Line Project Artist's Statement
Through the window I stare, watching life. Wondering about the lives of others, where they are off to in such a hurry. So many stories surround me, the city makes one feel small. Pencil in hand, I document the people that walk past me, those on the phone, those walking their dogs, strollers, walking fast, walking slow, countless differences in each story. With Michel De Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life: Walking in the City in mind, I continue to watch, “Writ[ing] without being able to read it,” as I switch the pace at which I draw my lines, rotate colors, weights, type of pen depending on what I see. Though it looks like a jumble of lines and shapes, merely child’s scribbles, it “makes the complexity of the city readable,” just as Certeau described. I think about asyndeton and synecdoche and how though they describe words and sentences, they apply to what I am doing now, connecting events, connecting people and their habits with lines of different color, direction, and weight. I notice that Certeau's assertion about the “symbolic order of the unconscious” exists: without realizing it, people create patterns, and their habits repeat. For instance, some always walk fast, some slow, some have more bounce in their step. No matter what it is, there is always repetition in the same people, and with others who have the same habits.Though it is difficult to keep track of and document every moment passing by, I am left with a jumble of colors and lines, an abstract story.
WWW Response
After reading both WWW and Jorge Luis Borges’ The Library of Babel, I have a further understanding of W3 and how the internet works. IN comparing the two, I was initially confused but as I focused on each source, I was able to draw many similarities. First of all, in WWW, many different W3 clients are discussed, connecting largely to the vast library of books as described in The lIbrary of Babel. WWW explores the changes that have occured over time in W3 and its clients and protocols and how it is much different today than how it was when it was first concepted. This relates to the Library of Babel because it is said that “the most ancient men, the first librarians used language quite different from the one we now speak.” In the internet world, there are no two sites the exact same just how in the philosophical piece, “in the vast library there are no two identical books.” Additionally, upon the creation of the vast online databases known as W3, there was rarely an answer that the internet couldn’t give, similar to how Jorge Luis Borges asserted that “there was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon.” In regards to each other, The Library of Babel is a metaphor for W3 as the library is unending and its books represent the vast number of websites existing online.
Newspaper Project Artist's Statement
The media has a strong tendency to cover primarily negative events because it sells. Bad news dominates headlines because it sells. As a whole, people seem to prefer the events that are more catastrophic because they are exciting, because they draw concern from people and give them something to worry about other than their own problems. Not to say that these negative events aren’t important to stay informed about, but there are plenty of positive events that occur everyday and could just as easily make a headline. So why don’t they? Some say they would prefer more positivity in the media, but is this really true? What would the media look like without the natural disasters, murders, rapes, harassments, and gossip? Where would the morbid excitement lie? For this project, I focused on the language used in the newspaper. I decided to juxtapose the negative words with the positive ones to show that negative events monopolize the media, specifically the newspaper. I scoured through the AM New York Metro paper and cut out positive and negative words sorting them as I went. I decided to lay them out in a pattern to highlight that the newspaper itself is a pattern. I found that the majority of the positive words lied within advertisements and food reviews and the headlining stories were primarily portraying negative events. In the podcast “The Last Newspaper Artists in Conversation” three artists who use newspapers as a medium through which to pursue their art talk together about their work and what the paper means to them. Sarah Charlesworth, one of the artists follows photography in the paper and her projects illuminate the problems with photography’s representation in the paper and how one photo can have many different stories and approaches depending on what platform they are published on. She explains that on the third page of the paper you see ads and “right there with the diamond earrings and the boots and fur coats there is also a world news story very apt to be some terrible tragedy, some bombing, some flood, some poverty somewhere” with “intense contradictions of values.” Her focus on this pattern interested me greatly because I myself am attentive to these ideas and this influenced my idea for the project. These “contradictions of values” are seen everywhere in the media. Bad news sells, ads sell. In thinking about why this is the case, I have come to understand that the media’s primary focus above informing people, is to make money. Negativity makes money, and the media capitalizes on the public’s fascination with it.
Textile Artist's Statement
In thinking about what to do for my textile project, I decided to focus on beauty products and vanity as that is a daily pattern that many people follow everyday. Many people include makeup in their daily morning routines and I found it interesting to incorporate figurative patterns into a literal one. In thinking about the aesthetics of the patterns I had in mind, I wanted to include colorful objects that would create an interesting variety of patterns that were each unique but each cohesive in their theme and some aspects of their designs. In my color choices, I tried to stick to traditionally “feminine” colors that each object actually possessed. I wanted to create aesthetic patterns that included these beauty items as a way to point out that people often follow a “makeup routine” or have their own daily habits while getting ready each day. I think that these patterns could be used as cosmetic bag patterns.
Color Response
Green, like the grass that spreads like a wildfire in the spring, like the meadows we run like maniacs around in. Like the wrinkled dollar bills in my pockets with which I have the freedom to do what I wish with. Like the frogs that ribbit loudly in the backyard on hot summer nights, freely hopping from rock to rock. Like the sassy M and M that is so widely loved for her spunk and fierceness. Like a four leaf clover, lucky. Green like leprechauns, like St Patrick's Day. Green like sour grapes, apples, crisp broccoli. Green like that artificial green apple flavor in jelly beans that we used to sneak from the jar as kids, rebellious. Green like nature, like the butterflies that fly about my head. Green are the ones that perch on my face, my neck and chest. Green are the butterflies though fake, can fly in my imagination. They are free, not entrapped in their own home. Green are the butterflies that in my mind can go anywhere, with the simple flap of their wings. They began as green caterpillars then transformed, evolved in their crystalists into these magnificent insects. Green are the butterflies that grew into something greater than they were before. Green are the leaves on the trees blowing freely in the wind. A butterfly lands on one. Green are its wings gently swaying in the wind. The green leaf falls, tumbling towards its demise on the ground, yet the butterfly remains unharmed, hovering above the ground fluttering its delicate wings. The butterfly flies off into the distance, into freedom, something that feels rather lacking these days all quarantined in our homes. “Some colors are ingrained in memory,” and “you will never know how I see red” (Cwynar), or green for that matter. Green is freedom.
