3D to 2D

I chose to take the second half of my 3-D soap project and use it for the 2-dimensional image because the images below made me think of icebergs and how the ice, before it is exposed to oxygen above the water has these bright, saturated hues of green and blue. 

Comparisons to icebergs that have turned over (images found from a Google search) :

Here is the painting that I wanted to work with since it had different variations of icebergs and glaciers to inspire how to warp and shape the cutouts from my soap photos. The painting is William Bradford's Vanishing Ice. 

Below are some of the cutouts after I altered their color to both overlap and add new pieces of ice to the image.

Aaaaand the final image.

It was a test in color distortion, angles, and warping since I needed the sky and ice to match the ink in the soap as much as possible; the cut sections from the soap photos were also very linear, so working with the lines to match up with the horizon and events happening was a lot of trial and error. I played with shadow and highlighting quite a lot in regards to foreground and background; I initially wanted the sky on the left to be darker so the darker spire of soap/glacier would not stick out, but I actually like the balance between it and the dark ship on the right. The same balance was achieved with the blue soap/ice in the left foreground as in the right mid-ground. I used different bits of blue and pink throughout to try and maintain the different weights of color as well as to vary up the levels of saturation a little.

All in all, I like this result. It is an artistic rendering of explorers trying to sail through the arctic, a struggle painted in neon as I struggled with soap, albeit in the heat of Florida.

The Happening Video Footage

The Happening

I knew I wanted a mask to have some sort of function, and when it came down to the wire, I thought opening and playing music would be the best to create. Below are the two masks when I added holes to them for the "hinges".

Here is the mechanism cut out of the Captain America birthday card.

The music maker glued in place on the top mask.

I knew that these things would be creepy no matter how I painted them, so I decided to try and make them somehow match the music of Captain America.

Finished piece closed.

Finished piece open. It looks more like a dirty Mexican wrestler's mask but I tried to make the top mask reveal a zombie Captain America underneath. The opening and music playing was successful, and I'll let people take it to be a dark irony on America if they wish. Video footage coming in next blog post.

Yoko Ono "The Cutting" Response

I'm not going to lie, I do not care very much for performance pieces. A performance to me should be on a stage, with a script, so it is hard to put the label of "performance" on something outside of theatre.

On the same token, though, I get it. Yoko Ono's "The Cutting" is a living painting of the trust of a woman to the society around her. Like everything else, it is up to the viewer to decide if each cut and alteration to her clothing is for the better or worse. I will say, that I was impressed by how they all seemed to be just snipping away at her sleeves, the buttons on her cardigan, the hem of her skirt. For all intents and purposes, it was almost a testament to humanity upholding her personal space and modesty until the end of the video when the man was taking away the outer layer of her bra.

Then again, maybe that was the point of the performance and the reason for her sacrificing her trust; to show the different liberties people will take and to make the viewer uncomfortable. Even in performance theatre, often the plays that intentionally made the audience uncomfortable were the ones that had the greatest lessons to teach, and the discomfort was how they gripped one's attention to listen.

All in all, I respect Yoko Ono and "The Cutting" but I don't like it. I'd rather see Shakespeare.

Memento Part II: Finished

The memory of my memento: 

I was in Paris for a long weekend during my time living in London, and let's just say the city did not meet the standards London had set for me. The metro was far filthier than London's Underground, the city seemed to be run down whereas you could hear and see parts of London always under construction, wrought iron fences being painted and repainted to maintain levels of aesthetic and hygiene...and sorry, France, but Parisian's live up to the stereotype of French people hating foreigners, especially the Americans that we were. It was not until the last day, on our way back to our hotel that we were walking behind an elderly woman who turned to me since I was the fastest walker and came even with her first. "Are you Americans? Oh, I love Americans!"

