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Project 4: Place

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Place Project Statement of Intent

   For the fourth project, the selection that was chosen was the first option with a bit of some other ideas involved. I created a mural that was supposed to be the culmination of all of my coworkers and I’s jobs and experiences. The place or location that will be explored in the piece is the Island of Guam. There was a large chunk of life with a huge impact that shaped my character. The Image should be in the shape of the island about 12 inches tall with various widths. 

   For the construction of the piece, the plan is pretty simple. Multiple images that represent Guam as a place and my experience there will be printed out. A shape around 12 inches in the form of the island of Guam will be cut out in cardboard as a base. After that the images will be attached to the base. A border will be added to the edges of the island to give it a finished look.

   In the pursuit to think of a place that actually resonated with me and was super impactful on my life, I settled on guam. Guam was a culture shock that allowed me to shake off my preconceived notions about life and become a new person. The place was more than a location; it was a point on the map that made me realize that so much more of the world existed than just my home town in the United States. I shifted how I felt about the world and people and myself.

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Project 4 Project Ideas and Influences

Old painting on door

While working at my old job, I was asked to create a mural that represents unity between me and all of my coworkers. At that point in time I lived in Guam for three years and it was a pretty impactful experience in my life. The place was a very huge portion of self development and most of my early adult memories come from this era of my life. That Island is like a time capsule that I reference often when explaining current facets of my being. The painting of the mural I did represents the culmination of all experiences I had in that place, and while creating the image many of my friends at that time worked as assistants. When I think about that location and all of the memories This Mural comes to mind. I wanted to use Photos from that project to represent that place and everything that it means to me. 

My body

I feel like the only place that someone has true complete agency over is their body. At least that is supposed to be and should be the case, but might be different from person to person and gender to gender. Regardless, when it comes to change and pursuit of goals, my body is one thing that I will always have control over. It is a place of security and safety. If I want to alter the body mass index, modify the surface, or allow it to waste away I can. For my project, I wanted to do several interpretational drawings of my body and physique. Different ways I view myself, and at different times in my life. No matter how radical the changes in my life were the one place that I always had control over was my own body. Like a shell around My consciousness, as long as I put in the effort it did what I told it to. 

Images from my story

I have been working on a story about a fictional universe and all that it is made up by for several years. From characters to places to vehicles and creatures. This place mostly exists in my mind currently, but I wanted to flesh it out further. I have a few sketches and concepts created, and I wanted to add more to the universe and use this project to create more location based components to the space. 

Influences and Inspirations

https://www.wikiart.org/en/h-r-giger

https://www.cbr.com/star-wars-new-hope-concept-art-pieces/#:~:text=%20Star%20Wars%3A%2010%20Pieces%20Of%20A%20New,Breathe.%20Darth%20Vader%20is%20perhaps%20the...%20More%20

https://bruceleetraining.com/

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/393924298626575737/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWIbtKXOGoc&t=7s

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Places reading response

   The reading on place seems to give a description that can be as wide and vague as the artist wants. Before the reading, I would have only imagined a place as being something that represents a geographical location, however it can be so much more. A place is whatever a person makes it. A country can be a place as well as a chair, or maybe even an imaginary situation that someone escapes to. That last one is the one that opens up the widest spectrum of places that can exist and be interpreted. The reading said that there was a shift in referring to a place as a space and after finding out that imaginary places can count as spaces that makes so much sense. Artists like Salvador Dali and HR Giger create spaces that seem impossible to exist, but within their minds they have to create and live in these spaces to bring them into fruition. Thinking about this entire concept, where does the space or place boundary end. If something like cyberspace can be counted as a space, can a song be a place, or maybe a smell. These different concepts can take you somewhere else in your mind that might not even be visual to any degree, but still have somewhat of a location. This entire process makes me think about all of the world building that takes place in artist and writers imagination. The storytelling that occurs in so many different mediums is truly expansive.

