maggie-parks

[maggie-parks]

Project 3: Identity & Place

#identity #place

[maggie-parks]

Project 3 Artist Statement: Identity & Place

This drawing depicts a time in my life when I felt I was rapidly losing my identity. The pandemic ingnited my depression and agoraphobia to a full inferno. I use charcoal to represent the foggy feeling of depression. The gray tones and smooth walls allude to an empty prison cell, emphasizing the feeling of being trapped with agoraphobia. Colored pencil is selectively used to contrast the grayscale setting. On the other side of the window is a blue sky with rays of light shining through, which illustrates hope and all of the good things waiting, but I positioned my body to be facing away in a hiding position to further communicate the phobia and how my mental health was keeping me trapped inside. During this time, I felt like my life was on pause and I wasn't building an identity for myself. The pandemic forced me to make drastic changes in my life and I felt like I was being forced to abandon the identity I was building. I think this is something people with mental health issues can relate to. When we have a particularly bad episode, the only energy we have is to just get through day by day. Nevermind having the energy to develop personal identity.

#identity #place

[maggie-parks]

Project 1 Artist Statement: Time

For this piece, I combined decay and growth to communicate the concept of time. The skulls represent death and the long time it took for the flesh to decay. The crystals on the skulls represent rebirth and the time it took for them to grow. At the end of this time period, the crystals started to slowly dissolve in the solution, sort of starting a new cycle of decay.

#time

[maggie-parks]

Project 2 Artist Statement: Language

This piece is an 8-panel endless zine. I made it to act as an interactive visual interpretation of lyrics from "All Eyes On Me" by Bo Burnham. Each panel acts as a line from the song, so it can be flipped through as an infinite 8-bar loop. When I think of language, the first things that come to mind are flipping through pages of a book, or listening to words in music. When words in a song resonate with me, I find myself listening to that particular part of the song over and over. That's what I captured with this zine.

#language

[maggie-parks]

Documentation: Project 1: Time

I had a pretty bad depression episode this semester and didn't keep up with any documentation for the rest of the month. I left the bones in the solution without touching them and the crystals had become less chunky and began to form together into a smooth crust on the skulls. The crystals on the smaller skulls stayed clear and were more stable than the crystals that formed on the deer skull.

#time

[maggie-parks]

Documentation: Project 1: Time

The crystals on the deer skull turned to a powdery white when they dried out and were much thinner and more fragile than the other skulls. The crust of borax crystals fell off very easilly when handling and photgraphing. The deer skull also aquired an unpleasant odor despite being degreased and bleached.

#time

[maggie-parks]

Project 3 Ideas: Identity & Place

Idea 1: Self-portrait in a real place: I Think I’m Getting Bad Again 

Reflecting on the height of my depression 2 years ago, I was extremely agoraphobic and my eating disorder was becoming unmanageable. I was home alone looking out the window most days wishing I had the will to go outside. When I was willing to eat, I was too afraid to leave the house to buy food. My weight dropped below 100 lbs and I finally asked for help soon after. 

This drawing would show me sitting on the floor looking down with my head on my knees, highlighting my protruding bones and absence of muscle tone. Above my head would be the window that I looked out of every day. Light will be shining through the window into the dark room. The inside of the room & myself will be dark & drawn in graphite, and the outside on the other side of the window will be bright and colorful.  

Idea 2: Self-portrait in an imaginary place: No Refills 

I feel like I’m in a place in my life that is coming to an end soon. I’m planning to get pregnant in my early 30s, and I won’t be able to take medication for my bipolar depression. I feel like I’m working to be a healthy version of myself so my body and mind can handle a pregnancy, but I know that there’s a chance that I’ll slip into postpartum depression and end up in a worse place than I was before I started. 

To illustrate the place where I am and where I’m worried I’m going, I want to draw myself on top of a hill made of RX bottles and pills. I’m standing on the edge of a cliff with a dark abyss below, and I have no choice but to jump off (no refills left- no more bottles and pills to continue going up the hill). I worried I’m going to end up falling to a place lower than I was before. 

Idea 3: Detailed brain map inspired by It’s Kind of a Funny Story and Paul Noble drawings

I would like to create a brain map in an outline of my silhouette similar to the book, but I want to add details inspired by Paul Noble to make this map into an imaginary place. 

