Domestic Violence and Divorce

That's not what this post is about (but that IS what the homework I'm supposed to be working on is about). You may be asking yourself, "Monica, aren't you getting a degree in Art?" The answer is, yes, but none of that matters in my "Sociology of the Family" class.

And none of the aforementioned matters, either, because it's three in the morning (AGAIN, I know!) and I am procrastinating. I found these photos from May and they made me laugh. What am I even wearing (a dress and jeans at the same time)?

So...

...this blog is NOT dead. I've just been very, very busy. Even though grad school, work, friends and the new boyfriend are keeping me plenty busy, the thing that is keeping me the busiest by far is commuting to the four aforementioned items. I can't wait until November 1st, which is the day that I get to move into my new studio apartment (much, much, much, much closer to school and work). It is soooo efficient that the kitchen is kept inside of a tiny closet. You know you are jealous. In other news, I am having extreme clay withdrawal. In the MAT program, we need to have taken specific types of studio courses to earn our licensure for D.C. public schools. Because I studied ceramics in undergraduate school so studiously, it is, unfortunately, NOT one of those studio courses that I need. Instead I need things like printmaking, painting, digital art, sculpture, metal-smithing and textiles, among other things. So, I am officially saving up for a kiln, wheel and clay (it'll probably take me ten years). My life is simply fantastic, but amidst all the joy, excitement and new obstacles, I have begun to realize that something is missing in my life: THE CLAY, MAN! I am the poorest I've been in years and, yet, I am 100% positive that I would take a block of clay over United States currency any day these days.

Homesick

I am having a blast during my vacation week from camp. I drove up to Maryland to spend the week with my best friend, Rachael (Yep, that's us at our senior prom).

Anyway*, Rachael, Christian and I have been frantically apartment-hunting since Friday with lots of potentials, but no luck yet. We've been on site to some places to check the safety of areas out in person and have been emailing people like crazy and I think I've visited craigslist way more often than I've visited facebook this week (seriously).

Anyway, for a much-needed change of pace, I got to go all the way to downtown D.C. by myself like a big girl today (I officially have a smartrip card!). I arrived at the steps of the Natural History Museum to meet up with Kenny, Corey, Jailee, Louiza and Andy (who are friends from camp that decided to spend their vacation week house-sitting near D.C.). While Rachael was at work, I shopped around D.C. with my campy friends pretending that I wasn't about to be homeless in exactly a month...I bought coconut ice cream from a hot dog car and selfishly purchased the cutest dress from H&M (a clothing store that everyone in the world has been to but me). Also, whilst at Urban Outfitters, I got to witness a real-life shoplifter get arrested. It was actually super depressing and sad because the woman was crying and looked like any other person. The situation was simply all-around uncomfortable and humiliating. Urban Outfitters is really, really, really expensive though.

Anyway, on my crowded, but solitary, metro ride back to College Park, I began thinking more and more about my new and different life scheduled for the fall. What will grad school really be like? Will I get good grades? How stressed out will I be? What kind of people will I meet? What about boys (just kidding)? What kind of part-time job will I get to slave away at? Will I make enough money for rent? What about for food? Will I be happy? The latter is worrying me most. I know that I will be happy, but I don't know if I'll every be as happy as I was these past two years. I know I've always complained about Elon, but ever since I stepped foot into the ceramics room and got to working with Mike, I've had some kind or sense of inner calm.

I know that sounds silly. It really does. But I COMPLETELY mean it. The daily struggle and triumph that I experienced working on my ceramics and sculpture made me feel so special and unique. I would tire physically at the wheel, wedging the clay, feeling it in my arms, shoulders and, even, abdomen. I'd get weird looks walking around campus because I'd be so mentally involved, constantly thinking about art, that I wouldn't even bother to clean the dried clay off of my pants, hands and even face. Needless to say, I absolutely LOVED every painstaking minute of working on my thesis. I loved even more discussing the things of life with faculty and peers. My happiest days were at the end of April, installing the senior art show. I hadn't eaten for two days, hadn't slept for the same amount, but I was all giggly and bubbly. I didn't want to be anywhere else. All I wanted to do was stay in the art building.

What I am trying to say is that today on the metro, it hit me. It hit me hard. I am not going back to Elon this fall (which I am okay with). Rather, I am not going back to the ceramics room. I won't get to see Mike's face every day. I won't have clay under my fingernails. I won't get to walk around the maze of Artswest, passing friends in the hall. I won't get to judge the bad art in the bathrooms. There are other things that I won't get to do, but mainly I am jealous that I don't get to make more art full-time. I hope that at the Corcoran I will have enough studio time to explore more with my art. I hope that I find the faculty and students as fun as I found my cohort of art kids. I'm not worried. It's more that the Corcoran experience I am about to embark on is being held and judged against my Art/Honors experience. Mainly, though, as much as I don't want this summer and camp to end, I can not wait another day to get my fingers back in some clay and my brain wrapped around someone else's art.

