For the final, I decided to take an experimental approach regarding materials and how they were applied. The main idea i wanted to play with was scrunched up aluminum foil as a surface with watered down acrylic paint gently brushed over the surface of the wrinkles. The top of the aluminum wrinkles would be still shiny but stained a different color, and the deeper parts would remain their natural color. This was the original idea, however I learned later that some areas would feel much more opaque than others, defeating the purpose of the underlying metallic shine. The original design was also much more organic and round, as opposed to the jagged but curved shape seen here, with the underlying foam chunks, cubes and rectangles, that can be seen underneath the aluminum foil. The rectilinear shapes underneath clash with the overall roundness too much in my opinion and it makes the sculpture more of a pain to look at. Once I told myself this, I pushed further on ways to make it more interesting. I had the pink green and yellow paint all down, and decided to use an extremely watered down blue to drip over top of the sculpture so that it would naturally fall and pull its way though the cracks and surface differences of the sculpture, and this to me is the highlight of the entire sculpture. Now looking back at it, I probably should have designed the sculpture to be taller and thinner in order to really accentuate the watery blue paint, but that last addition was made on a whim. Nonetheless, I learned a lot about how to approach sculpture and art in general through this process.
For this project, each student made multiple pieces of red clay with different shapes, patterns and textures. These pieces were all fired and then each of us were to make a sculpture using these pieces that others have created. This made for a more instinctual approach to the sculpture rather than building it from the ground up with what it means and how it'll look. Omitting the pre-planning process (sketching, etc.) of creating this sculpture was a really interesting and new method to me, and I found that it pushed my creativity by creating this limitation. I used 3 different paints, red, white and black, and painted along the edges of the pieces as well lightly brushing over them so the paint only caught the most superficial surfaces, visually enhancing the potpourri of textures that appear among the individual components of the sculpture.
Above is the performance itself. I didn't go as well as I would have ideally liked it to, but given the experimental nature of this whole project, this is something I expected. Ideally I wanted everything (except close up shots of the canvas) to be symmetrical, and this symmetry was broken once I brought the cup to the foreground. Other than that, the whole process was simple and worked well. I added some transitions and different camera angles to keep the whole video visually interesting and to not be monotonous. There were some happy accidents, such as my body staying in the middle between the two pedestals as I grabbed for the basin, and that added to the whole contrast of the scene and made it even more interesting to look at. The black thermal I wore as well added much more of a visual "pop" then I originally thought it would, so that was nice. above are concepts of the canvas and a general storyboard. All steps were followed in the storyboard, but I also added additional scenes in the video itself, such as the closeup view of the canvas, the perspective panning up the canvas, and the closeup shot of the basin with the dirty water dripping in it. This has been the most experimental piece of art I've ever done. During the course of this project, I really wanted to expose myself to techniques and new ways to portray objects while also integrating film. Nearly everything the final product is made of is symbolic, and I wanted to convey what the overall idea was without any explicit details within the work itself, I wanted the art to speak for itself. The whole process involved sewing cut up stuffed animals into canvas, then attaching yarn with hot glue, and then used coffee grounds distribute throughout with rubber cement and acrylic gesso. Black paint was also used to intensify the look the coffee grounds gave. I then filmed in gallery 10, the act of me pouring a pot of hot water over the top of the canvas and letting the water filter through the intricacies of the piece, picking up anything it can in its path, and ending up in a glass basin beneath the canvas. This was then poured into a tall glass and then brought into the foreground. The amount of water that ended up in the basin wasn't nearly as much as I would have liked or nearly as dirty I as I would like, but nonetheless I got dirty coffee water.
Before I get into the details, the overall idea of this piece is memory and retention, especially at that of an older age when we start to forget more and more of our past, masked over by recent experiences. With that said, the piece is composed of stuffed animals from my childhood. They're cut up and some have their faces inside-out for a more macabre effect. The fact that they're cut up represents the sparseness of memory and that we don't always remember events in their entirety unless we search out each piece of that memory. In regards to arrangement, the cut up pieces were arranged to what I thought was visually interesting, they weren't arranged chronologically or in any other fashion other than strictly visual. The stuffed animals altogether represent my past. Yarn was used to express neural connections but also acted as a more intricate space for the hot water to filter through. Different colors were used to compliment the different colored animals as well as, again, to make the overall piece much more visually dynamic and interesting to look at. The colors could also represent a "colorful" past, full of different experiences and events, and noticed how it's masked over, but not entirely, by coffee grounds and black paint. The used coffee grounds represent modern me. I drink tons of coffee and it's become a really important factor during my first year here at Siena, and I've been collecting coffee grounds since the start of the winter semester, so just like the stuffed animals, they've been used. They're dark, practically black, and this is in clear contrast to the colorful yarn and animals. The coffee grounds and black paint represent recent memory and what I have become accustomed to. Mostly everything nowadays for me is routine and nothing too exciting, the complete different to when I was a kid when I was exposed to tons of new experiences and everything was interesting to me, expressed by the color. Color altogether plays a major role. As I've mentioned, the range of actual color seen in the piece represents my childhood experiences/childhood in general, and the black represents recent experience and recent memory. Notice in the video that I'm wearing black all over, black pants, black thermal, black glasses. This is to further accentuate the modern "John", or what I am now. The mug I'm holding is also dark (not black, although it would be ideally) and has the Siena emblem on it, and I'm drinking from it as I walk in, further reinforcing the idea that coffee is a part of my adult life in addition to the grounds on the canvas and pouring a coffee pot of hot water over the canvas. The height comparison of the Siena mug and tall glass is also important. The mug is shorter, representing recent memory, and the glass is taller, representing past memories and all my experiences (of course the height in relation to each other isn't exact in how they're proportionally related, but it gets the idea across). The finished product, the glass filled with the water filtered though the canvas, represents my current memory, but this can be applied to anyone. We all forget a lot about our past, but the personally important parts stick with us as (yarn, stuffed animal fur, etc.) well as some other events in which we don't know why we still remember them. I wanted to make sure as well that others could relate to this piece. Stuffed animals are almost always considered a piece of childhood, while it is generally agreed that older individuals drink coffee, so the distinction between the two can be uncovered and understood based on our cultural context for each of them. Overall, I'm proud of this project's outcome. It ended up working out a lot better than I initially thought given how different and experimental it is. I found it a good way to finish my first year in Siena's art program. |
Archives
October 2016
Categories
All
|