Week 11

Talk about displaying your work today. What feedback did you receive and what new
insights did you gain? How can you use your experience working with the Big Idea
inform your curriculum? (Talk about the process, lessons learned, and how to make it
relevant for your students).

Feedback was overall good for my project/presentation. A few things that were mentioned were that in my original images, my font was a smidge unreadable. Another thing was that everyone (including myself) hated the song that I used for my stop motion animation. That's okay though, because what I'm going to do is have my brother make me a song for it instead. He's a musician and that's his thing, which is good for me because I can use it! Ha.


Overall, I've enjoyed the process of working with a big idea to make curriculum. Honestly speaking, I feel like it makes it a little bit easier. Although it's very easy to go - okay, I want to teach my students painting, collage, ceramics, blah blah blah and come up with arbitrary reasons for why they're doing it, having the connections between everything that they're doing, along with their own personal connection, really makes it their own. A few things that I've learned along the way is that not everyone thinks in the same way that I do (NO WAY! It should have been obvious, haha), so I have to articulate myself better. I've also learned that I completely overwhelm myself by making my project ideas too big and way too complicated. Simplification is a good thing, but often I think, oh no, this is way too simple. Then it seems like I need four hours, a powerpoint presentation, a live action performance, a musical number, and a seven course meal to explain myself. Keep it simple, it's much less grief.

Making things relevant for my students is one of my extreme worries, but I feel like as long as I let them make their own connections without being so specific, it can work. Once again, not everyone thinks like I do. 

Week 8.1 - Leon Johnson

I realize that this has nothing to do with any journal prompts, or maybe it will. At this point though, I would just like to track my thoughts so that I can articulate them clearly later.

I feel like I've been hit with something so profound that I can barely wrap my mind around it. I felt like Leon was simply talking to me in that huge room of people. How else could he have gotten so far inside my head that he was on the other side?

Grief. I was just talking about this today. I was just thinking about this.


And the idea of grief being the absence of something. The split second before a decision is made where time seems to stretch into it's own separate entity. The feeling in the bottom of your stomach before you run head first into a wall of your own making.

The woman in the video speaking about her dreams said that she "made so many elegant decisions."
And what is an elegant decision?
Could it be simply waking up in the morning?
Could it be deciding to face the day.
Could seeing the world around you as the lights turn on and the sun rises be an elegant decision in it's own right?
Could every single thing that you do every single day be an elegant decision?

I was on the edge of my seat in that room, feeling like weeping.

And the people in the room! After everything was over, I stood up, clutching my package of amazing items that I was given when I walked in, while everyone around me went, "Ah, that was strange. So what are you doing this weekend?" around me.
What a concentration of apathy.
It's the whole dragging a horse to water thing. You can't make people get it. You can't even really make people see what is being said.

I don't even know if what he was saying was what I am seeing. I feel like I understand everything and nothing. I feel endlessly inspired and completely intimidated by his thought process (and because I see him as a kindred spirit this evening, my own.)

My dad called this "a cosmic situation." I called him immediately to articulate what I was thinking. How on earth can I describe out loud what feels like someone describing myself to me? (And what a narcissistic thing to say. This feels more about a human condition, which is NOT directly only connected to me, myself, and I.) I told him I was just talking about grief today, in connection to my uncle, and he said, "What a cosmic situation. He was exactly what you needed exactly when you needed it."



What a cosmic situation.
What an elegant decision.
Yes.

Week 8

What is your 4 week plan for your big idea?


Week 1 : Research.
What have I done so far?
Identity of surroundings (more specifically, identity of houses.) How does who you are change based on where you've been?

What do I want to do? Identity of emotions (more specifically, the stages of grief.) What are the five stages? Are there five opposing stages of joy? How could I go about making this visual instead of just a psychological idea? Does our identity change based on which stage that we're in?

Week 2 : Wrap up research, start shooting and creating.

