I will be working on my BFA show piece in this class since it is my only studio class this semester. I have always been interested and involved in intimacy, vulnerability, and exhibitionism of private/personal moments, and want to continue concentrating on these ideas for the piece. Also within my own process, I have been thinking about the slow moments of creating a piece: brainstorming and editing, versus the quick moments of last minute additions and impulsive gestures (illustrated well by the work of Josh Faught). Because my work and interests have always been on the fine line between design and fine art, I find that I usually figure out what materials/aesthetics I want to use before I figure out the details.
Right now the materials are: my recent break-up, the text messages from this long distance event which have been put into a word processor, alphabetized by word, and in the process of being printed onto translucent fabric that will be distressed. I will hopefully be getting swatches in two different types of fabric in the mail soon.
I have been toying around with the idea of adding in this tropical houseplant that my roommates and I killed by driving through the cold weather because it's just visually funny and sad, but am still deciding on that. I do know that I want more than just this fabric piece in the exhibition though.
I try to use events from my personal life as a starting off point. I am very wary of the fact that I have been told that it's hard to enter biographical works, especially text pieces. I don't want this piece to be a one-note therapeutic act, or attention seeking, but rather something that people can relate to: that the failure of any relationship is hard. I am also wary that my personal choice in aesthetics along with the subject matter always tends to lean hard towards the idea of nostalgia; I have yet to decide if I want to embrace this or to go against it. (Also I realize that I'm not showing any photographic prints, as of right now, even though I am in a photo class. I hope thats okay.)
On the other hand, I also have been meaning to work on more formal pieces involving the repossession of past works: cutting up all the prints I've ever made, and using the colors and shapes as part of a larger landscape and potentially creating yardage of fabric out of these collages that I create, ultimately to end up as a garment or functional textile. I'm not sure that I will bring this work into class (it seems so far removed from the department/the rest of the class), but this has been something I've had floating in the back of my mind for a while.
i want to know more about "questions on your subject matter to research"...the answers to these questions can come about not by only instinct, intuition, but by actively searching out ideas related to: the history of successful bio work (sophie calle and tracey emin--why is their work successful? also laurel nakadate). i have a feeling the plant may be more successful than the text/distress which we can talk about in class...the textile sounds interesting and is relevant. what if you took discarded photos from the whole photo dept? is that more interesting? why do they have to be yours only (seems derivative of dave murray's all work i ever made in grad school piece that were compressed into a diamond for his thesis exhibition at saic last year)...
ReplyDeletelots to think about! ;)