Amy Wilson

Conspiracies

I teach a few classes at the School of Visual Arts in NYC. In the Spring, there's Understanding Kitsch, which is (yes) an art history class about kitsch. In the Fall, I teach a class called Under the Influence: Art History and Altered States of Consciousness, which is about mental illness, religious experiences, and drug/alcohol use and the relationship of these states to the creation of art. In the Fine Arts and Visual and Critical Studies departments, I teach Foundation Drawing which is really fun. I also bop around a lot and talk at different schools. Last academic year, I went to the Boston Museum School and the University of Delaware; this coming year, I'll be showing my face at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. This summer, I am teaching what I think is (and correct me if I'm wrong?) the first program in Visual and Critical Studies for high school students as part of SVA's pre-college program. In the evenings, I'm doing Expressive Drawing to Music, an experimental class involving the interpretation of live and recorded music, along with another class which is a shortened version of Altered States. And lastly, in August I will be at the Aldrich Museum, doing a workshop for kids in how to make pop-up books. One of my hobbies (if you can call it that) is playing around with the online game Second Life. I recently started taking screenshots of various parts of the game and using these shots as a basis for some quick watercolor sketches - basically, a warm-up or cool-down after a long day in the studio. I'd jot down some notes of thoughts I'd have about the place and then file the drawing away in my piles of stuff... until I eventually had enough to publish a little print-on-demand book, which you can see here. My friend Bryan Campen wrote a really lovely introductory essay and was nice enough to put together an "in-world" book signing, along with a virtual version of the book designed by Falk Bergman. Anyway, it's been a fun little project to play around with. Here's one of the images, which I'll link to our flickr group if you want to see more: The Reverse was kind enough to choose my work for their album cover, and I truly could not be happier. I was definitely one of those suburban kids who first experienced art through album art, so I was especially touched to be asked to lend a drawing to their new CD. And their music's great too! Check them out at the above link or at Heartcore Records. I'm blogging again, this time about my work. I started making some cheap artist's multiples at the end of 2005, mostly for fun and experimentation. Here are some images of some projects:
	The book Honey to Ashes, which came packaged in an attractive plastic sleeve with a toy magnifying glass attached. I printed these off my home computer in an open edition, sloppily cutting, pasting, and stapling them together myself. It was offered for sale in Bellwether's booth at the 2005 NADA fair in Miami. My idea here was to start creating cheap multiples that go along with the more polished (if you can call them that) and finished drawings and paintings. This book was a first stab at doing that.
	The collection of three artists books Last Words, Louis Jones, and an untitled book) which were packaged together under the title Cut. In order to get the books open to look at them, you had to either cut or very, very carefully untie the thread that bound them together – you either destroyed the piece in your haste to see what was in it, or you put some careful consideration into viewing it, sort of like a take on the whole Situationist sandpaper thing, only much more cloyingly nice and yet somehow self-destructive (which is actually irritating me as I write this). Louis Jones includes some images that were created for Conveyer magazine which, I think, hasn't been published yet.
	Daisy is a quick-and-dirty (technology-wise, that is) animation made from Powerpoint, set to the music of Marianne Nowottny. It was produced by the Abaton Book Company in Jersey City, NY in September 2005 and subsequently released on DVD.
	I got slightly obsessed over Christmas break with the idea of making the smallest artist's book possible &ndash the size would be dictated by the staple and the whole thing was sort of based on the World's Smallest Bible which my parents had (an out-of-character example of poor taste for them, but it fascinated me endlessly as a child) &ndash and then decided to take it one step further by making four of them and keeping them organized by connecting them to the holes of a button. It made sense at the time, and thus we have Button which is a series of four artists books joined together by thread and connected to the holes of a single button. I haven't editioned this yet, as it might give me a nervous breakdown.