Project #1
For the small world project, my working idea is 'evolution,' but that will have to be tailored around the object I find at Goodwill in the morning. I was thinking about doing an empty candle holder, with the evolution of 'flame' but that feels too obvious.
I bought a cookie jar. I think it would be nice to have a cookie themed museum. I'm thinking there could be steps going up from the lid with the cookie jar on its side and some red rope keeping the museum goers a proper distance from the large cookie in the back. I would need to add flooring to the bottom, and the proportions would be ratter small.
I really like how the cookie jar has certain milk-jug qualities. I was thinking I could make a spray-paint stencil 'MILK' on the side and add an old expiration date.
I have these other bags as containers as well, and I was thinking I could set up these mango pits and pistachio shells inside for a nut-based installation.
I saw this article in relation to food-based artwork that sparked my interest:
I was thinking - how can the modern cookie be revolutionized? It can be shaped differently, have a different arrangement of cinnamon/frosting/chocolate chips, or potentially reworked in its 'completed' form. I sketched (poorly) a little mock-up of what the steps and rope might look like.
My idea stems from the object - a cookie jar. It is the perfect culmination of restriction and indulgence. The jar provides the illusion of restraint, whereas cookies kept in their original container would be 'freer' than a jar. The jar is the illusion of restraint. The pathway of chocolate chips leads to the remaining cookie, trailed by the framed modifier of indulgence - milk. There is also a hand covered in chocolate chips - which is a more personal piece. Sugar gives me acne, and I struggle balancing my indulgence and my want to be pretty.
The piece speaks on the struggle between pleasure and health in relation to addiction.
The most common addition is sugar - which is more addictive than heroine.
American rates of obesity could tie into this.
I want a round, flat LED behind the cookie, so it looks all the more desirable, surrounded by a heavenly white light.
My hope is that you continue to make work long after you have graduated, which means honing that portfolio much like you do your writing. Give us an installation we cannot stop thinking about once we leave it. Just because we can, doesn't necessarily mean we should so think and make as if it is your last piece. Your This Gallery show is a hard one to follow, so maybe think about how its success comes from you mixing and mingling your love for writing and your love for art. Give us prose in a gallery space.
Ok, so working with a sugar jar is a different story. I think connecting it to prose will work well.
In order to connect it to my last piece, Freezer Burnt (FB), I have many motifs to consider:
- Wyoming - Wyoming temperature
- Jack London
- Man v. Nature
- Dangers of the cold
- Overcompensation, aftermath
- Mother Nature - Resources
- Greed --> the Downfall of Greed
As well as past pieces: my chaneque (Ch), the wooden hand lamp (HL)
- Aztec/Nahua (Ch)
- Parasitism (Ch, HL, FB? - man as parasite?)
- Nature (Ch, HL, FB)
- Death (Ch, HL, FB)
- Nest/Birds (HL)
- Omens (Ch)
- Greater Forces and the Great Beyond (Ch, HL, FB)
I will expand the list as I think of possible motifs to consider. So far, the connections of my work seems to be Parasitism, Nature, Death, and Greater Forces and the Great Beyond
I was also thinking of incorporating a different story by Jack London - loosely, not as heavy-handed as last time because I feel like I need more creative interpretation than solely instances of the text, though the story could be the jumping-off point: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/788/788-h/788-h.htm#page57
So, in The Red One, there is a strange group of cultists that have found a large red hole that they use to perform sacrifices. Now, the book has a very sci-fi setting. The 'Red Hole' functions as a black hole. The symbolism of 'red' seems to imply the nature of its use in relation to the cultists - the spilled blood of their victims. I really gravitated towards this story, in particular, because I LOVE sci-fi stories and I grew up reading them.
So, black holes. They do a little thing called spaghettification - where the force of the massive mass will warp nearby objects (and astronauts)
(Chris Williams) - wood
I'm not married to the sugar jar, but I do think it had a very cool shape. However, there as some issues with it: I can't do much with the inside in terms of bonding, and it is rather small to get stuff inside.
Regardless, I think I want to make clay astronauts.
While I was deliberating, I also had the idea of incorporating the Hansel and Gretel narrative into the sugar jar - to still speak on sugar addiction - the witch's hand (sculpted from sugar) would be reading out and a trail of breadcrumbs would be trailing underneath her until eventually the breadcrumbs morphed into warts spread across her arm.
