Steve Lambert

Website Link
Steve Lambert was born in Los Angeles and then instantly moved to the bay area four days later. His father was a monk and his mother a former nun teaching him the core values of his belief and the ultimate way to be a better person.

Lambert was a high school dropout in 1993 and moved on to be a student of sociology and film. He went to the San Francisco Art Institute and received a BFA in 2000 and in 2006 earned a MFA from UC Davis.

His high expectations of art show that Steve Lambert is capable of making great works. He is a character very against advertisement. In his works he makes a point to show how advertisements are meant to catch your eye and yet they mean somethings that is non-existant in real life. It taints our perception of reality.

My main criticism of his work is that he refuses to see the art in what he is criticizing. I don't appreciate his attitude toward it but I appreciate the way he goes about expressing his opinion. His use of simplicity in his structures and pieces combined with the complex meanings.

His work on the invisible sculpture was the work that most captured my gaze. It sets a blank canvas tone at a glance and then the word takes a hold of you. It's as if the audience is involved in the process of making the art.

I might toss out my anchor... reworked.

I might toss out my anchor....

Jeff Crouse

Website Link
You3b
For the most part, Jeff Crouse is a video artist who works to show the absurdity of technology on our lives. He believes it to be a bad influence in how it is always striving to be bigger and better. However, even though he believes in this, he uses this technology to make his point. Whether or not you believe this to be a good tactic or to be somewhat hypocritical is up to you.

Jeff Crouse was raised normally as a child. When he discovered computers and the internet, he really began to excel in it. In 1999 he graduated with an art major from a small high school in Wilmington, DE. He was well known by his teachers to be familiar with Photoshop and other HTML sources. Soon after graduation he accepted an internship working with graphic design and web development. Only after several other internships and programs did he finally move down to Georgia to study in the Digital Media design program at Georgia Tech. Finally he became to see himself more as an artist and started to really pile up his resume only to become part of the eyebeam team.

After becoming a part of the eyebeam family, he developed a program called you3b where users can combine youtube videos to make origional works adding to the technology argument. I find it a very odd expression but I like the uniqueness in what it shows. In combining the web and video it is taking two mediums of technology and combining them to make almost pointless videos showing the pointlessness of technology. I like what he has done with video and I admire his thought process but I do not completely understand everything that he stands for. He is taking the one thing in his life that he has worked so hard at and is turning it against himself and everyone else.

Another one of his projects is called Project Blackbird. You can see a small example of it shown in the image above. Basically, the point is to show the correlation between humor and the media. He originally thought of this plan when he saw a class about media and how it creates humor. The course description can be viewed on his website.

I enjoy looking at Jeff Crouse's work. He has a very exploratory mind. Also, I like that he gives the viewer exactly where he found this inspiration. It gives the viewer a better sense of his work.

To further look into what makes Jeff Crouse up as an artist, view the video on the main page of his web address. It explains his goal as an artist.

Jacob Ciocci

Website Link
Youtube Link to "The Peace Tape"
Jacob Ciocci is a video artist who works with exploring the connection between popular culture, technology, and transcendence. Most of his videos, exhibits, or performances involve an inconic figure like Spongebob, Elmo, or something he invented to express pop culture and then he manipulates it by turning it into video, overlapping animation, or the like so that it turns into a fast paced explosion of what we call pop culture.
According to his website, Jacob Ciocci is an artist, a member of the band "Extreme Animals," and a professor of animation and video art at Carnegie Mellon University.
Some of his other work involves collage art with bright colors depicting the same ideas expressed in his video. His more popular exhibits appear to be graffiti adding to his concept and making it more appealing to the eye.
The image above is taken from a video he did called "Booty Melt". I wasn't able to find a link or video for it but I found that the image itself was strong enough to make the statement the movie would have.

Self Portrait Ideas

For the Self Portrait Project 2 I've chosen to work with these images; my favorite being the bottom one taken at Bash Rock. I don't know for sure what words I want to include but I'd like them to be incorporated into my hair. My hair symbolizes the similarities between me, my family, and altogether my heritage. Ultimately this would rule out the middle photo because my hair is not in the photo, and it would also make the first the best candidate.
As for the background, I would like to do a collage of images including places I find most comforting. As to how I'm going to do all of this, I really have no Idea but I like the images and I have confidence that it will all work out!

Two Line Scans