Love,

Monica

*I like this word.

Life is good

Mike gave me this picture today and I thought to share it here. Things are starting to come together and camp (summer!) is just around the corner.

SURF

Today classes were canceled and oodles of students presented original research projects and theses at Elon's Student Undergraduate Research Forum (or SURF). As someone said tonight "I went SURF-ing all day and was no where near the beach!" Actually, that's not true. I wanted to see all of my friend's presentations (which was about 40, give or take), but my presentation took too long both to install and de-install. Here is a video of the way I set the installation up today (I might change it a bit for my gallery opening on Sunday):

Honors Thesis Preview from Monica Huang on Vimeo.

Along with allowing viewers to, um, view the artwork, I gave a brief speech and participated in a Q & A session for about 15 minutes. I think I did well and people seemed to really enjoy the session.

After a hard day's work of presenting, the students and their mentors were invited to attend a dinner celebrating and congratulating everyone on their achievments. We got little awards! :

Love,

Monica

"That was Yoko Ono's sister."

Lucky tries to figure out how to get a hamster out of its cage...to do what?

I know that my spring break isn't over yet.  It just feels like it is.  I think it is because I am back at school already, working on my thesis and other homework as if my last weekend of spring break didn't mean anything.  

Over the break, I spent a couple of days at Elon to volunteer, teach and work in the ceramics studio before helping my parents pack up the things in my room that I wasn't actively using.  I was kind of bummed that my cool blue Ikea bookshelves would be leaving, along with the books on them because I thought I would miss them in a room left with only the basics.  But, after moving tubs and boxes of books, clothes, shoes, odds and ends, and carrying a heavy chair, a bookshelf, a chest, my electric guitar (I kept my acoustic), my keyboard (don't worry, I kept my accordion), my television and my twelve foot long art easel, getting three hours of packing out of the way then instead of later, seemed like a very good idea.

Now I suspect that I have unpacked, give or take, three-quarters of my room!  All that's left are my spring/summer clothes, a guitar, an accordion, some lights and the artwork on my walls.  And my room still manages to look like a happenin' place to be.  

That night after moving, I went to my parents' hotel near Duke.  My dad had a meeting the next day and my mom, Lucky and I took the free day as an opportunity to walk around Chapel Hill.  I took my mom to the University Mall to show her where I taught Art-to-Art in addition to the gourmet grocery, Southern Season.  I also took her and Lucky on a complete walk of Franklin Street to Carrborro.  I pointed out Cat's Cradle, the hip place where I saw Tegan and Sara two years ago.  Then we walked back to Med Deli and met David for lunch.  We got the lebanese lunches to go so that we could enjoy them with Lucky, sitting in a park.

A sweet view from the school of the monument

The next day, I drove home with my parents for my interview at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington D.C.  I've applied to the MAT in Art at the school and will hear back from them in one to two weeks.  I think my personal interveiw went pretty well, and I got to sit in on two classes with students from the program.  One was on museum and community arts education and another was some kind of seminar with four students that had prepared practice lesson plans.  I actually got to participate in the latter and got to feel what it would be like to be part of a class!

One side of the Corcoran

Also, you might find it cool to know that while I was being led through the halls of the school by the Director of the program, I held the door for Yoko Ono's sister.  She had her hands full and I didn't think twice, holding the door for someone like that.  When the woman had left, the Director turned and whispered to me, "That was Yoko Ono's sister".  I sillily blurted out, "Oh my gosh!  I HAVE to tell my mom!"

After my long day came to an end, my mom and I took the metro back and drove home.  While my mom and dad had dinner, I drove to College Park to visit Rachael and friends.  It was convenient that my friend, Jeremy, was stopping by for dinner.  I haven't seen him in a few years and was horrified to see that he too, like my brother, was now much taller than me and with a deeper voice than I was used to.  Reunion photo below:

Vote!

Now I'm back at school.  I just met with Mike about five hours ago to start another batch of sculptures.  By Sunday night, I will have fired twelve sculptures leaving one last big one and six or seven mini-sculptures to be fired the remainder of next week.  Speaking of next week, my cousin, Sarah, has decided to spend three days and two nights at my apartment for Easter weekend.  It should be fun, but I hope she realizes that we will be hanging out while completing lots of homework!