So, there is now two schools of thought: the astronaut method and the witch method. Which method is better will be determined once I figure out how easily I can bond either sugar or fabric to the sugar jar. If I find a different object, both methods might be tossed aside. For now, I'm going to play around with clay spaghetti astronaut proportions and seeing if I have what it takes to make a sugar sculpture.
I got a new found object (also from good will). Its an old-fashioned sink (I left the matching water jug there because I'm a monster) primarily white with pink edges. I want to have the notches of it pop out like it's coming out to grab you, so I put plastic bags on the side and paper-mached them down in place. I'm going to paint over them in red, fading to pink, and maybe keep the grid lines?
I want to have a little red latter coming off the side with a little person climbing it. When they come in, they are trapped inside, because no one escapes the black hole!
I'm going to have one in-tact astronaut (for scale) and then two or three others with their spaghetti legs and arms being sucked into the same central spot. One astronaut (of the spaghetti variety) should have their mask down so the viewer can see their frozen (and agonized) face. I do want it to look a little funny/cartoonish.
So the astronauts turned out a bit too big to fit three in the red-hole, so I ended up staying with two - which makes it even more dramatic if you ask me because they're staring into eachother's eyes (or helmets). One only has a foot dipped into the black hole and the other is having their limbs spaghettified. They both have two little buttons on their neckpiece - where the helmet locks in. I painted them both pink so that the glow of the red hole is being reflected off of their white suits. The spaghetti astronaut's feet are dipped in blood to show the previous sacrifices made to the red hole by the cannibal tribes. Spaghetti's helmet is also cracked from the pressure of being slowly stretched.
I painted the hole red and added grid lines to give it more UMPH - make it more physics-type looking and sci-fi, like warping into another dimension.
It also looks like a web, as if it's trying to catch them and suck up all their blood.
I have the sitting astronaut staring into the eyes of his fallen comrade. He is propped up by red sticks, some spray-painted and some regular painted. At first, I had only two sticks, but after many tragic car rides, I decided to include eight support sticks. The bowl slowly fades to pink then white on the lip, where the light halo of the red hole is trapped.
The astronauts have airtanks, gloves, and a helmet shield, but other than that are relatively simplified. They don't have any country decoration, or any other insignia because I want them to be universal - anyone can slip into the void, it's a mental state of nihilism when we lose sight of what's important to us.
In the book,
Bassett catches butterflies. His catching of butterflies is symbolic for the red hole catching people - the red hole itself being a metaphor for (death, despair, nature?). There's a little ladder on the side for the museum guests to climb inside. :)
I'm going to call it:
"Into the Void"
The two astronauts are staring at each other as one dies and is taken into the void. The other will soon follow. What is it like to stare into the void? It can symbolize many things: mental unwellness, a lack of focus, or death. The void is the absence of things as well as the absence of meaning. It is often used to refer to a Nihilistic outlook, i.e. 'staring into the void.' It's often the people close to us that can make us feel this way, and it's difficult to escape when it's already sucking you in.
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Project #2
The snowflake is: fragile, cold, and intricate.
Other things that are fragile, cold, and intricate:
people, ice sculptures, gems/minerals
Could be seen as self-reflection?
I have a thing of felt I was thinking of starching or coating in glue-water to portray a bulbous bed of snow, or snow climbing to up the side of the 'This' gallery wall. I've been playing around with an online snowflake maker to (1) understand how to fold them (2) figure out how they are lined out within that fold (how they unfold) and (3) to experiment with shape and pattern without wasting paper. Also, it's quite fun.
~ https://dangries.com/rectangleworld/PaperSnowflake/
This was my first snowflake. It didn't really scream snowflake, despite my efforts by adding more triangles within the main line form. I then decided to take a less geometric path, which was a bit difficult to do since the cutting tool operates with lines that connect along a set of dots the user makes, so in order to do natural, smooth lines the user must set up a long line of dots in a row instead of a free-flow cutting tool. I was very happy with the results. Yet, I know that my folding of a hexagonal paper would produce far less perfect results. There's a lot more room for error if I were to switch from this perfect, digitized format to paper. Additionally, I'm going to have to cut the paper into a hexagon before I even fold it, so I will have to be carefully measuring lines and angles. It would be helpful to use graphing paper initially, then switching to white paper.
This last one was far easier to design, and yet it is possibly the most interesting looking. Yet, I don't think it is all that feasible to do with paper since the points would be to fragile and the points would not line up across all layers of the folds. This would be true for the second natural snowflake as well. The most doable snowflake pattern would be the first geometric snowflake and the first natural snowflake. Between those two, the natural snowflake is better looking.