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Project 3 Post Critique Response

During the critique I received one main point of feedback on my piece that had multiple subcomponents and examples. My piece was an image that was supposed to represent Identity, so I created a portrait in the classic style of my cousin and role model that once had heavy gang affiliation. The image of him posed with weaponry, colors and gang signs being thrown encapsulated all of his identity at the time, however this moves into the major critique. The render of the figure accomplished what was required, but the background is void of details. Though the composition doesn’t suffer dramatically, the real estate is wasted and could have been used to showcase a huge portion of identity. The background could have been used in many ways to show where the figure is from or what places were important to him. The recommendations included symbols that could be more representational, full backgrounds of certain locations that were important to the individual, or A best of version of said background imagery. All were good Ideas, and I will probably end up doing the last idea so I can try to incorporate all of them.

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Project 3: identity

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Identity Project Statement of Intent

   I want to make a painting of a family member in a typical gang pose that is altered to appear more like a classic painting of nobility. For this I will be using acrylic paint on canvas paper. The goal is to make a painting around 12X15. It will be displayed in a frame on a wall. 

   The process of making the painting is going to take a few steps. To begin, I am going to do research on my family member and find old photos to reference. After that, I will break down the pose I want. Following, I am going to cut and organize the canvas paper to fit my measurements. Next I will make preliminary sketches to be transitioned onto the canvas. Finally, the painting will be done over the undersketch.

   For this project, I wanted to paint this picture for a few reasons. With the main tone of this project being identity I really wanted to make a full piece that captured the whole identity of someone. I think that all aspects of someone's identity can be shown through in one of those classic paintings. A comparable modern image to match those would be the photos of people that are showing off gang affiliation. Even though my cousin doesn't live this same life anymore, The photos he took act as time capsules of what his identity was at this point in time.

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Post Critique Response

After the critique, There are a few notable things that come to mind. First, I think it is important as an artist to go outside of your comfort zone to learn and grow, but sometimes it has to be in baby steps. My project was on a medium that I was unfamiliar with in languages that I didn’t know. That being said I did learn how to combine chop up music files and combine them with video files. Opposite to that point, I believe my concept was strong however the execution wasn’t as stellar. I think I tackled all of the components of the language project. In addition to learning the various processes, I learned how to operate different software's. From the feedback I received, I seemed to do all of the steps correctly for the project, I just need to polish up the end result quite a bit. I’m going to take the whole thing as a learning experience to improve on future projects.

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Identity project

Art and media inspirations

http://www.artnet.com/artists/kehinde-wiley/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmLkBQmZQM8

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34144489-crown

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120611/

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1853728/

3 Ideas for Identity Projects

My First Idea was something that I took inspiration from the movie “Blood In Blood Out”. I wanted to create a portrait of my relatives that have gang affiliation in a prestigious manner. Much like how the old paintings of the dukes kings and knights posed proudly in their portrait in their armour with banners and weapons in the paintings, I wanted to reimagine the classic gang pose and adjust it into the honorable painting look. I feel like those old paintings completely encapsulate the whole identity of who they depicted. A person's profession, successes, family ties, government affiliations, and social status all in one image. Modern day gang members flexing has the same effect, so I wanted to bridge the gap.

My second idea is a bit more cliché. I wanted to create a self portrait or photo collage that depicts the various things that I believe make up my identity. These things would include my interests, important past activities, and other notable background information. If this were to be a drawn image, it would be a model “me” split into sections with the sections being outfitted with related articles of clothing. If I went with the collage idea, I would find old photos of me and combine them similarly and appropriately. 

My third and last idea would be to draw an image of myself as how I am today in a walking motion forward. Next I would include the different components of my background that held me back and that propelled me forward. In addition, I would add the default information that makes up my identity like family ties, race and gender. Essentially The piece would have all of the things that make up my identity and who I am with murals, that tell a story, look to it.

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A remix of the classic “Steady Mobbin” by Lil Wayne and Gucci Mane

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A powerful set of lyrics reimagined from “Burning Heart”, First sang by Survivor. 