The next twenty minute walk turned then entire weekend around because she was possibly the nicest, most enthusiastic person we had ever met and really redeemed the behavior of the Parisian people so I wanted a material that could start off cold with the room temperature and then heat up the longer you held it. Aluminum foil is an insufferable material to work with if you want to keep it flat and crinkle-free, but eventually I weaved it and placed in the bottom of a plastic mold (a Christmas ornament with the top cut off). I did not have resin yet, but I had "craft water," or the gooey, clear stuff people use to look like water in fake flower arrangements.

I did not stick with this first attempt because the gooey fluid was still a bit wet and did not stick to the foil once it had set.

 Here is the weaving process of attempt #2 once I had finally found resin.

Cutting the ornament mold and peeling it off was surprisingly easy, and here are shots of the finished piece. The one above is the underside.

The top side.

They are difficult to see, but inside are blue crystals inside. I did not expect them to be so hard to see, but I actually like that you have to move the piece or the memory around in order to find those brighter, colorful parts. I chose blue crystals because since the city was renovated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the boulevards are really open to the skies, so the memory has a bluish-grey tinge to it.

Below are two shots taken in the photography studio....but resin is very reflective to light.

 The chain around it is to prop it up.

Poem Response

The poem was "Gatsby, Again" by Laney Burrell.

 Here are the dark sides drying. I used black ink but it came out more as a grey. I wanted the outside of the one further back to the left to be dark whereas the inside of the one front and center to be dark because on the latter (top side pictured below) features yellow for Gatsby's car and the green fragment he sought so dearly...while a dark underbelly was the reality of his dream.

I wanted the pieces to be made of pieces of paper, showing how unstable and broken both Gatsby's dream and the reality of the 1920s was.

Here is the inside of the further back piece. It is dark on the outside for reality exposed, but inside the yellow of Gatsby's car and red (although the ink behaved in pink) for the light at the end of the poem: "before I reach the green light, it turns red." I waned the red to drip all over the yellow and did not mean for it to become so messy, but I actually like it better since that yellow car created such a mess in the Buchanan's lives.

 Detail shot of the way the ink soaked in the frayed texture of the paper.

Two work-in-progress shots. A balloon was used to make one of the pieces round and the tupper-ware container to the left was the mold for other piece before it was used to hold the yellow ink.

Memento Part 1: Quotes, Images, & Responses

"The body is the primary mode of perceiving scale."

I think this one is self explanatory, but then again I have extensive travel experience so I know how much better it is to experience something in real time versus looking at a picture. Comments of people seeing the Hope Diamond or the Mona Lisa for the first time also fit alongside the above quote: "It's so small!...Was it always this small? It looked bigger in pictures." You haven't really experienced something unless you have shared physical space with it.

"The capacity of object to serve as traces of authentic experience."

When I went to Ireland, I had one thing I wanted: an authentic claddagh ring, but not the basic two hands holding the crowned heart that most people returned with. I was delighted to find a claddagh ring with a bit more personality which I have worn everyday since I bought it.

"The souvenir reduces the public, the monumental, and the three-dimensional into the miniature, that which can be enveloped by the body."

My dad likes to joke that I should send this photo to SuperDry for them to use as an advertisement but similar to my time in Ireland, I had one thing I wanted to buy while I was in England, and it was a SuperDry jacket. They are essentially England's equivalent of NorthFace, only more superior. I wanted this jacket for functionality as well as souvenir purposes since this coat saved me against Britain and Ireland's grey weather and every time I would wear it, I would be slipping into my memories of the best travel-filled year of my life.

"Nostalgia cannot be sustained without loss."

It is a regular occurrence for my friends and I to exchange memories across Facebook since we were united in England and our adventures throughout Europe but in America we live in different corners of the continent. It has been two years since we were together, so no one understands the connection between loss and nostalgia better than us.

"To have a souvenir of the exotic is to possess both a specimen and a trophy."

England is often praised for it's museums and the collections within, but a sense of dark humor hangs over it all with the simple fact that the museums - the British Museum to be particular - is a hoarding house of stolen treasures. This is just one photo from my gallivants through the museums but it gets the point across from the quote above: how the objects we collect as mementos are specimens from a land unknown to us and a trophy of our success in getting there.