Love,

Monica

Thesis progress

These are the four I made since spring semester started!  And below is me for height comparison:

Love,

Monica

Feeling Weird

Subway from Lee Bretschneider on Vimeo.

I promise to start writing again once I get back into the semester grove.  

For now I'll say that:  Art to Art is going well (Elisabeth and I have made neat, laminated schedules using clip art she found), my fish are growing by the hour, Stephanie is finally back in our lives, Jenna's got a boyfriend, I cut David's hair really, really, really short, my hair is growing at the speed of light, I'm still working on applications for graduate school, yesterday I started throwing on the wheel again and got back into the swing of things, there is already a lot of dried clay on my pants (which looks like mud and dirt to normal people I walk by on campus), my sculpture came back from Denver undamaged, I really like my art history teacher, I had to drop my installation class (sad :( face) for fear that it would interfere with my honors thesis, I feel very prepared for this semester, this blog is one year old (not today, I missed it's birthday), I missed Irina's "birthday" too, Jenna and Alexa got into NCUR which means Stephanie and I have the apartment all to ourselves for a few days in the future, I went to the gym yesterday and ran three miles very quickly, the ping pong tables were taken so I couldn't play yesterday, I can't wait until next weekend because I get to go home and celebrate my favorite holiday (Chinese New Year), I got a new kazoo after my other new kazoo was busted from me blowing/humming too hard into it, I'm waiting to watch a documentary I found in the library on noodling (bare-handed catfishing), and I'm finally taking piano lessons (I think I found my teacher on wikipedia).

The stockings are hung by the fireplace and there's a nice smelling tree in the house but I still need to bake pies and decorate things

There's something smelly going on with the dog, and we need to do something about it immediately.  But that's not the purpose of this post.  I'm gonna take a second and brag about my grades for once:

Fundamentals of Design: A

Professional Practices in Art: A

Honors Thesis: A

Senior Seminar: A

Statistics: A

For winter term, I'm taking my upper-level GST (Plants and Civilization...should be neat).  These are the classes I'm taking in the Spring:

Advanced Projects in Ceramics

Honors Thesis

Art History III Cathedrals/Conquest

Installation Art

Senior Seminar

Whitewater Canoeing

Piano

It should be busy, but EXTREMELY fun.  I'm especially excited about the installation art class and the whitewater canoeing.  I just got the syllabus from that class a couple of weeks ago and my professor (coach, haha) said that some practices will be taking place in school lakes.  That makes me nervous because of all the stories I've heard about people getting e. coli from polar-bear-plunging into the waters.  I guess as long as I don't fall in, I'll be okay.  After all, it's canoeing, not kayaking (though I strongly wish there was a kayak class).

In other news, Rachael is officially done with school.  I'm jealous, but not jealous at the same time because I have a lot of loose ends to fix up this Spring.  I'm excited to see her this break and go to her graduation!  Now I've got to do some holiday shopping/make myself poor again.

Love,

Monica

P.S.  My artist website, for any that are interested:  My "website"

Flying high

I finished working on these (above and below) before I left today.

And took these pictures before landing in Baltimore.

Now I'm home, after eating Korean tofu soup, hanging out with the new dog (he's sweet).

Big wheels keep on turnin

Current Work

Franklin-stein Street

This past weekend, David, Stephanie and I went to Chapel Hill to visit Elisabeth (from camp!).  We did lots of walking back and forth between cars (because of strict parking rules), hung out at her characteristically-high-ceilinged dorm room, played bananagrams and had dinner at a conveyer belt sushi place all before changing into our costumes.  Elisabeth was a Jedi Knight (probably a young obi one), Stephanie was a sultry devil and David was one of those endangered, yet plump bumblebees.  As his girlfriend, I played his flower counterpart by wearing a flower-printed dress and stapling flowers that I cut out of an old Georgia O'Keeffe calendar to a green cardigan.  All of this was topped off with a flower smack dab in the middle of my head:  

Then we walked Franklin Street...

What I DID NOT know was that Franklin Street is basically a giant party in the road.  Plus lots of drunken girls in small animal costumes and boys wearing anything from pizza boxes to Elvis garb.  

I'm exaggerating, of course, but maybe only a little.  Here are some of the highlights from the night:

Fun for all the ages!

Everyone wants in on the picture!

I am proud to say that I got the cone reference.

These are my friends!

This guy was cool.  He asked me where I was from because he said it was what he asked when people said to him, "Can I take your picture?"