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A beautiful rendition of a small portion of “A change is gonna come” originally by Sam Cooke. 

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Greatest of all TIME

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Identity Response

This reading seemed to be pretty on the nose for today's social climate. At least recently, there has been a wide spread push to have a societal reeducation on the way that identity works. To begin, honestly, I’m not that big of a fan in terms of identity playing such a giant role in society, I understand why it is important to a lot of various groups in terms of privilege and suppression. On the other hand, I always feel like it creates a defeatist mentality when it reaches wide spread awareness. People start to feel like they are predestined to experience failure. For example, I can see why there is a representational issue in the breadth and diversity of types of artists that occupied gallery space, and that was an issue, however in search of a wider variety of voices and stories, there was no longer a search for the “best” artist. Maybe this situation is not as applicable for art because it’s so subjective, but I still believe that in most scenarios, both of these issues bump heads. In regards to the actual stories told or art made by these diverse artists, I was struggling to understand how Identity became fluid or forever changing. I was under the impression that a person cannot alter their ethnic background or true sexuality and everything else just seems like it would fall under the “ don’t make (whatever topic) your whole identity”. I guess someone can change their culture by living with and around people from different walks of life and cultures, yet it seems like it may be artificial at that point like becoming a culture vulture. In sum, like I said at the beginning I understand why highlighting identity can be important, but I am not the hugest fan and feel like it can be self sabotaging at times. 

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Finally got the pencils finished for the time project. Colors coming soooon!

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Project Statement

     I am settling with the idea about using onomatopoeia from other languages as my project. Words and storytelling are the primary goal, and carrying over from the language reading got me wondering how to incorporate other languages into the art. A very common form of art that involves language, is the onomatopoeia that appear in the pages of cartoons and comic books. These pieces of art are also used to move the story forward.The full idea is to find Images of certain situations that are common moments frozen in time, and add the foreign onomatopoeia over them. They will essentially just look like comic book pages. With that I feel like language, art, and storytelling are all being knocked out. For this project I wont need that many crazy supplies. The plan is to search for images of people doing tasks like interacting with objects energetically or grunting/ roaring in some fashion. I will probably incorporate animals growling or things like car tires squealing. Then I will create letter art with a loud exaggerating font with outlines and backgrounds. I will probably use Photoshop for this project as well as scan in some images. This will lend itself to allowing me the ability to spice up and edit the original images a bit. As stated before, This project uses art and language and how they tie together; plus the story will be told through the images interacting with the words.

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3 Ideas and Research Links

My first Idea is to explore foreign onamonapias. I was pretty intrigued about how people that speak other languages used sounds to describe different noises that occurred in the world. Words like BANG, CRACK, BLAM, and ROOF. My idea was to find or create common actions or events where these words would occur, and overlay the foreign language equivalent on the image. The Story comes in with the reader being ignorant of the meaning, and having to connect the dots to figure out what the word means.

My second Idea would be for me to speak in other languages. I would like to focus on uncommon languages like Native American or Island dialects. I would write poems or short stories, and record myself saying them. I would use voice inflection where it would go in the English version to give the audience a way to try and understand where I was at. I am not a foreign language major, so I would have to rely on google translate for a lot of this. 

For my third Idea, I wanted to create images of situations that can be recognized by everyone. There would be no words necessary for the audience to understand the story. Examples would be: a pair of sneakers hanging over an electric wire, a family laughing while playing board games, or a broken mirror. These images show common depictions of scenarios, yet the audience still has room for interpretation. 

https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Clayton_Cowles

https://www.widewalls.ch/magazine/10-artists-that-write-their-art/jonone-4

https://www.translatemedia.com/translation-blog/onomatopoeia-different-languages/#:~:text=%20%20%201%20English%20%E2%80%93%20TICK%20TOCK,5%20German%20%E2%80%93%20MAMPF%20MAMPF%20%28munching%29%20More%20

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJyGpVmkewU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gybTMf_Xa10