Journal of Student Research 2023

Glove Tips & Chimp Pits

89

Glove Tips & Chimp Pits

Brodie Spolar Senior, B.F.A. Studio Art: Comics Faculty Mentor: Mary Climes

Artist Statement Picture the flaccid tips of a disposable rubber glove, laboriously and

unsuccessfully applied to a hand damp with perspiration. Those tips could be cut off and given to a very small man to be used as swim caps. The glove is now fairly useless, but one small man has been granted aquatic aerodynamics. Now follow me, if you would, to a pit where there are chimps chimping hard. It does me good to see them this way. I would have been quite depressed had the pit chimps been chimping half-heartedly. Please allow me to extend my apologies for any confusion the previous statements may have caused; don’t fret--it’s just art. No need to be nervous, it won’t aggressively spunk on your trousers if you startle it; the art can be quite docile. In fact, art is like farts, easy to rhyme and a bodily function that is societally discouraged. You may have even experienced a whole variety of symptoms from holding in your arts. In my own artistic practice, I seek to express my art glands by exploring the intersections of art and functioning. By functioning, I mean the processes and experiences that make up being a human. As I go about being a human, I become more and more fascinated with the areas where art appears in my daily life, like patches of mold. My artistic practice is not progress-based; it is an attempt to rein in and understand this bodily function. Art moves slower than life tends to, requiring careful listening and patience to recognize. This conjunction of art and functioning, when observed, results in immensely satisfying gestalts. I refer to this phenomenon as the Asynchronous Semiotic System (ASS) which opens up unprecedented modes of ingesting and emitting reality. A piece of roasted broccoli will fuel and inform a drawing the next day, but it is in the broccoli that I see the art. My exploration of art emanating into the world extends into my drawing. I am not an innately nimble or talented artist in the context of image making; my motor skill capacity restricts my line quality to dense or extra dense. With images simplistic to the point of being easily replicable, I use bold and humorous imagery to lure cheap emotions such as incredulity and frustration out of viewers. If you make somebody laugh, you have created an opening, an in-road to more complex and Sotheby’s-approved emotions. I recycle forms and ideas, presenting them in different ways to observe what reactions they might elicit, as the reaction is where the art lies. This network of forms and reactionary-based drawing is a portion of my practice that I refer to as Person Oriented Ontological Practices (POOP). I attempt to harness the more easily accessed human responses such as laughter or discomfort to create weak points in the viewer’s façade through which more poignant responses can be accessed.