Crealdé School of Art Welcome Garden Mosaic, Winter Park, FL
I am working with volunteers at Crealdé, the community arts center, to construct a 6' by 15' mosaic celebrating the arts and featuring bright flowers and hand-made leaf and hand tiles. Donors created these hand-made tiles to support the construction of this mosaic that will be presented at the dedication of the newly renovated campus, April 24, 2010.
Welcoming Wildlife Mosaic at Dommerich Elementary School, Maitland, FL
Dommerich Elementary's Green Team was the core group that designed and made tiles for a mosaic teaching about how citizens and students can welcome native plants and animal into their suburban neighborhood. every child in the school will have the chance to participate, whether drawing an animal, making a tile, glazing a tile, or mortaring a tile in place on this colorful 5' by 18' community mosaic that will be mounted in the front entry in the newly built school. the project will be unveiled at the new campus dedication ceremony on April 29, 2010.
Say "Goodnight" to the Hannibal Square Community Mosaic.
I hope it wakes up soon in a prominent new location on the new Winter Park Community Center.
We safely removed the backerboard panels. The project came down mostly intact and will be safely stored until the building is demolished and rebuilt, when it can be reinstalled. I hope it will be installed again in a year -- hopefully still on Shady Park at the corner of Pennsylvania and New England Avenues in Winter Park. It is a site specific piece that tells the story of that neighborhood, and it needs to be at that location.
Project Coordinator: Take Flight, Trinity Prep, Winter Park, FL
Supported by Trinity Prep's Patron's of the Arts and the Danhof Series, I arranged and facilitatied a two week residency and collaborative sculptural installation by artists Lynn and John Whipple, who worked with the art teachers and helped the students build ceramic birds to be permanently installed on the campus. The sculptures will be presented on March 26, 2010.
Ecology Mosaic at Trinity Prep, Winter Park, FL
In April of 2009 I completed an artist residency at Trinity Prep School in Winter Park, FL. Working with over 100 students, we designed and created a 5 by 12 foot mosaic, featuring the animals and plants indigenous to the campus. Beautiful handmade tiles illustrate armadillos, sandhill cranes, red eared sliders, and dozens of other creatures, with reclaimed ceramic tile, stained glass, and mirrors adding color and sparkle to this permanent addition to the campus.
Teaching in Ithaca, NY
I'm heading to Ithaca again this summer, to teach a summer animation course at Cornell University. The course blog, Animation History, has a lot of interesting material, and I'll be adding more in the summer. It is amazing to see how much obscure and hard-to-find animation is on YouTube these days.
New Series in Progress
Video-sculptures:
I received a $1500 Professional Development Grant from United Arts of Central Florida to create, exhibit and promote a series of time-based video-sculptures. With imagery from the native Florida landscape and Audubon's bird and animal engravings, this series explores place and space, and technically explores boundaries between sculpture and video. I chose Audubon's animals because of something alien and frightening about the way birds and beasts are pictured in his works. Perhaps in reaction against my experience as an animator, I am interested in finding non-anthropomorphic, non-cute ways of presenting animals and the natural world. The series has an air of danger, since we live in a threatened (and threatening) environment. On a practical level, I plan to sculpt hollow clay forms using paper-clay, (reminiscent of eggs, wood knots, cypress knees) with birds and other animals emerging in protective stances. Each sculpture will have an opening or two, like a knot-hole. In the base or encased inside each piece is a small portable DVD player playing a video loop-- either live action or animation -- images growing within the womb-like interior of the form. Mirrors and other reflective materials inside the sculptures will stretch and distort the images that are seen when viewers peer through the knotholes.
Screening of Wish You Were Here
Friday, January 25, 6pm, Hannibal Square Heritage Center, Winter Park
How has tourism shaped Central Florida’s landscape and culture?
Wish You Were Here, Lynn Tomlinson’s new documentary, supported by the Florida Humanities Council and produced in collaboration with WBCC in Cocoa, tells the story of early thrill seekers traveling on steamships, wealthy visitors relaxing at posh hotels, “tin can” tourists at roadside camps, and theme park visitors searching for a simulated paradise. Animated vintage postcards and archival footage combined with interviews bring the tale to life. Read the Orlando Sentinel Article about the program.
Public Art Project: Working with Mr. Imagination to build a Memory Wall & Supervising a Documentary on "Mr.I"
01/01/08 - 03/01/08
UPDATE: A tragic fire in Mr. Imagination's home destroyed much of his work and forced him to return home to Bethlehem, PA. He plans to return February 18th to create the memory wall, which will be unveiled at a fundraising celebration to help Mr. I recuperate from his losses in the fire.
Beginning in January, as Coordinator of Public Art for the Crealdé School of Art, I will be working with Mr. Imagination, a folk artist whose work has been shown at the Smithsonian and the American Visionary Art Museum on a public art project involving the community in Winter Park, Florida. The wall will be built in front of the Hannibal Square Heritage Center in West Winter Park, right across the street from the Hannibal Square Community Mosaic I created last year. I'm looking forward to working with the community again to make another public artwork, and also to working with "Mr. I." Mr. Imagination lives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. His memory walls contain objects of personal significance that the community brings to him to embed in cement. His sculptural walls incorporate figures of personal significance, including self-portrait heads, angels, and eyes. Children, adult volunteers, and seniors from the community center will all have a chance to add to the wall when Mr. I visits later this month, in connection with The World of Mr. Imagination, a major two-venue show of his work at Crealdé . The school children's trip to the Heritage Center will be worked into the field trip program that Crealdé has set up to teach about heritage and the role of the arts in its preservation.
At the same time, I am helping with a video project that Tomas Valladares of the Folkvine team is currently editing, that documents Mr. I's visit to Sanford, FL, this past summer, when he built a memory wall facade on the front on the Gallery on First, home of Janine Taylor Folk Art. I plan to interview Mr. I on tape during our time working together, torecord some of his stories to flesh out this documentary.