Calarts Students

The Colors of Spring

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Textile artist Cybele Moon: "I wanted to share my love of color with others."

Artist Cybele Moon partnered with The Trailer Trash Project to offer her Earth Day art installation to the community of Santa Clarita, CA.

Cybele models clothes fashioned from pre-owned T-shirts

Some artists choose paint as their medium. Others choose stone or metal. Cybele Moon chose fabric–or perhaps it chose her.

“My mother used to weave and make her own clothes. One of my grandmothers worked in a bobbin factory, and she sewed at home. My other grandmother would crochet and do cross-stitch,” explained the Cal Arts grad student who was a professional costume designer before deciding to go back to school to get an MFA.

Textiles are intertwined with her family tree. “Even my grandfather had a connection to fabric. He came to this country at the turn of the century from Slovakia. He made looms and wove rag rugs in the 1930’s and ‘40’s.”

Cybele spends most of her time at Cal Arts working behind the scenes, designing costumes for dance and theatrical productions. Before graduating she wanted to create some of her own textile art and share it with the Santa Clarita community on Earth Day.

Sam Breen's 1951 Spartan trailer provided a backdrop for Cybele's installation.

The result: a textile installation resembling dripping vines, dyed in the soft blue and green colors of spring. The work was fashioned from recycled T-shirts donated by CalArts students, faculty and staff.

“Fabric is my medium. I can dye it, paint it and manipulate it,” she said. She is particularly fond of the challenges presented by recycled fabrics. “I can take a piece of clothing, cut open the seams and make something else.”

Cybele’s Earth Day offering demonstrates her dual passion for ecology and art. “We waste and throw away so many things. I wanted to show that you can take a common T-shirt and transform it into something completely different – like a piece of art.”

Drawing on her skills as a costume designer Cybele, along with Jessica Ramsey and Emily Moran,  two Cal Arts BFA students in costume design, conducted a workshop for kids demonstrating how to transform used T-shirts into trendy scarves, vests, tank tops and other items of clothing.

With graduation coming up, Cybele’s thoughts have turned to the future. Her dream? To live some place where she can have a huge garden and chickens. Her career goal is to be costume design professor and to continue working professionally as a costume designer.  She will also continue to explore her own textile art.

Cal Arts students Cybele Moon (r) and Jessica Ramsey (l) conducted a workshop for kids to show how to turn a used T-shirt into something unexpected.

The experience on Earth Day in Santa Clarita has inspired her to try to take on more collaborative community projects in the future, especially those geared for children.

 

Her off-campus art project comes at a time when she and other Cal Arts students are working at a hectic pace, trying to finish up the school year.

Emily Moran (l) helps a youngster work magic with recycled clothing.

“I didn’t know what I was getting into or how it would turn out,” she explained on evening before the event,  her hands covered with thick rubber gloves while she prepped another batch of T-shirts for dying. “It was a challenge to see if I could do it, to get all those people to donate T-shirts. But I just kept on trying.”

Sam’s vintage trailer provided a framework for Cybele’s piece, giving the trailer’s metal exterior a soft, whimsical look. It could be the beginning of a colorful, art-inspired and Earth-friendly spring.

For more on Cybele Moon, click here for her web site. 

This post is part of a series documenting Sam Breen’a Spartan Restoration Project. Please see his first post here and check out the archive here. The CSPA is helping Sam by serving in an advisory role, offering modest support and featuring Sam’s Progress by syndicating his feed from http://spartantrailerrestoration.wordpress.com as part of our CSPA Supports Program.

A Long Way Home (Post: #1)

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– by Sam Breen
I’m a 27 year-old graduate student in acting, at CalArts. I’ve just embarked on the final year of my master’s degree and the fun and games are over in class. The focus has shifted from voice classes , movement  and Shakespeare scene-study, to entrepreneurship.  In less than a year, my classmates and I will be classically trained professional actors. But before we graduate we’ve got a whole lot to learn about the business of acting- these days it’s all about “booking the job”.

On evenings and weekends, however, my mind is elsewhere– you’ll find me on the lower parking lot, renovating my 1951 Spartan trailer.