I made more 'naturalized snowflakes in nature patterns of flower petals, leaves, and twigs. I then made someone I thought looked more like an actual snowflake more than anything so far.
I'm thinking maybe I should cut these out. It took a while to design them, so I think it would be wise to print them out ad use them. Maybe I could take the ink and print them onto fabric. I don't know how I'd be able to do that.
My friend said this snowflake looks more royal than the previous one. I tried to use very rough and jagged patterns to produce a different snowflake look.
I printed these out from the library:
I'm going to paper mache them onto balloons to create these bowl forms, with the snowflakes as the centerpiece and dark baby-blue tissue paper to go with it. They will hang in an arch on the back of the room. I will cut out other snowflakes and scatter them on the floor in the corner with a fireplace - wood with a stick teepee in the center.
I was inspired by the story "To Build a Fire" by Jack London. His stories are about nature and its brutality, which is the message I want to send with the snow and the cold - especially in relation to Wyoming - a sort of looming ever-present thing that we tend to ignore because we have heated houses and heated cars and puffy coats to escape it. In the story, the man is warned of the cold in the Yukon - he is there during the gold rush hoping to make himself wealthy. He sets out to meet his friends and ignores the warning. Eventually it gets so cold he decides to stop and build a fire. He and the dog warm themselves, and then he attempts to set out once more. The dog is hesitant to leave the fire because he is anxious about the cold - the dog is wise of nature unlike the arrogant man. The man eventually falls into water, and has to build another fire right away before the wet kills him. He first builds the fire under a snow-laden tree and it goes out. Then, he frantically lights all 70 of his matches in his attempt to save himself building the new fire. He burns his hands and accidentally scatters the fire, which burns out.
He is jealous of the dog's warm fur and calls on it to come so he can kill it and take its warmth.
Yet, the dog is suspicious of the strange desperation in the man's voice, and does not come.
By the point, the mans hands are too numb to kill the dog and he cannot feel them at all despite a constant effort of smacking them against his legs.
The man dies and the dog is left stranded.
My project explores a different route the story could have gone. The man lights the 70 matches, the matches burn the man alive, showing that even if he had managed to light the fire, the man cannot control nature and do as he pleases - and his arrogance erases him regardless. The fire, which is his perceived savior, consumes his life just as the cold did. The inventions we make to combat nature can turn around and spit in our faces. We are not safe.
Initially, I drew the man projecting on the side, but I went to the 'This' gallery and saw there's outlets on all sides, so I'd much rather have him projecting onto the fabric trailing under the arch, and then I can have the snow-bowls brach out to the other wall. The front wall (door-side) won't have anything on it, but this will be the side with cut-out snowflakes and a campfire.
The fabric probably won't fall the way I'd like it to, so I might starch it or paper-machete it the same way to portray natural snowbank-esque forms. For the man, the cutout of the fire needs to be made out of a lighter paper, or at least a lighter colored paper than the man, which I will paint black for an optimal shadow.
Mel Chin: The Funk & Wag from A to Z (installation view), 2012; Excised printed pages from The Universal Standard Encyclopedia, 1953–56, by Wilfred Funk, Inc., archival water-based glue, paper, 524 collages
Mel Chin: Unmoored, in Times Square (Climate Change Based Sculpture)
In the first image, the repeated artwork creates a tile look along the wall, transforming the blank white wall into a pseudo-black space. The table-looking piece in the middle is then the 'keeper' of the room, as it occupies the central space. I do not know how to interpret the title, but I like the repetition of the wall pieces, and how their similarity allows the furniture piece to stand out.
The woman appears to be emerging from the space, she is very out of place and yet her coloring seems to match the overall color of time square. The long forms branching out behind hr she seems to ignore. She is dressed very modestly, and seems to be from a different century - perhaps she is sowing the seeds of rebirth.
Wolfgang Laib - a German artist with highly simplistic yet symbolic pieces
(1) Pollen from Hazelnut, (2) Partial View of SAIC exhibition, (3) Passageway Inside - Downside, (4) City of Silence
Though I admire the simplicity of his works, I could not see myself doing the same style of minimalism.
Ernesto Neto: Between Earth and Sky
Since I figure I am using fabric for the piece, I thought I'd look at a fabric installation artist to see what they are doing with it. This is a bit too out of my range, but the patterns are lovely! Not quite as snow-like as I envision my piece, but remove the color and it could very well mirror snowfall.
I love the interactive quality of his pieces, giving both a sense of wonder and comfort to the audience. I love how the fabric is cut in a certain way that when it hands down it becomes something else, also the way it is wrapped.
