Thursday, December 24, 2009

merry christmas!

Just wanted to say a quick merry christmas and happy holidays to everyone! Thought I'd throw in some fun holiday-esque imagery too. I love this season, specifically for all the lights~









Anywho, that's all from me for now. Wishing everyone a great new year too! I feel a new lens will be added to the roster soon... we'll see!

Saturday, December 19, 2009

last.fm

So, my friend made me highly recommended I make a last.fm user account.

http://www.last.fm/user/lauracrowell

Unfortunately, someone had the name avalilly already, so I just went with that.

If you also have an account, feel free to add me! Or if you don't, you can still go and judge my taste in music and general listening habits. Trust me, they're weird. Or make yourself an account! It's kinda fun. You can compare your taste in music with your friends and such.

Anywho, I am finally free of my crazy second-last semester of university. I can't believe I'll be graduating after the next one. I'll have to be a real person soon. Scary!

Monday, December 7, 2009

the silent witness project

December 6 of this year marked the 20th "anniversary" since the Montreal Massacre in 1989. The human resources centre at York University approached the faculty of fine arts to do a free public exhibition in one of our central buildings on campus to commemorate the lives of the victims and to raise awareness about violence against women. Myself as well as ten other students created 14 silhouettes of female figures that represented each of the thirteen female students and one female teacher that lost their lives twenty years ago.

York's press release:
http://www.yorku.ca/yfile/archive/index.asp?Article=13823

Our exhibition was held on Monday, December 7, 2009 in Vari Hall, York University. Here's a few photos I took while passing through between classes:


Barbara Daigneault
Age: 22
Artist: Laura Crowell
-Mechanical engineering student.
-Teaching assistant to her father, Pierre Daigneault, a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Quebec at Montreal.




I think these two were my favourite of the bunch.



It was really neat to see all the students passing through on their way to classes and then stop to take a look at each one of the figures. They all had a small bio about the victim on the reverse side and some had an artist statement explaining the imagery on the front. They may end up being exhibited each year for this memorial, or in various other violence against women awareness related events put on by the university in the future.

I'm glad I got to be apart of it!

Friday, December 4, 2009

deviantart

I revived my deviantArt account a couple days ago. Not entirely sure why, but I figured it might be nice to have another venue in which to display my art. It's sort of a weird community, bountiful in 'cutesy' art, but there are a lot of really good artists and photographers that continue to post there, so I figured no harm in indulging for now.

http://avalilly.deviantart.com/

Feel free to add me or say hi if you're also a member!

Perhaps I should start focusing more upon making an official website instead of posting on a variety of web communities. I really don't know where to begin with something like that though. I have several different ways I'd like to go in terms of the design, I just don't know which is manageable enough for me to try coding myself or what represents me the most... I suppose I'll start looking into that sort of stuff more in depth over the christmas break when I have some time.

If anyone has any tips they'd like to throw my way, I'd greatly appreciate it~

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

fear

I Art Directed another 4th year York University film recently; written and directed by the fabulous Shannon Fewster (cutester!). It shot from November 19-23, 2009 on many locations with many characters! I only have snaps from a couple of the days though; the classroom and the car scenes. The actual classroom was very bare bones, so we needed to make it fun and math-y looking. The car scene was pretty light for my department, but I got to wrangle some raindrops and how often can you say you've done that~









This still kills me. I know it's so she can see the monitor better, but it still looks like a lunch bag to me.

Check my raindrop skills.

The film won't be completed until the end of the school year, same with Boycatt, so unfortunately I won't know how either of them turned out until I get to see them at the end of year screenings.

Fortunately, I was recently contacted by my director for It's Raining and he's sending me the completed copy of the film. Can't wait to see it! I may be working with him again on his next project, so perhaps you'll be seeing more updates from me on that front.

And now, back to my many remaining final projects for the semester...

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

chantilly lace

Recently, I was given (very short) notice that I would be participating in a group exhibition in the Gales gallery at York University. It was to feature works by five talented young female artists (Jess Thalmann, Jiallin Ji, Jo Fallack, Lili Huston-Herterich, and myself). Unfortunately, due to time contraints (ie. practically no notice and it being the busiest part of the semester), there was no way to really plan a show that would have a lot of cohesion between all the different work. So, we figured we would all just put in whatever work we could and that would be that.

Another unfortunate piece of business was that the artists who utilized the gallery space right before us were given the wrong shade of white paint to restore with and our walls ended up having very noticeable darker blocks of paint across them. Already being frustrated with the show and everyone being so busy, there wasn't any time to go out and buy the right paint and fix it. We decided to just roll with it and we installed our work over top and named the exhibition Chantilly Lace after the shade of paint that wasn't meant to be there.

These are the drawings that I installed in the show:


Outspoken (Laura Crowell 2009) 22"x30" conte on paper


Untitled (Laura Crowell 2009) 22"x30" conte on paper


La Scapigliata (Laura Crowell 2009) 22"x30" conte on paper

The show will be running until November 13, 2009.

Interesting experience, to say the least. I am a little sad that we were given such crappy notice about it though. I've wanted to show work in that gallery since I found out undergrads were allowed to apply, so it's unfortunate there wasn't enough time for me to produce new work for it.

Outspoken is my most recent piece. I'm hoping to continue with a series of drawings in a similar style. The hands drawing has already been shown at Whippersnapper gallery earlier in March of this year in the Play/Pause show. La Scapigliata is sort of just a drawing for the sake of drawing something. There's not a terribly big meaning behind it, so I felt a little silly including it.

Ah well, there was space on the wall, so why not!

Monday, November 2, 2009

headshots

So I got to try my hand at some more headshots on Sunday. My friend Laurie is in theatre production and needed some headshots for the show she is stage managing so she asked me to do them, which was awesome because I need more practice! She was great and brought along another lovely girl, Emily, who is also in production. The more the merrier~

These ladies were a lot of fun to work with and were super fabulous because they set up the lights for me! We used the theatre lighting studio, so unfortunately I have no idea how to handle the type of lights that were available to us. They weren't the most ideal lights for headshot purposes, but I think they turned out quite nice all the same.

Thank you Laurie and Emily!

Friday, October 30, 2009

boycatt

I worked on another film over this past weekend. It was directed by my ol' roommate Tess Marie Garneau. It shot from October 22-26 for a 4th year York University student film production in quite a variety of locations. Unfortunately I was too busy to take stills in a few of the places, but for the park day I had some spare time to run around with a camera.

The majority of these photos will be from the outdoor pet show scene. We shot in Trinity Bellwoods dog park and it was a gorgeous fall day!


Our AD taking a break under a tree at lunch.


Is this not the dog from the Sand Lot?





This is 'Lole', he's a little down on his luck.


Our Production Manager doing a little dance.


I had to make a giant cheque for our pet show winner.


Cinematographer.


The pet show set.







The make up team.




The evil encyclopedia salesmen mafia.


Our lovely director... being lovely.


 The main cast, sans Milo the cat.

It was an interesting five days. I learned a lot, had some fun, and worked with some pretty rad people (for the most part).

My roommate will be editing it, so when he gets around to sorting out the footage I'll see if he can provide me with some stills from the film to show ye alls. The colours in this movie are going to be beautiful, I can't wait to see the final product.