André da Loba

Our first class visit in New York was to see André da Loba at the shared studio building The Invisible Dog in Brooklyn. 

We started by viewing the exhibition Shaboygen by Steven and William Ladd, which covered the bottom floor of the building. 

These strange bead trees were my favourite feature in the room. Unlike some of the other pieces, which just looked like boxes of trinkets or decorative fabric arrangements, these had more mystery about them...perhaps more of a story to tell. I wonder why the artists chose to make these tree shapes out of the beads; were they portraying a particular scene or environment? Their formation interests the viewer and you subconsciously try and attach more of a story/purpose to them. 

...followed by a lift up to the studio floor (a huge lift like none other I've ever been in!)...

...and slowly the entire group took turns to cram into André da Loba's studio, where he let us take pictures and be nosey in general...

These little men were some of my favourite things in the studio- they remind me of a papier mache wise man my dad made at school when he was little.

I could have stayed for hours in this room! It seemed like a real-life tour of André's imagination. There was so much work to see, so many creations and characters, different ideas everywhere you looked!

 ...Afterwards we went up to the next floor where there was another exhibition and we all got to rest our legs a little while as André gave us a performance displaying his work. We went away feeling very inspired!

Here is a video performance of his, Zeitgeist, that includes some of the same pieces.

I made some notes at the time:

That was a great first day!

New York, New York!

Last Saturday we arrived back to a dreary Stockport afternoon, extremely jealous of all our classmates ringing their parents for lifts home. However, suffering jet-lag for the best part of a few days and paying for an expensive taxi ride home all on our own was all worth it for the amazing week we had! 

This was my first time visiting America, and the streets of Manhattan were far more overwhelming than I had anticipated...it certainly brought out childish excitement being somewhere I'd seen so much in films and was finally experiencing first hand. For the most part the people were extremely friendly and welcoming. I had been scared that the effects of hurricane Sandy would still have been causing a lot of stress for people in the area, but apart from a few fallen trees in some places we visited, it was (bizarrely) almost as though it had never happened. Clearly New York is a very bustling place and managed the clean-up very efficiently, for the sake of carrying on as normal as quickly as possible, making it strange to think we were getting scared that our trip would have to be cancelled. More than the storm causing problems with our schedule in the city, I was concerned that visiting and expecting New Yorkers to be hospitable and enthusiastic about our visit was going to be completely inappropriate; but it seems that those fears were unnecessary and our tutors guided us around some very inspiring visits with people from the industry who seemed very happy to meet us and welcome us into their homes/studios.

The highlights of my week were visiting illustrators Andre da Loba (at his studio) and Caitlin Hackett (in her apartment!). We also got to wander around the fascinating house of Stephen Byram as he told us about his work. 

 

Of course we also spent much of our time travelling around the streets of the city, and underground on the subway. The last day, in particular, gave us an opportunity to indulge in a bit of pure tourism. We wandered around Central Park then went up to 'the top of the rock', spying on the city from the top of the Rockafeller, and in our last spare minutes returned back to the park to see the sun set before we had to board the coach to leave- such a perfect way to end the trip, but we were very sad to go.