Meg Webster: "I want you to care"
I love how she incorporates nature into her pieces. If I did this I would surely kill the plants, but this is lovely!
The paper machete mounds are coming out crispy. I'm going to need more balloons to use, about 30-40 balloons. I'm going to need to do ten per day if I want to give myself time this weekend to experiment with the light and the box - how the man will project. I need to reconstruct a cardboard box from my recycling and cut out a relatively small man and flame - see how well it projects closer, further, and more angled up and down. The man will be covered in tissue paper. He will be blue like the snow mounds.
The snow mounds remind me of boobs with snowflake nipples - sort of like 'mother nature' - which does tie into the theme of my project: the uncaring nature - the cold mother who offers nothing but snow. The son seeks love outside of his cold mother - the warmth of the self-made fire and burns alive while the cold mother watches.
The reason I picked the blue tissue paper and blue background on the snowflakes was because of snow shadow - I love the blue color of snow shadow - which also ties into the darkness of the piece - the dark side of the cold.
I was also told recently that a professor went outside for a smoke and hit her head and died from the cold while she was unconscious. I've been thinking about that a lot - and the nature of Wyoming and how harsh and frigid it can be.
I've been painting around where the edge of the snowflake meets the tissue paper - so that its less of a stark contrast and it can instead blende together. You can see with the bottom bowl that its a bit crunchy on the one side because I popped the balloon early.
The man is lying face down in the snow. He is already deceased from the flame. His clothing is becoming as and his body is so cold he can barely move to put out the flame - as he'd overcompensated from the snow.
I'm not sure how exactly I want the flame to look. It's a bit difficult I feel to make a naturalized fire silhouette when fire is so sporadic.
I decided to draw the man lying upright instead so that he can be a black silhouette - implying that his body is burnt. The flames will be sticking out. Since he looked a bit disproportionate in the original drawing, I glued more cardboard in place so that his knees are brought up implying his legs are longer. I spray-painted the box white so that it would match the white room and the snowflakes. I will have to also cover the other outlets, though most of them can likely be easily covered with the mache lumps and the hanging fabric.
I like the red etsy cutouts, but I feel like they look a little too seaweed/coral like to represent fire. Though I got a roku light which could project the fire as more red or orange, it might not work with the school guest wifi.
The balloon mache is coming out well, but many are unpainted. The one bellow in the bottom right corner is entirely painted - a bit unreasonable to achieve overall. The top ballon is the most natural looking transition of color, while the bottom right does not match colors - though not in an undesirable way.
The blue is snow shadow in the Yukon, Alaska where 'To Build a Fire' takes place:
Since in the story he dies during the night-time, I've also included balloons with darker, starry wrapping paper with snowflakes, as if they are falling down across the lump-forms. I have made thirty balloons thus far, with each balloon taking around 20-30 minutes to make depending on the size.
I've began to line them across the wall of the 'This' gallery by order of size and color. A few balloon have a combination of lighter and darker midnight snow, and they will be lined up accordingly. Since I have 30, they will be evenly distributed on the front and side walls, while the back has the projection and the fire-place. I will need to chop the piece of wood and add a twig/stick teepee on top. Sorry, the picture is quite dark.
I then tried a few ways of hanging them to see how they looked. I folded the side of the mache back and pinned that flap against the wall so that the nails and pushpins can't be seen from the outside. There is a lot of variety with the balloons in terms of shape, size, color, as well as the the shapes sizes, and positions of the snowflakes on them so there are many ways that they can be arranged.
I took the lighter blues and speckled them with spray-paint for a snowy/blizzard effect, the mid blues were sprayed with a light cyan color and the lighter colored maches were sprayed with white. The dark blues weren't sprayed so that I could retain their midnight/starry effect.
The projection did not work. I'm thinking there will have to be either a cardboard cutout or a stencil on the fabric of the burnt man.
I decided to cut out a fire from the fabric. The white on white doesn't stand out so much, but I thought the fabric would have a luminous quality. I will have to get glow-in-the-dark paint so that it glows in the blacklight.
I noticed how strong the shadows were closer to the wall and decided I would hand fabric from the balloon like a winter forest.
I hug fabric from the balloons, but not with the holes I was thinking of doing before, they just didn't look right.
I was playing with folding and cutting fabric, seeing how it would hand on the wall.
So far I'm leaning more towards the stencil than the cutout, but my overall concern is the spread of the mache breasts, I think they should be more clustered together, but would it still be a installation if everything is in one place?