Start looking at the collages more objectively. What else can be included? Should anything be taken out? Should there be more pictures and not just cut paper? Should there be multiple images on top of each other?

Week 3: Think about display.

Should they be solid, simple pieces sitting flat on a wall? Or should they come out of the backing that they are on? Should I take pictures of the preliminary objects, make frescoes, and then work from there? Should I make wet paper transfers? Come up with final pieces.

Week 4: Wrap up display, do a dance.

Comb through all of the work and come up with how they best look together. Take out things that don't work. Make new things if nothing works. Try not to cry too loud if things are lame, or laugh too hard if everything is ammmmazing. :D Listen to music and dance around. And relax, hopefully.

Week 7

Week Seven:

How did you work with the logic and also resist the logic of the media? What is the cultural encoding of the media? How does this matter for your work?

John, you make me laugh. I've done a project on this exact topic.

I called it "Media Circus" and each of the images were meant to show how the media makes you see what you shouldn't see, hear what you shouldn't hear, wear what you shouldn't wear, and eat what you shouldn't eat. Aka, influence.

Of course, there is little to no logic in the media. Just think about the photoshopped images of the models that don't look like they even have a ribcage anymore. And those are supposed to be appealing! 

The problem is not deciding to work with the logic, I don't think, but in trying to figure out how the logic even begins to exist. It's like teachers mentioning to me that I should use skinny girls for models instead of real women. The worst part is, they're trying to help, because out in the real world, models are never not the standard size blah blah blah.

I personally think that the world can change on that, but we shall see.

 

Clearly this effects my work because I thought about it long enough to do a project on it. I've often thought about how people, but more specifically women, are effected by the images that surround us. Since when do we care more about what Lindsay Lohan is doing more than our friends that are dying overseas? Oh yeah, since forever. This is obviously an influence of what the media chooses to show to the public.

The fact that I know that Lindsay Lohan can't afford to go to rehab is a really sad thing. But I digress.

 

Visual culture has such a large effect on people of every time period. Fashion, especially. But how can we separate ourselves from this fact? What makes us so prone to the influence of bias sources? I think that the internet has a lot to do with it too. At this point in time, not only are we constantly surrounded by images, but there are so many images on every single thing that we look at that we don't even know where to begin. I think the world is constantly skimming down "pages" except we're not reading books anymore, we're reading facebook and McDonald's ads.

Week 6

Which 3 ideas seem most important to you about your big idea? Why? What directions does your artwork suggest in relation to your concerns?

When I think about identity, I look at it in relation to a few different things.

 
1) At first, I was thinking about the identity of objects and how surroundings effect it.
2) Then, I was thinking about how surroundings effect the identity of people. Would I have been the same person now as I would have been if I was born in a different country/different family/different socioeconomic status? This is not only following in line with the ideas that I was thinking about for the objects, but also in line with what I have been thinking about for my senior thesis. (See above!)
3) I have completely crashed my cart of ideas and jumped off the ship of surroundings and moved onto the identity of emotions. I feel like we turn into different people depending on our emotions and was wondering how to convey that. Or perhaps, I would like to focus on another specific emotion. Lately, I've been thinking very hard about the five stages of grief and what they mean. I tend to process large emotional upheavals by making artwork about them, and the death of my uncle has been sitting low in my belly for a few weeks. How has my identity changed now that his doesn't exist? Or does it? 


Oh my, so many ideas.


I've been thinking with collage, but now instead of just having collages and leaving it at that, I would like to take them a step further. How? I'm not sure yet, but I have kept them in my room to stare at during random points of time. I was thinking about adding found objects to them, or something. Not all of my steps have been explicitly figured out at this point, but I'm okay with that. (I know, surprise!)

Week 5

Week Five:

Create a collage of images that represent your big idea. As you write, reflect on what features are in common or dissimilar. What stands out to you as most significant? Why? What questions have you generated about your topic? How has visual culture made an impact on your issue of concern?