I saw the balloon kid at the very beginning but he got away before I could take a picture.  Luckily, I was OBSESSED with finding him and snapped a shot of him on his way out.

Believe it or not, he was not the only peacock on Franklin Street that night.  And I thought it a pretty original costume.

This guy had a dance-off with himself.

Swim team? or Triathletes stuck in the swimming portion of a triathlon?

Octo-mom!  And Franklin Street isn't just for college kids anymore...

"Oh my gawd!  A Big reference?  It isn't every day that you get a Big reference!!" --really drunk guy who saw the Tom Hanks classic 

First costume I saw that night, and the reason I love group costumes

Oh, and this is what I meant by pizza box earlier.

After all of this craziness and more, we went back to Elisabeth's friend's apartment and watched creative people build halloween cakes for $10,000 in prize money.  We would have gone home after that, but with the extra hour from daylight savings, we decided to watch Corpse's Bride, a movie witch (haha) Stephanie had yet to see and ended up sleeping through.

Now, life is moving very quickly.  I'm busy working, of course, on my thesis and am trying to keep myself out of trouble (and by that, I mean keeping myself from adopting furry little animals).  My dad came to visit yesterday, installing a nice little blinker for night-driving safety along with much-needed new brake pads.  I've got babysitting this Friday for six hours and will be helping out with some kiln firings on Saturday with the other claydogs.  I've also got to greet the jurors that I selected for the Juried Student Exhibition this Sunday .  With all of that on my plate, I can say for certain that I am looking forward to a relaxing matinee showing of Kiss Me, Kate at Elon on Sunday.

Love,

Monica

DCC Community Art Show

For my Professional Practices in Art class we are required to regularly submit art to exhibitions to get exposure, circulate ourselves into the art community but, mainly, to get experience doing things that artists people do.  So, I submitted some pictures of pieces around to random exhibits that I saw online thinking that no one would really get back to me (because of this, I didn't pay too much attention to location).  However, there is this art show called Convergence: An Exhibition on Community that liked one of my pieces.  The only problem is the show is in Denver, Colorado.  HAHA  The funniest part is that I'm thrilled and am going to pay shipping and handling to get it there!  Here's a little blurb about the show:

The DCC Community Art Show is seeking applications for its annual art show/wine tasting event, November 14 being hosted at 1101 S Washington St. in Denver, CO. We are currently looking for artists who are looking to gain more exposure for their work or are new to showing and/or selling their art. This year's show has an emphasis on the greater community and what that means to its artists. 

I'm thinking I might try to sell in order to make up for shipping and handling, though.

Getting tall

I did it!

Today I found out that I made it through round 1 of Teach for America.  This means I've been invited to a phone interview which will happen early next week.  I'm so excited, but so nervous too.  I can't wait to tell them more about myself beyond what my resume says and I'm going to do everything I can to do my very best.  

In other news, school is going very well.  It's weird, but one of my favorite parts of my short week (classes only on Mondays and Wednesdays) is when I get to help the boy sitting infront of me with Statistics.  You gotta enjoy that group work and peer frustration over math.  And I absolutely LOVE watching the teacher's calculator demos via the overhead.  Yes.  I did say overhead.  You probably thought they stopped making those things when I stopped attending high school.  Thankfully, though, there are still a few of them in existence in colleges across the country that like to keep it old school.

Also, I'm having such a blast working on my thesis this semester.  I'm working on a ceramic garden of sorts right now, sculpting tree forms that have reached my personal high of 33 inches.  Mike and I will have to modify the kiln to get this plant life fired.  And since I finally got my camera battery charged the other day, I'll start posting pictures of stuff again.  And by stuff, I mean my art work!  

Now I've got to go back to my homework.  I'm working on a project for Fundamentals of Design.  The goal is to make a self-portrait that is larger than life using a small grid where each square expresses the image by way of a different pattern.  If that wording was confusing, then know that I am basically making a giant mosaic of my face.  I'll have that picture here too.

Love,

Monica

My video interview

and article.

Done with junior year forever

Everything (and more) is in the living room now.

I had my last exam today.  It was my ceramics final and my classmates and I had a group critique.  It lasted for a while, but the worst part was that at the end I had to transport all of my ceramics/pottery back to my apartment (all 3 hundred tons of it).  

Need I remind you about my tiny, tiny car? 

Anyway, now everything is awkwardly on the coffee table in the living room.  I've also got stuff on the end tables and next to the TV.  Hope the roomies don't mind too much.  Signing off now.  Here's a painting I did on the last day of Drawing II: