?) our concentration is on contemporary artistic practice.

Is there any sort of philosophy backing the program?

If there is a guiding principle here it's that art making is a process of discovery that is not insular or isolated from contemporary culture; one makes art as a way of knowing the world and finding one's relationship to it while simultaneously reinventing it. The work we seek to generate is engaged in contemporary discourse, is non-commercial and can take just about any form that is appropriate to an IDEA. Yes, CAPS are intentional here.

What is the story behind how it got started?

The history of the department, a long time ago there was film, and there was video, and there was experimental studio, and due to conservative political times, various retirements of faculty members and the impracticality of supporting these independent areas, I thought it best to merge concerns and concentrate our efforts. Video survived and in an attempt to retain some of the curriculum of experimental studio, it became clear that Media Arts was the appropriate term for the department. But now it seems outdated as a term - new media is being used broadly, but Media Arts serves the purpose for the moment.

Recently, I came across The New Media Arts Collaborative online.
Can you tell us more about that and what is happening with it now?

This was a collaborative project I started with composer Ken Steen from Hartt. We were collaborating professionally and we thought this might be a good way to work with groups of students in an informal way across colleges. Informal is really the operative word here. We suggested some project areas and then set it in motion. The main result (which is currently being recycled) was a project called "four word stories" another was "60 seconds". Ken and I are both fans of John Cage, Fluxus and process-oriented works. We used ideas surrounding chance operations and intentionality as organizing principles to generate work. The main thing was that students produced writing, sound and video modules, posted them online and then responded to the work directly with no personal contact, a kind of remote collaboration. This is a model used by many international artists who physically can't be in the same place at the same time. We thought it would be interesting for students to experience this sense of anonymity and use the internet as a kind of repository for their efforts. It was also a way to avoid things that sometimes get in the way of collaboration, namely personality or ego (obstacles like hair style, perfume or body odor, linguistic accents, prejudice, etc.).

You can go online and see this work for yourself. It's all public. The NMC site has evolved into a sort of archive of student works produced in the department in various classes as well.

What projects are you working on in your personal work now? Where are you moving toward with your work?

I am all over the map presently. Reliquary of Labor was performed at the cyberarts festival in Boston on April 28 at Axiom Gallery. Ken and I are working on an opera - a solo female soprano with piano, violin, cello and clarinet accompaniment with multi-channel video, processed synthesized sound and interactive live video. It's based on poems of Denise Levertov. I also have just put together a series called "Still Lifes + Silent Movies" which really are neither, it's a series of videos for installation viewing which challenge traditional notions of these genres. I am also working on digital scans of real-time events, using a flatbed scanner as a tool that fits somewhere between a video camera, still camera and a photocopy machine. I am scanning things like snow falling, rain and bugs at night. Each image is about a ten minute exposure so each image represents time shifting but it seems like a singular photograph, LIQUID is a group show I had last spring at Manchester Community College through May 1st, and then there's nocamera.com, and newmedianewmusicnewengland, like I said I'm all over the map but you can't find me on Google Earth (I don't think anyway).

Any artists that you would recommend we taking a look at in the field of media arts? too many to mention.

The field is exploding. We put together a web page for the freshmen class when we did our department presentation a few weeks ago. There are links to hundreds of artists, enjoy.

Thanks Gene, nice to have you.

Thanks for asking, Ethan. Nice to have you too.

Gene Gort is a visual artist, video producer, media programmer and educator who lives in Avon, Connecticut. He currently holds the position of Associate Professor in Media Arts at Hartford Art School, University of Hartford, a program he designed and directs. He has been twice recognized by the Rockefeller Foundation with nominations in the Film/Video/New Media categories for individual fellowships.

What year are you, what classes are you currently taking?

Freshman, I'm taking foundations drawing, 3D, and 2D black and white.
(Along with Issues in Art Making, Art History, and Rhetoric and Writing.)

Why did you decide to come here?

I decided to come here because I really liked the look of the art school when I went on a tour and I also liked that it was a part of a larger university.

Any idea of what you are going to major in and why?

I think I am going to major in painting because that has always been one of my favorite things to do. I might also minor in education so that I could possibly be a teacher some day.

How do you think the foundation program will impact the rest of your years at the Hartford Art School?

The foundation program has expanded my knowledge of art making. I never did any 3D work before coming here and I did very little graphic design work as well. I have learned a lot this past year in all of my classes that will help me in the rest of my years here.

What flavor of ice cream would you create if you could?
If I could create an ice cream flavor it would be gummy bear/chocolate ice cream!

Catherine Johnson is a freshman at the Hartford Art School planning to study painting. She grew up in the Boston area and has liked drawing and painting since she was a kid. In addition to art, she was on the track team and in the drama club in high school. Catherine goes to an island in Maine every summer, which has influenced some of her artwork. She is also thinking about becoming a teacher after graduating college.

Can you give us a little background about yourself?

I studied printmaking here from 1990-1994. After that I continued my work while serving the school as the Admissions director until 2000 when I shipped out to Lincoln, Nebraska to do my graduate work. When I graduated my husband, my dog and I moved back to CT and I began teaching adjunct at the Hartford Art School! Can you say full circle! AMAZING. In 2004 we had a little girl and named her Nona. I took a year off from teaching and came back in the fall of 2005. I have been teaching different courses within the print department, foundations, and drawing since then. It is my complete pleasure and a total gift to be doing so. Really.

What are you currently working on?

I am currently working on finishing my studio! I bought a shed, and had to insulate, sheet rock and electrify it! Lots of work, but I should be in there officially by months' end. I have been working on some new prints and drawings based on the way light breaks through the canopy of leaves. So far, the work has been fairly modest in size, I am hoping to make something gigantic, so you can really feel the space of a walk under trees.


Tell us a little about the printmaking department?

I LOVE THE PRINTMAKING DEPARTMENT!

It is where I was raised as a young artist. Jim Lee, John Willis and Fred Wessel were my professors, so it is amazing to now get to call them my colleagues. Scot Maccluggage is SO talented and smart and brings so much to the department. He is always there for the students and faculty, he knows what we need before we do!

The atmosphere in the department is an incredible community. Because of the nature of printmaking, the special equipment involved in most of it, there is a necessity of working in a space with other artists. What develops is spontaneous exchange of ideas, continuous support and constant critique. So the students develop a real sense of community.

When I was a student, I thought it was just HAS, but learned as I traveled that it is part of the Printmaking Community. It is one of the things that I really love about the medium. There is so much to learn, so much information, and the more you work, the more you learn. The more you are in the print shop, you become a sponge. The students and I benefit from each other in this way.

Every time there is a visiting artist that comes as part of the Print Workshop, our information pool expands, and each time the facultyand students attend a conference, same thing. I could go on and on. It is a great place to be an artist, and to grow.

Jenni Freidman makes prints and drawings as well as limited edition books under the name of Stone Dragon Press. Born in 1972 and raised in Hartford, Connecticut, she now calls West Hartford her home. Her work has been shown in exhibitions across the United States and abroad. Jenni teaches at the Hartford Art School and at Trinity College and is on the Board of Directors for Paper New England.