In this group of images about my big idea, I decided to focus on self identity. More specifically, I tried to find things in magazines that spoke to me, about me. I think that any object viewed in the proper context can be seen as referencing identity.  Along with the images, I included words or phrases that I thought were important to my own self identity.


Things that I noticed the most when I was searching for images were big patterns and any variation of red or pink. I think the most significant image that I chose when I was considering my big idea though was the image of the little girl in the tutu with a sword around her belt. Little girls exude confidence before the media gets to them, and anyone who can bounce to the beat of their own drummer is admirable to me. I placed the word confidence above it just to cement the thought. The flowers were for the feminine side of me, even though I can run with the boys. And my very favorite part of this whole thing is the phrase that I found in Cosmo, of all places. "Men are attracted to women who challenge them." This statement once again comes back to the idea of confidence and conviction in one's own ideas, which in turn is a very large part of self identity.


Visual culture has such a huge impact on identity. Magazines, tv shows, and advertisements all play a large part in bringing up the questions that are needed in figuring out who someone is. Why do you like something? Why don't you? Sometimes the reasons why you don't agree bring you closer to figuring out who you are than the reasons why you do. Visual culture also has a negative impact on identity. Just one look at the people who have eating disorders can show you - brought on by stress in their lives, the need for control, and the image that the media has shown for perfection.




Having identity for a topic seems so very gigantic. Every step of the way is another set of huge questions that all seem to come down to only a few short ones. Why? What makes people identify themselves in one group over another? What makes it important to me that I'm seen as confident more than anything else? Would being brought up a different way have made it so that I would choose a different option, or would I have always gotten to this point, at twenty two years old, of being Mara? What makes us be who we are?

Week 3

Funny enough, I already answered about my three essential questions in last weeks journal about my big idea, but I'll restate them. Is identity only referencing the thing itself, or the thing in contrast to other things around it (whether we're talking about people, objects, time, plans, ect)? How are the ways that identity can change depending on context? Is it really realistic to expect someone to understand their own identity at any given point in time? If not, how can we accommodate in our work the room to fluctuate our ideas?


I must admit, the commands make me uncomfortable. (I'll scan the images of what happened later.) I am very much a, "I know what I'm doing because I planned everything out and this is how I work," kind of artist. To allow for complete and total chance was stepping out of the box for me.

At first, I pulled the word "postcard." I thought rather literally and cut one of my pieces into postcard sized pieces and put a space for a stamp and mailing address on the back. After that, I had multiply. I took the birds that I cut out of paper on one of the pieces and drew them over and over, then multiplied the house on the same piece. After that, and I can't remember the exact phrase for it, but it was something about hiding certain parts. I took one of the postcards and drew over what I thought were important parts in black sharpie in large boxes.

The exercise was a good idea, I believe. But, it really made me uncomfortable. On top of the fact that I it wasn't falling in my idea of plan plan plan, I had already really enjoyed what I had done, and if I had it my way, would have stopped then.



The quote that I liked the best out of the ones that were given is the one by Ann Hamilton.

"On one level you do this intellectualized research and you think you're really onto something - but it's almost as if you're keeping yourself busy because you're blind to deeper issues. It's like you set up a process that allows these issues to rise to the surface."

This really makes sense to me because of the type of artist that I am. The fact that she mentioned research was interesting to me. Of course, although everyone goes about things in a different way, there are still common threads among us. Most people that I know (admittedly around my age, which is 22) don't seem to do much research behind their projects before they start them. I, on the other hand, refuse to start a project without some kind of background information to go from.





The funny thing is about doing all of that research is that it all seems to fly out the window once the project really starts moving. For example, for A Greeting of Sorts, my series about awkwardness, I spent so much time thinking about how people are awkward, and how to put them in an awkward situation that it took me a few weeks to realize why I was doing it. I wanted to make them feel like me when I'm in any kind of dating situation. In fact, I went so far as to recreate how my first kiss went, down to the colors in the fabric behind them. But, I was so far into what was my technical reasons for doing things that I almost lost what was really happening in front of me. I was making unconscious decisions that had blatant references to things that had happened in my own life.



