November 2021 — a self portrait
This is an ongoing collection of research notes, in the form of sketches and works in progress.
Mixed in are artworks made as classroom examples, showing the connections between my interests as an artist and my interests as a teacher.
November 2021 — a self portrait
October 2021 — quick animation tests, using an overhead projector to create drawings that interact with architectural space
2021 — Dressings, india ink on paper
September 2021 — demonstration animations for classes at Arts Umbrella
September 2021 — The Ambassadors by Holbein, projected on a white wall at an angle, so that the image is stretched out and distorted—except for the anamorphic skull at the bottom of the painting
September 2021 — a GameBoy game about rock collecting (a work in progress)
August 2021 — an interactive web goof: type a phrase and my cartoon lipsyncs to it. Try it at nloewen.com/lipsync/. Inspired by an animation project at Arts Umbrella
July 2021 — Instructions on how to operate a slide projector, given to the team at the Evergreen Cultural Centre to reference while showing my With drawings
September 2021 — A slide sequence; in each of the 27 slides, the words “next slide please” are combined in a different order
July 2021 —
(For example, the childlike grace with which a certain poet in Naples gulped down ice cream in secret, or the awkward, shambling way a certain philosopher would pace the room as he spoke, stopping suddenly and staring at a distant corner of the ceiling.)
— Agamben in “Genius” (included in the collection Profanations)
August 2021 — With drawings at the Evergreen Cultural Centre, in the (Re)Visions exhibition
June 2021 — ‘50 figure drawing’
This idea is stolen from some young students at arts umbrella, who created pages like this in preparation for a quick figure-drawing exercise. They had just been introduced to the idea of the “figure” label, but hadn’t yet seen examples of how that label is conventionally connected to an image. The result were beautiful, accidentally Broodthaers-esque compositions that I have been thinking about for months since.
Potentially in dialogue with also, to compute
June 2021 — a memory of my elementary school library, drawn on a ‘magic slate’ drawing toy (the contemporary equivalent of the toy described in Freud’s essay on memory, “A note upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’”)
June 2021 — A sketch for an installation featuring elementary school classroom style patches of carpet. Lit by a carousel slide projector.
June 2021 — Slide projection and yarn, 2021. For Agamben’s cat.
June and May 2021 — self-portraits
April 2021 — sketches for also, to compute, a research project around depictions of women in the computing centres of the 1960s–1980s
Spring 2021 — Dressings and also, to compute (work-in-progress)
Spring 2021 — ‘what is a library’
March 2021 — poems about prepositions
2021 — a carefully edited and typeset edition of Engels’ On the history of early Christianity, a long essay which compares the early days of the workers’ movement in Europe with the early days of the Jesus movement — and which perhaps invites comparisons with certain tendencies in contemporary art... This list of ne’er-do-wells is my favourite passage:
And just as all those who can expect nothing from the official world or have come to the end of their tether with it — opponents of vaccination, teetotallers, vegetarians, anti-vivisectionists, nature-healers, free-congregation preachers whose communities have fallen to pieces, authors of new theories on the origin of the universe, unsuccessful or failed inventors, victims of real or imaginary injustices who are termed “good-for-nothing pettifoggers” by the bureaucracy, honest fools and dishonest swindlers — all throng to the working-class parties in all countries.
October 2020 — an artwork after Felix Gonzalez-Torres “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers)
October 2020 — pronoun buttons, for a social event at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art gallery
September 2020 — the pattern of damage on Malevich’s Black Square
July 2020 — an ‘art historian’ badge, in the style of a toy sheriff’s badge
July 2020 — a sketch about dialectics and vector addition
June 2020 — political signs and comics in response to BLM and the movement to defund the police
May 2020 — ‘lacangerie’ — sketches for a critical theory clothing line
March 2020 — an experiment in analogue virtual reality, using an overhead projector and an image of Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Real Estate projections
March 2020 — a stopmotion animation using drawings on transparent plastic
March 2020 — a handdrawn animation
March 2020 — a visual note describing a theoretical observation — understanding marxism as an analysis of social relations that helps to inform an understanding of individual experience, and psychoanalysis as an analysis of individual experience that helps to inform an understanding of social relations
March 2020 — a ‘self portrait as piles,’ showing some of my ‘to-read’ stacks, and the objects on which they were piled
November 2019 — an overhead projector experiment
March 2020 — a comic
February 2020 — an etch-a-sketch controlled by the scroll wheel on a mouse; the screen can be cleared by ‘shaking’ the window
February 2020 — a comic drawn during an Arts Umbrella cartooning class about dialogue, drawn in MacPaint on an emulated 1984 Macintosh
February 2021 — comics drawn during an Arts Umbrella cartooning class
February 2020 — a comic made for an Arts Umbrella graphic novel class — read the full PDF
March 2020 — a self-portrait
February 2020 — a drawing of Scooby Doo from a cartooning class at Arts Umbrella
January 2020 — a self-portrait
November 2019 — a collage after Ed Ruscha (made at Arts Umbrella, in the style of the backgrounds we use for stopmotion animation)
2019 — a projection of an origami crane, using an overhead projector
2019 — a projection test, using two carousel slide projectors and a set of digitally printed slides
May 2019 — an animation made for an Arts Umbrella claymation class
2019 — a treasure map, an example for a cartooning class at Arts Umbrella
2019 — a felt board created for an exhibition of student work at Arts Umbrella. Visitors to the show could re-arrange the scene, and add dialogue using dry-erase speech bubbles.
2018–2019 — collages made in stop motion animation and cartooning classes at Arts Umbrella
2018 — an overhead projection
2018 — an text piece inspired by Gu Xiong’s artistic practice
November 2018 — an animation made for an Arts Umbrella stop motion class