Body Project

I'm not going to lie, this project was brutal. Perhaps the most emotionally and mentally draining project we've had this year. I think part of the difficulty for myself and our group in general is that we were trying to coordinate the efforts and ideas of three people, all of whom approach art very differently and wanted to go in very different directions. I prefer the approach of exploring material and building a concept out of a workable vocabulary rather than trying to express an idea first and foremost and letting the medium arise from the concept itself. I also usually try to be conscious of the time commitment required for most projects because I find it really difficult to put in more than fifteen hours a week at the studio outside of class. However, with this project I felt that I was fairly discouraging of some of the projects that were discussed early in the process because I thought a lot of them were too ambitious, so when we finally settled on a material to use an an idea for it I was wary of raising my concerns about the time constraints. They were probably valid, however, because I don't think we were able to create a piece that was as large as we would have liked it to be, and scale was a very essential element to the piece that was somewhat lacking in the final result. Overall, I'm just relieved to have this project over. I feel like the individual strengths of everyone in our group were lost in translation and that our attempts at collaboration really led us to create something that was an unhappy compromise of all of our ideas.

Body Assignment Part 1

After our class discussion today, our group decided to move back to the vocabulary that we had been exploring with the cloth circles. We were all really excited about that as a material, and the concept we had been previously working with seemed difficult to complete in the time limit and wasn't really coming together cohesively. We're still playing with the materials, though, which is something I think we needed to do a lot more of earlier in the project, but it's definitely better late than never. My own personal exploration is with the little gold octagonal caps. I've found that they fit together to create a perfect sphere if you line up the sides, leaving squares in between each group of four octagons. I think it would be cool to make a sort of helmet by hanging a sphere made out of these from the ceiling. There would be a hole in the bottom large enough for a person to fit their head through. I think the reflectiveness of the gold finish and the geometry of the interior would create a really interesting immersive experience by diffracting the light that would come into the space through the square holes. I'm not sure how to expand on this concept though. I'll be curious to see what we decide on as a group for our final project, but I think the exploration we're doing now is a lot more productive than when we were trying to force a concept with a vocabulary we didn't quite understand.

Skills

List of skills I have:
Matlab and Maple (both Engineering computer programs)
Some very basic Photoshop
Some very basic Garageband
A touch of iMovie

List of skills I would like to have:
Photoshop (I feel illiterate not knowing how to use Photoshop well)
Illustrator
Web Design

Furniture Project

I really enjoyed the furniture project. For how little time I actually had to create my piece, I thought it turned out pretty well. I liked the idea of playing with dimensionality, so I created my three-dimensional bookshelf by making two-dimensional frames out of the wood that I stacked on top of each other and screwed together. There were two different frames, which I think made the design a little more interesting as it broke up the space in a neat, linear way, so that the shelves were composed of slats with space in between. I thought it was a good introduction to furniture making, and I enjoyed working with wood as a material. There was something very satisfying and solid about the final product. In critique, other people mentioned turning it different ways, which is something I'd really like to explore. I think if I were to expand on the concept I would try making something that extends to different depths and would be more versatile in the ways in which it can be oriented while maintaining it's basic functionality as a storage unit. I think there are a lot of untapped sculptural possibilities with my design that I'd like to explore further.