This happens in almost every project that I do. My current project for my thesis, about peoples' safe places, follows along the same lines as the rest of my work. I just need to make sure that instead of paying so much attention to the science behind things, that I pay attention to what people are really saying to me in the images. And that instead of thinking that I know everything because of my time and research into something, that I allow for some learning myself.

Week 2

Why is the big idea that you chose important? (to you and others?)

The big idea that I chose was identity, and of course it is important. Identity has everything to do with who someone is, why they think the way that they do, and what made them become that way. But, that is if you are only referencing people. There are plenty of other ways that identity can come into play. Identity can be about the past and the future of objects. It can be about how something is different from everything else in a group. It can be about something as simple as preferences, or as complex as personal growth. 

Identity jumped out to me as my big idea because my entire thesis this year is about the safe places for people - what do people wear and where to people go to feel most at home and most safe? This is not the same for every single person alive, in fact, it's not the same for people even within the same family. Personal safety is a very complex thing. People have stated to me that they feel most safe when they are driving their boat,  when they are standing in front of a movie theater, or when they are standing in Belle Isle Conservatory. They could be in a field or in their bedroom. No two answers are alike because no two people are alike. 

Identity could also have something to do with advertising. Don't most brands have one? Having a unique brand is pivotal to making people choose one product over another. Most advertisements have something to do with how a product makes you a better person or will complete your life. 

I made the images above because I was playing with the idea of inanimate objects having an identity, for example, a house. (This is the front of my dad's, not that it's important, ha!) Is a house going to have the same exact functions or "personality" if it is in a field, or in a neighborhood, or on a beach? Does the season that the house is seen play a part? What makes a house a "home"? Is it simply the people inside of it, or does the walls and surrounding area play a part too? These were all questions I was thinking about while I was gluing myself together (and the paper), and honestly, I came no closer to real answers. There has to be a reason why people chose one house over another, when the houses are very similar. Most of the time, it is based on personal preference, but it must be based on a gut feeling, too. And where does the gut feeling come from? 

This is turning into a much bigger set of questions than previously anticipated. But, my statement still stands. Identity is a big idea that can be applied to almost any situation and connected to any kind of artwork.

Week 1

How would you describe yourself as an artist?  Consider what inspires and motivates you.

  

The most obvious answer to this question would be that I'm a photographer, fine art to be more specific.

 

 It sounds a little strange to put it this way, but I consider myself a scientist. Or, maybe a better word would be anthropologist. According to Princeton University, anthropology is defined as "the social science that studies the origins and social relationships of human beings." 

This pertains to me because most of my work is a study in human emotion. The image on the top is from my series Media Circus, a study in how the media affects how people think. The image directly above is from my series A Greeting of Sorts, which was a study in the awkwardness of dating. The last two images have similar themes. Directly below is an image from Hearing Damage, which when paired with the song of the same name by Thom Yorke describes the loss of senses that happens when a relationship ends. The one below is from Love For the Loveless Like Me, which explored the emotions of a complete relationship from the beginning to the very end. I've also done projects on what stress does to the body and how the order that children in a family are born in affects their personality.

 The point in explaining all of this is because sure, I very well could take pictures of flowers, birds, and pretty things, but instead I attack my work with weeks or even months of research and constant study. Only after I have lined out exactly how I want to attack my work do I even pick up the camera at all. Once I finally shoot everything, the process of how I present my work is just as important.

I love the "how" of photography just as much as the "why" - the smell of chemicals in the quiet darkroom, the feeling of plaster in my hands as I mix fresco, and the sounds of the printer as my images appear. When I make a new discovery in process, I relish it and master it as fast as I can.

  I asked a friend last night what kind of artist I am, and the word that she used was ambitious. After a bit of contemplation, I agree with her. It seems like such an overused descriptor, but taking the easy way out is not in my game plan.