staying in and keeping quiet.

it’s saturday night already- the last couple of days have been insane! it’s nice to slow down and breathe for a night.

tuesday was a great work day. i created a poster for this year’s Gallery publication. my roommate briana is the editor this year and decided to revamp it. it will be sort of an “art box” with goodies inside- including a poster.

anyhow, i’m really excited about how it came out; although the imagery is in my style, i included some interesting textures that really make it one of my favorite pieces. it will definitely be in my senior show! so that was tuesday night’s project. i ended up staying at westby until 4am with liz and courtney- that night, we put up a show featuring work and installation pieces. luke and eric included some prints they’ve done for print II, courtney finally created her pill bottle work, christian had some unique imagery. i especially liked liz’s beer bottle piece:

this is big jason’s piece:

this was my corner- i hung pretty much all the works i included in my solo show back in january.

everything i hung was polaroid imagery- in particular, lifts and transfers. here’s a closeup of one my favorite polaroid lifts, entitled “pine street”

after a long night of getting work done and having strange conversations with Liz and Courtney, i slept briefly, got up at 9am (early for me!) and went to Philly . . . to pick up Amie and Grant from the bus station!!! Who are they? Well, Amie was one of my roommates when I studied in Italy and is one of my best friends. Grant is her boyfriend, who also studied at Santa Reparata with me. They both live outside of Los Angeles and go to the University of Redlands. Their spring break is way early, so they came to the east coast to visit Grant’s brother in DC, me in Philly, and sightsee in NYC!

it was so fantastic to see them. i havent seen Grant since 2006 and Amie since this past summer, when we visited our other roommate Caitlin in Colorado. i picked them up in Chinatown and we went to see the art museum and the Ben Franklin Parkway. here’s how beautiful the day started out to be:

we hiked it all the way up the parkway to see the love statue. we took an obligatory tourist shot, of course:

since they were only in town for one day, i tried to give them the grand tour- they got to see most of the city, but not really in depth. after the parkway, we got cheese steaks at Pat’s- mostly for the experience rather than the quality. but they both liked their very first cheese steak experience after that, we headed to south street to do some browsing- Amie got some vinyl, i got a Ratatat CD. from there, we went to Northern Liberties and went to a store i knew Amie would die for: Art Star. And, as i expected, she went nuts. Our final sightseeing stop was Olde City. The flurries and wind made it very uncomfortable, so we headed to dinner at Osteria. It’s a nice Italian restaurant that won “best restaurant in philly” in 2007- i had seen a photo of their pizza and knew i needed to try it. it certainly lived up to their reputation, although their portions were on the small side.

we headed back to rowan after dinner to go to Joe’s art show in the downstairs gallery.

he really did a great job- he showcased the graphic design and photo work he’s done for bands like Deathkiller and One Win Choice.

afterwards, we celebrated joe’s show and amie and grant’s visit at Landmark. a bunch of my friends from pa came down and we had a great time! here’s me, amie, and karina in the bathroom being silly:

the next day, after dropping amie and grant back in philly to catch the bus to NYC, i helped set up an mini art showcase for an event at the student center that night. the event programmers at rowan had artist Spencer Tunick out for the evening to talk about his naked installations. despite running into a couple of roadblocks, the show went off without a hitch!

so the big news in my life right now: i got accepted to graduate school! my mom called me on Wednesday:
“Honey, I got a thin envelope from Penn State, and I didn’t know what that meant so I opened it and . . . you got in!!” i’m still kind of in shock. i found out the next day that i didn’t get into Tyler, which was kind of a bummer, but somewhat expected. so now i’m kind of at a crossroads- should i say yes to Penn State and see how it goes? or should i wait to apply to Tyler again and perhaps never get accepted there? this week i hope to sit down with some of my professors to sort through the clutter in my brain.