(Live) Translations from tom burtonwood on Vimeo.
Translations, projected / performed live at Three Walls as part of Chasing Two Rabbits. Thank you to Jacob C. Hammes for his awesome musical accompaniment / score. Big thank you to Andrew Rigsby, Travis Saul and R James Healy for their help with all things animation, Maya & Final Cut. Also many thanks to Shannon Stratton and Sonia Yoon for organizing the event and asking me to take part.
Translations from tom burtonwood on Vimeo.
Final version. Titled “Translations.” Come to Three Walls on Friday Feb 26th, doors at 6pm to see it in person.
first draft of the new animation for threewalls screening on friday, i’m really happy with some bits of this, other bits need to be tweaked, but i’ve got like 3-4 more sequences ready to plug in and a few more that haven’t been made in maya yet, but i’m liking the retro, glitchy feel to the visuals and loving the unfolding cubes….. now if only i could make these in real life… if you wanna see this finished and projected on a wall with awesome musical accompaniment hustle on over to threewalls on friday.
here’s a sneak preview of one of the sequences for the upcoming screening at Three Walls on friday, it cuts off a bit a the beginning and runs a bit fast but i’ll fix that for friday. Events details are as follows:
Friday, February 26th, 2010.
Doors at 6pm, Program starts at 7pm
Suggested Donation: $10.00
Chasing Two Rabbits is a special event curated by Sonia Yoon and Shannon Stratton that pairs animators with live performances by sound artists and musicians. Inspired by the experimental films of Norman McLaren, who combined abstract imagery (including scratching and painting into the film stock in earlier work, as well as paper cut-outs and live action and dance) with imaginative music and sound, Chasing Two Rabbits, acts to pair artists in both genres to produce a unique event where, rather than leaving art to illustrate a story, perhaps sound and vision will illuminate each other.
The program for the evening will include animations by Gracen Brilmyer, Peter Burr, Tom Burtonwood, Dana Carter, Jodie Mack, Tracy Taylor, and Rebecca Schoenecker with sound by The Chicago Phonographers, Chris Hammes, Eric Zeigenhagen, Steve Lacy, Frank Van Duerm, Kotoka Suzuki, Cait Stevens, George Monteleone and Broken Chooser.
“If you chase two rabbits, both will escape.”
Permutation_495 from tom burtonwood on Vimeo.
Half way thru uploading some new drawings to flickr produced this last month. I’m really happy with the direction the work is taking. it’s certainly giving me some pause as i circle around almost fifteen years in terms of interest and output, back to the humble cube and all the variants and possibilities it offers. Look out for new installations, animations, sculpture, video and drawings in the months to come.
The focus of these drawings has been two fold (ha! pun). first to make some schematics for custom sections akin to tetris blocks for new sculpture i’m planning, cut first on laser cutter and then assembled spore like in the studio and painted. second to continue to try and solve the problem of making a cube flatten completely to a square a conundrum i;d like to realize in both sculpture and time based medium > which gave rise to a good number of drawings riffing off tetris like patterning and then finally some drawings taking the square as building block rather than the cube per se and of course comnig bakc around to make patterns based on the square too.
stay tuned. all will be revealed!
Display Unit, ver. 1
Isometric Interior, pastel on paper, 2009
Post it Note sketch, 2000
Posting has been slow of late as i prepare for the start of the school semester, i’m teaching courses at SAIC and UIC in the fall and with the new term only days away at UIC i’m putting the finishing touches to the syllabus and what not. It’s great to be teaching again, i’m looking forward to meeting my students and immersing myself in academic life. I’m hoping to take some classes myself either in Motion Graphics or Maya both of which would be a big help to the studio effort. Holly is also about to start school at SAIC for her MFA in sculpture so we’re about to become a very academic household again.
Post It Notes, 2000
In a search for the sewing machine Holly dug out some sketchbooks from a “hidden” closet last night, and found some real treasures. I’ll be trying to get back in the daily posting groove and share these with everyone. Looking at this current post and the last one i;m struck as usual by the similarities and connections between the work i was making in the period of 1995 – 1997 and 2000 – 2001. The synchronicity of seeing all this work, from Loughborough, Carbondale and now Chicago together for the first time combined with my “new” studio practice is very exciting and I hope that i can get some of these “unfinished ideas” out in the real world soon. As you can see from the drawings these images mostly revolve around the idea of unfolding sculpture, of an installation that is either MANPORT (man portable) or VEH PORT MOD (vehicle portable modules) …. At the time i was making this work, i was back in the UK i think for the summer before my final year in C’dale. Regular air travel meant that i had to carry whatever i took back and forth across the Atlantic. After transporting an aluminum relief across the water in the summer 0f 1999 i realized that i should quit making art out of solid metals like aluminum or iron and focus instead on more MAN PORT objects / items. This idea for making in a general sense has held true for me throughout my practice, working with Holly or by myself. Apart from a brief stint between 2004 – 2005 (ish) i’ve never owned a car or other form of motorized transport and frankly do not plan to. Holly and I factor our living plans around public transport. When we do a big install we rent a cargo van or similar. And so it goes for my art practice, these sketches illustrate ideas for either unfolding installations that expand from a compact module to fill an exhibition hall, to paraphrase Marshall Mcluhan, “the medium is the message”…. the work is about networks, structures—- and it speaks this with form — it is what it is — OR the sketches illustrate pieces that are still modular, but are wheeled and can be moved from place to place and exhibited not necessarily in an exhibition hall but rather taken out into the public sphere.
Post It Notes
Studio wise i’ve been building and calibrating a camera stand to record all the frames of the Permutations animation i drew while in France this summer. It’s taken a lot of effort and fine tuning, and in the long run maybe it would have been quicker just to scan these images in at a low ppi… but i have another experiment / idea to follow up on now…. which if it’s half way interesting will post asap….
Anyhow plenty good material here to work from…. ok now i’m off downstairs to draw.
pyramid / beacon / node
drawing for sculpture. pyramid / beacon / node. i’ll be remaking this piece which was originally made in 1997 – 1998, and lost. also had some wild ideas for animations. got to get “Permutations #1″ finished and made a camera stand, so hopefully soon i get it all plotted in, key out a couple more frames and move on to adding sound, color sequences and so forth. additionally i’m hoping to start some new animations using the pastel / paper, again should have something to show soon.