Line Project Artist Statement
In chapter 8, Walking in the City, of Michel De Certeau’s book, The practice of Everyday Life, he explores the concept of the city. He says that when one steps back, or above the city, they can read it. When someone is distanced from the city they can become a voyeur and see everything in it that they would not see when they were in the city. That is what I have done for my line drawing project. While I did not distance myself physically, I distanced myself mentally in order to read Washington Square Park. I viewed the park at different times of day on several days and recorded the people and some animals that interacted with the space. Certeau writes about how the ways people interact with a city can be viewed from a distance. He says that you can see how they work with the intended purposes of the space and how they create their own purposes and shortcuts. I logged the interactions between people and the park by putting them in categories such as workers, skateboarders, and dog walkers. Certeau also defines a the words “synecdoche” and “asyndeton”. My drawings are both of these. They are a synecdoche, in that they take a part of Washington Square, the people, to represent the whole. They are an asyndeton in that I selected to include and to omit specific details of the park in representing it.
Key:
Diagonal pink line=Street Performer
Diagonal light green line=pigeon
Red orange diagonal line= vendor
Tropical rainforest diagonal line= dog walker
Blue vertical line=Police Officer
Bright pink vertical line= Tourist
Bright yellow vertical line=Park worker
Vertical cantaloupe= People just enjoying the park
Bright orange vertical line=Rats
Purple horizontal line=skater
News Project
To start this project, I bought a newspaper and flipped through it to see what I noticed. Immediately, the ads stuck out to me. There were ads for Dior, Tiffany's and Chopard. In the panel discussion, Sarah Charlesworth addressed these advertisements. She said that these ads were often featured next to an international news story and that juxtaposition seems, to her, like a “contradiction of values”. When I saw these luxury ads, it made me wonder who this newspaper was intended for and who has access to what information. I cut out all of the advertisements I saw and pasted them onto my paper. On top of that I placed every election headline I saw. IT was just interesting to me that all of this information about the election is compiled in a publication that, judging by its advertisers, is not intended for the majority of Americans. I also highlighted words and names that referred to candidates, as I noticed that only two candidates were named in headlines.
Charlesworth also talked about feeling empathy for deaths she read about in the newspaper. This led me to the obituaries section. I made my own obituaries page where I placed the name and picture of every obituary. At the end I included the list of submitted obits along with the ad that encouraged people to submit obituaries. In making this page, I was thinking about why some lives are valued more than others and what it takes to be recognized.
When flipping through the newspaper, I noticed two topics that were mentioned in several sections: seual assault and coronavirus. I cut out every headline of these topics and pasted them on a page. I wanted a visual representation of how these two things invade every aspect of life, from business, to art, to sports.
For my final piece, I pasted the one article about climate change onto a sheet and highlighted a blurb that said “After a summer of fires, we need to rethink how we live.” This phrase stuck out to me because it is the same message people have been saying for decades.
Shape+Pattern+Textile
For this project, I chose three items in my dorm room to outline. The first item was a pair of cowboy boots. The second was a little stuffed angel. The third was a tiny bear figurine. I chose these items because they each meant something special to me. The cowboy boots were a gift from my aunt, the angel was my grandmother’s, and the bear was given to me by a close friend. The angel is the only pattern that has color. It has a yellow halo. In reality, my stuffed angel doesn’t have a halo, so I decided to add one to the outline and make it yellow, as that is typically the color of an angel's halo. The angel is also the pattern I had printed on a textile. For the fabric, I chose a white satin because that seemed heavenly to me and most appropriate for an angel.
Color
When I was younger, my family and I would drive 8 hours to Hilton Head Island to see family every summer. Being from Dc, the water I saw on a regular basis was the Potomac River. It was common to hear jokes about the quality of the water in the Potomac. “Don’t swim in the Potomac, you’ll come out with an extra arm”, “if you eat fish from the Potomac, that’ll be the last thing you ever eat”. The jokes were warranted. The Potomac is disgusting, it’s heavily polluted and you can tell by looking at it. The water is always an unwelcoming green-brown color. So it was always a pleasure for me to go to Hilton Head and enjoy the blue ocean water. My cousins and I would go to the beach and dip our toes in. My dad and uncles would catch fish and that’d be our dinner for the night. My mother and I would often sneak away from familial obligations and go swimming. I’d try to swim to wear the ocean met the sky, but of course I never made it so far. As I grew older, my family's trips became annual, then biennial, then completely unpredictable. Now, I try to make the trip every year on my own. By plane or by train, I travel to my family and to the blue ocean.
3D Project
For my 3D project I decided to make a model of a lemon. I started by hanging a lemon in my bedroom. After shooting the images, I realized the lighting in my room was very inconsistent and decided to reshoot. I then hung my lemon in my shower. Surprisingly, my shower has the best light in my home. I then bought my new images to the meta shape software. One of the first steps in making the model is creating camera groups of different angles you shot. When I shoot, I didn’t shoot one angle at a time. I just shot willy nilly. This made it difficult to make my camera groups. I made 4 camera groups and then aligned the images. It did not turn out well.
Aligning one images from second shoot.
After making this first alignent I decided to reshoot again. This time when I shot I made sure to pay attention to how I did it. I took about 25 images at one angle. Then 25 images at another angle and so on. This time the alignment came out much better.
Aligning of images from third and final shoot.
From this point on making my model was smooth sailing. One problem I have with my final model is that I wasn’t able to create the bottom of the lemon. If current circumstances weren’t happening, I would go to LaGuardia studios and they would help me build the missing piece of my lemon so that it could be 3D printed.
Model with no texture.
Artist Book
Something that has stood out to me during the coronavirus pandemic has been the surge in masks being made by fashion companies. I see articles on Vogue about mask that you just have to have and I see how there praces can range from $5 to $100. This immediately seemed ridiculous to me. It felt like companies were taking advantage of this global crisis. After doing more research, I learned that many compnaies were donating some of the profits. i also learned that the reasoning behind them making masks is to provide jobs for their employees who would otherwise be out of work. LEarning these things made me feel better about the situation, but it is still ridiculous to me that there are companies charging as high as $100 for something my mom made me for less than $5. In this book, I explore the different masks being sold. I include screenshots of captions from the companies' websites. I also include screenshots from NEw York Times articles about the subject.