Little Dana in the Big Apple

On Thursday, the Fine Art, Photography & Digital Arts and Basics departments took a field trip to New York City to look at art. Since nothing in my life ever goes according to plan, of course many adventures ensued.

First, we stowed Sandy Frank away on the Fine Arts bus instead of the Basics bus where she belonged. At first, we figured it wasn't a big deal - we were all going to the same place - but when one of the Basics professors came onto our bus looking for "one of his students," we got a little nervous. There was no turning back now, though, and as the professor walked right by us not even noticing Sandy Frank, we sighed a relieved sigh and prepared for our journey.

After a couple of hours on the bus watching Harry Potter, commenting on it loudly and then deciding that we should start a radio show, Sandy Frank and the rest of us made it to the Met. It was about 10 a.m.

I was shortly thereafter accosted by several subsequent security guards for attempting to enter the museum with a turkey hoagie in my backpack and then trying to eat it outside on the steps. Who knew hoagies were such a threat - even in the coat check!

We grabbed some slices at this little (but muchos expensive) pizza joint nearby, met up with our friend Lauren, then headed down to Chelsea. Here are some highlights:

• Walked by the filming of a Law & Order episode. (We don't know if it was SVU.)
• Ernesto Neto's nylon stocking environments
• Berlinde de Bruyckere's disturbing and beautiful wax bodies
• Siebren Versteig's interactive and thoughtful digital projects
• NOT Sophie Calle's self-indulgent abuses of very thoughtful, universal imagery
  

Oyster Fest or How I ended up sleeping in a stranger's bed for two nights.

There's no easy way to say this. Oysters are delicious. Even the ones that cost more than $1 each.

Oyster Bay, Long Island is the home of the annual Oyster Festival, a harvest festival of sorts. This year, like in years past, my friend from Drexel (or, Jake's friend and therefor mine by association) Houstin carted a bunch of us up from Philly to partake of the salty feast. We left a little before 11 pm, piling into other-friend-Nick's white station wagon. During the drive up, we passed snack sized Kit Kat bars, recounted our favorite jokes from that night's Drexel Football Team improv performance, and caught some snoozage while the engineers in the car talked... well... engineering.

Being the only female was an unusual position for me since I started at Moore way back in aught-six, but I must say, I handled it with the graceless awkwardness that would befit an ogre or a small dog in the same situation. What can I say? I'm always a star.

We stayed the weekend at Bam's house. Who's Bam? I'm still not quite sure, having met him for a grand total of maybe 3 minutes. Apparently, he lives in Oyster Bay, and apparently Houstin knows him somehow, having been given a key to this guy's house. Jake and I missed the memo about bringing sleeping bags and pillows, so we slept in the tiny-tiny bed in what appeared to be the bedroom of a five-year-old girl - bedecked with Micky Mouse prints and cloud-mural-walls. "Don't even THINK naughty thoughts," I said to myself as I laid under the wall-matching-cloud-printed sheets staring at the cloud-painted ceiling, terrified of somehow ruining the innocence of this who-knows-why absent child.

The festival was a couple of miles away from Bam's house, so we hoofed it over on Saturday morning. The streets of this quaint yuppy town were filled with almost quaint yuppy folks and their kids quietly moving from booth to booth in the foodcourt drinking their bottomless sodas and slurping down oysters. The seafood was great - we feasted on oysters, lobster and sweet potato fries and drank so much of Wild Bill's Old Fashion Soda that we got pretty sick.

Back at the ranch, Houstin made us a pretty fantastic spaghetti and meatball dinner out of ingredients I guess he just sort of found around the house. Jake and the other lads played Soul Caliber II on Bam's XBox while I did some homework and dozed off.

The next day, Jake and I had to head home since neither of us had the liberty of an entirely home-work-free weekend, so we hopped on the Long Island Railroad, or the Train of the Future, as I'd like to call it, and ended up at Penn Station just in time to get breakfast at the Tick Tock Diner and hop on the Bolt Bus back to Philly. (I must say, between Philly and New York, someone's really mastered this public transportation thing.)

So, I'm still not sure how I ended up sleeping in a stranger's bed, but I won't say that I wouldn't do it again.

Did I mention I love my studio?

Since we started out in September, we've all grown accustomed to this new skin that is the Junior Studio. Now, we're more like a family, collaborating and pushing together to get through the rather intimidating amount of work we have to accomplish.

My last project that I was working on was a series of portraits of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit detectives in the style of Matisse and Rembrandt, and now I'm moving on to a large scale painting called "The Great Gorge-River-Monster Roundup," featuring a valiant cowboy hero engaged in battle with a giant aquatic monster that looks strangely like the creature from the black lagoon. My projects are definitely unlike what most of the other 2D Juniors are working on, and I'm having a bit of a problem resolving within myself what I'd like to do, but I know that at some point, I will figure it out. Anyway, most of my problems come from overthinking - and my teachers and peers are always reminding me to take things one step at a time, just get through the painting at hand.

There's nothing like getting really stressed over a painting, then having Lisa poke her head in from the adjacent studio and make some silly crack about her ceramic bunnies that just totally dissolves all of the pressure.