I found a stronger light that allowed the image of the man to project, but I still went ahead with the cutout and the stencil regardless because it wasn't entirely clear that it was a man lying down. I took the old light and added a snowflake mache over it - causing the purple light to turn blue - which was the color that I had originally wanted. The contrast of the blue light with the warm/fiery glow of the stronger lightbulb gives the cold/hot contrast all at once that I had been hoping for. I might have 'wings' going out on either side of the log/projection box to make cool patterns on the floor - maybe more leafy patterns. It was also suggested to me that I should add more leaf forms hanging from the snowballs.
I drew a burnt image of the corpse on cardboard. I cut it out as cleanly as I could so that I could use the cutout in the exhibition as well as the remaining cardboard for a stencil to apply onto fabric.
I hung the silhouettes on the side wall since they felt empty as I was trying to better bunch the snowflake maches together. They are a before and after - the man is originally frozen, then he is frozen and burnt all at once. "Freezer Burnt" hot/cold, fire/ice
Him both lying downward in the cutout and standing upright in a warrior-like pose on the fabric is his body and his spirit - further imagery of passing away and a memento mori - the spirit also emphasized by the etherial glow of the blue light - the great unknown.
I then took the cutout and painted him so that he was frozen and burnt all at once, through use of blue and black. I hung it on the tree-branch-shadow hanging hammock piece of fabric. I spray-painted the back white like a did the box just incase someone were to peer behind it, to keep to the snow theme.
I used remaining snowflakes and dark blue tissue paper to show a stream coming down the fabric. The man fell in the water before he froze to death - the main factor that lead to his death and numb hands that couldn't work properly enough to make a fire.
Picture for Advertising:
Other Advertising Information: Paper mache snowflakes, campfire, projection, blue light? Advertise it as a Jack London inspired piece I guess?
I made a few revisions for the closing exhibition. I moved the two stencil sprays together, and added another draping cloth with leaves and knobs cut into it, though it didn't produce shadows like the first. I had to rebuild the fire - which was very frustrating because when I put just one twig on the wrong way it would knock the rest over like dominos. I also added a branch-like piece of fabric along the floor and re-arranged the maches.
I am currently in the process of putting the maches up on my ceiling - which takes a little longer than the wall, but it is coming along. I want the colors to fade into each other, going: starry blue, starry blue with med. patches, med. blue with starry patches, med. blue, med. blue with cyan patches, cyan with med. blue patches, and cyan. I'm making them as close together as I can - which is somewhat difficult with pin-operation (especially because the pin rips through the paper quite easily). It is a work in progress.
Update: I have finished pinning the mache boobs to my ceiling! I love them so much more grouped together as they had been while I was making them. :)
ARTIST STATEMENT:
This piece is based off of the story 'To Build a Fire' by Jack London. The colder it gets here, the more I've been reminded of it. The protagonist lies dead in the snow after freezing to death. Here, after his slow descent into hypothermia, the man has lit all his 70 matches and burns himself to death - showing the overcompensation of humanity in an attempt to escape nature. The paper mache snow-breasts are reminiscent of mother nature - providing resources, yet are cold and unsympathetic. Like in the story, this piece conveys the struggle between humanity and nature as well as the struggle between humanity and itself in the face of this. It also presents the choice that Robert Frost presents of dying from fire or ice - where both have occurred. This piece is named Freezer Burnt.
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Project #3
Since Project 3 is situational, the best place to situate the sick 'runny nose' would be by a stream. The sickness is flowing into the stream and spreading. Though it is inconvenient, it is enveloped by the large water and becomes retrospectively small. I want the sick 'being' to blend into its environment naturally, like a being made of grass or roots, or maybe even concrete if it were to sit by a stream under a bridge - it could even be a sick troll.
It should also have its face scrunched up, and wrinkled in distress.
Potential Locations:
Garfield Bridge
For Sale: Rubble Pile, South Laramie
Bridge, Near For Sale, South Laramie
Pine Trees On Campus
North Laramie, Something Canyon
Sketches For Bridges and Rubble Pile:
Sick Troll: Trolls live under bridge, I could put a troll who's sick from the weather with tissues everywhere and a big trail of snot running down his big nose.
Under the southside bridge I could put a lizard like monster who's stuck and shedding its skin (paper machete)
Giant Flower Warrior on a battle field covered in leaf arrows, trying to reclaim man-made objects, shows a victory - ties into the rose and daisy graffiti already there
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