I’ve convinced the school to let me park the 36 foot monster on campus. This gives me easy access to the Institute’s scene-shop and mostly importantly, to the theater school’s technical designer, Michael Darling. My carpentry skills are basic, at best, and Michael’s mentoring has been absolutely essential to the project.

Sculptor and faculty member, Michael Darling works with CalArts students in the scene shop.

In exchange for letting me house the Trailer Trash Project on campus, I’ve offered to put the Spartan to good use. Once finished the trailer will be a home for my mother, a journalist and Katrina evacuee, but while it is being built I want it to serve as a work and performance space for the artist community at CalArts and beyond.

Inspiration piece.

The notion of displacement is one that my mother and I are all too familiar with.  As I began my studies in art school it became  clear to me:

…all artists are, at one time or another, displaced. We’re perpetually confronted with the reality of having to leave home to pursue our craft. Art-making can often distance us from our families.  And when we’re away, the feeling of longing inspires us to make more art.

Over the course of 7 or 8 months, the Spartan will take the form of a mobile performance space/ make-shift classroom/ screening room, used to explore how displacement and artistry go hand-in-hand.

Evelyn Serrano, a member of CalArt’s faculty in the Art School is onboard with this idea. Evelyn is an artist who means business. She’s a staunch supporter of education through the arts and teaches a class at Calarts, Arts and Activism, designed to

From the Nomad Lab web site: “The “NOMAD LAB is a program created to support the goals of the Valle del Oro Neighborhood Committee in partnership with the City of Santa Clarita Community Services Division, The Village Apartments and the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission. As an initiative of the Valle del Oro Neighborhood Committee, NOMAD LAB is devoted to building a better neighborhood through programs and activities for youth and their families.”

help her students develop and pursue their own social agenda. One of her latest projects is Nomadlab in nearby Newhall, which offers free creative writing classes to young students in the Valle del Oro neighborhood, who are at risk of gang activity. She’s offered to make the Trailer Trash Project a key element of her Arts and Activism class this year. Her students and I will be devising ways to use the Spartan as a means to collaborate with Nomadlab. But ultimately, I want to leave it up to the kids of Nomadlab to come up with ways in which the trailer can best serve their cause.

Another source of inspiration for my project has been Side Streets, a community arts project co-founded by Cal Arts, alum, Karen Atkinson along with RIDS grad Joe Luttrell, two artists committed to the belief that the creative process belongs in the streets as well as in studios and galleries.  More on Side Streets in future posts.

My mother, who has been researching and writing about the green revolution sees this trailer as an opportunity to display mobile, sustainable living. So we’re going eco!

This is a former FEMA trailer turned into a mobile disaster art studio by Paul Villinski. The trailer has solar panels and a wind turbine. We’ll use both on the Spartan, along with a composting toilet, and sustainable building materials. Credit: http://www.emergencyresponsestudio.org/

My Trailer Trash Project will be carried out in collaboration with The Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts, founded by CalArts alumni, Miranda Wright and Ian Garrett.   The CSPA is a network providing artists and arts organizations with resources to help them adopt more sustainable practices in their work.

The Trailer Trash Project will be carried out using safe, clean and renewable materials as much as

feasibly possible.  (See for instance, posts on “green” insulation materials.)  Believe me this is no easy task. To give you an example, I was convinced bamboo flooring and cabinetry was the way to go. It’s super renewable (it only takes bamboo 3-5 years to reach maturity) but in recent years controversy has surfaced over the use of bamboo: it has to be flown over from China, lots of chemicals are used in the manufacturing process, deforestation and others.

Keeping up with this has been a little too much for me to handle right now– I’ve got my hands full as it is. So I’ve charged my mother with this task. This blog has lots of interesting info about sustainable materials, information that Michael and I use when deciding how to proceed.  Perhaps it will be of interest to you as well.

Stay tuned.  It’s going to be a wild ride!

The CSPA is helping Sam Breen with the Spartan Trailer Restoration Project by serving in an advisory role, offering modest support and featuring Sam’s Progress by syndicating his feed from http://spartantrailerrestoration.wordpress.com as part of our CSPA Supports Program.