Skylee- Small World Project # 1

Reflection: If I were to do this installation again, I would have started it a bit sooner. It took way longer than I anticipated. When I was doing the papering that is all over the inside of the desk, I would have started with larger pieces of paper sooner than I did. I would have been able to spend more time doing other things for it, like making a chair and adding more writing/letters. When making the desk, I should have kept the scale in mind and measured it based on the dimensions.

This art piece explores my personal feelings and experiences with my disability and the constant and lasting impact of language and pressure. It shows the feelings that are felt from the ignorance of those who make hurtful comments. This piece shows the battles that school is itself, while you are accompanied by the comments, labels, assumptions, and pressure. Many comments were not intended to be personal; however, when you hear them over and over, it is hard not to. 

It starts to be harder and harder to keep the belief in intelligence or capability when you fight people telling you otherwise. 

The jumbled text with layering of different texts is a representation of this. These layers are a representation of the accumulation of situations, remarks, and pressures. Each layer is just another time when there was someone telling me I was or wasn’t, being direct or indirect. Eventually, those thoughts are constantly in your head.

One area defined by the drooping walls was external voices, and the other was representing inner thoughts. You enter the space,e and you are instantly confronted by an overwhelming amount of messages, large, intense lettering. The scale reflects how unavoidable, common, and intense these experiences felt. The overlapping texts on the wall create a visual and cognitive overload, reflecting the difficulty sorting through the emotions from all of these messages. 

This installation is not only a memory, but the continuing psychological weight of repetition and expectation. It asks viewers to reflect on how language shapes identity, the accumulated pressure, and how resilience is sought out in desperation. Ultimately, this installation offers insight into an invisible struggle, making internal experience visible, tangible, and impossible to ignore. 

I have been debating doing this piece on the desk or backpack, or both, as part of it. There would be stories of ICE (maybe not strictly the negative stories), but they would be a big part of this piece. Including the many deaths. This piece is supposed to represent the many children who are affected, even if they are not the ones being abducted. Really, just how dramatically it has been affecting people, specifically kids, and citizens. 

The idea is to have books and other found objects in the bag with papers of stories of these ICE incidents. The desk would have a single crayon, specifically red (the color that would be part of the drawings and circling different stories), but the desk could be empty. It would be an addition to the scene. My intention would be to show the desk being empty to push the idea of the absence of those kids or people who used to be part of the community.  These are all just a variety of ideas that could or don’t have to be part of it. 

The second idea would be a student back pack that would still be a similar seen however this one would be relating to a student that has a reading disability. I also considered this one having whispers and thoughts that a student usually has going through their head. Both ideas are similar with the found objects and set up however the content would be different. 

Ilya kabakov 

 In Ilya Kabakov’s work, I like the collage that also incorporates found objects, and the writing behind the work is absolutely amazing. 

He is doing a similar concept. The creation of how it is to live under certain circumstances.