Cut Above

I've had these for a few weeks and have wanted to post them... i have a horrid website that I use as a teacher, and tried to use this as a project to fine tune my skills manipulating photos in a blog. Clearly that didn't happen, I will have to revisit and tweak a bit.

These are stencils and resulting images from a World History class I teach at New School for the Arts in Tempe. There is a push for projects that blur the lines between classes in the curriculum, so I asked the young artists in my class to choose images that interested them from a culture, modern or otherwise, that had inhabited the new world. Some of them clearly have visual arts experience. Others claim to not be visual artists but patiently and methodically worked through the steps involved in projecting, tracing, cutting, and painting a stencil. Additionally they kind of accidentally were forced into learning to be patient and adapt to a very breezy Spring day that was selected  as painting day!

this is a small selection  of the images that were produced. They appear on a wall that runs alongside a sidewalk that acesses the rear of the main building at the school.

Today as i post this I am listening to crushing, almost non-melodic noise and experimental music courtesy of Nonpop.com.

The stencils were all done by tracing projections on craft paper... either from jpg files or from acetate overhead projections. then cut in class with a terrible collection of box cutters and rusty exacto knives.