The details of the map would allude to small things about myself that I wouldn’t necessarily describe as the main components of my identity, but all of those small things together make up who I am, how I see myself, and how I present myself to the world. 

#identity #place

[maggie-parks]

Research Journal 3: Identity & Place

Artist 1: Paul Noble

Form: Graphite drawing on paper

Content: "Nobson", an imagined place: detailed symbolic city illustration influenced by architecture

Process: Similar to a Bosch painting, this type of drawing takes meticulous planning to include as many details as possible with as many separate parts in the composition for a viewing experience that takes much longer than a quick glance to see the whole picture. This requires skill in 2-point perspective drawing.

I chose this work because I am interested in the idea of adding fine details to a map that represents my identity, and I like Noble's style of drawing.

Artist 2: Ned Vizzini & Abigail Smith

Form: Book cover/jacket artwork

Content: Abigail Smith illustrates Ned Vizzini's concept of a "brain map" in his book It's Kind of a Funny Story. The main character in the book, Craig, drew maps of imaginary cities when he was a child. While being admitted into a mental hospital for 5 days, he takes an art class and revisits his childhood idea, and decides to draw these maps in silhouettes to describe them as "brain maps".

Process: The process on this one looks pretty straightforward design-wise as far as placing simple shapes into the composition, but it could be approached through different mediums like drawing, painting, collage, or digital.

I was thinking about this map for the original idea I had to illustrate my own "brain map", but wanted to take it a step further by adding in some serious detail and adding meaning with metaphor, which is where I would pull inspiration from Paul Noble.

Artist 3: Ed Fairburn

Form: portrait drawn in ink on a map (Marquette, MI)

Content & Process: Artist statement- “I manipulate paper maps to construct other forms, usually portraiture. I call this process topopointillism; a direct combination of topography and pointillism. Using traditional materials such as ink, paint, and pencil, I make gradual changes to the contours, roads, and other patterns found in cartography. These changes allow me to tease out the human form, resulting in a comfortable coexistence of figure and landscape. I aim to preserve the functionality of each map by feeding the composition instead of fighting it – I often spend hours studying the terrain before I begin any physical processes. I’m interested in the degree of subtlety behind each synchronization, and [how] a completed map behaves more like a portrait when viewed from further away – it’s almost paradoxical that a portrait should lose detail when examined closely."

Moving away from imaginary maps to real ones, Fairburn's portraits are stunning, I love his use of cross-hatching, and I love how drawing on a map from a specific place adds a level of meaning and context to the identity of the person in the piece. If I did something like this I would focus on someone else's identity instead of mine, as I don't feel like there's a strong connection to a particular place that shapes my identity.

Artist 4: Joseph Cornell

Form: shadowbox construction 

Content: Assembling multimedia shadowboxes, Cornell combined found objects, painted surfaces, and collages. He was a major collector of everyday ephemera, and his materials ranged from marbles and toys to maps and seashells.

Process: These shadow boxes consist of found objects but also carefully crafted paper figures as well. This art form emphasizes a layered look.

I love shadowboxes, and I like how Cornell showcased his collected items. There's a potential here to use found objects/personal items that represent my identity.

Artist 5: Gillian Lambert

Form: graphite drawing on paper 

Content & Process: Artist statement- “I try to find the beauty in what is traditionally unattractive, grotesque, awkward, or bizarre, I work primarily with self-portraits, but try to make them less personal by removing body parts and disguising others. I think there is a lot that can be learned from fragmenting and objectifying the human figure and face, and a lot that can be learned from witnessing the final product.”

Figure drawing is a very obvious/literal way to represent a sense of self & identity, I'm hoping to maybe draw a full-body self-portrait that leans into Lambert's style. I like how she emphasizes characteristics that can be described as unattractive or grotesque, which is what I would want to focus on if I were to make a figure drawing of myself.

#identity #place

[maggie-parks]

Place: Reading Response

The reading highlighted a lot of different ways to make a place an important part of an artwork’s meaning. Initially, I was mostly thinking about art that is installed at a specific place that is essential to its meaning, or artwork that represents a physical place. The reading also explored the idea of public vs. private space, and how that relates to the use of surveillance in our society today. Another one I found interesting was the idea of a “placeless place”: the internet. Obviously, the internet is a place, we say “go to” the internet… but it’s not the first thing that comes to mind when I think about the word “place”. I mentioned this regarding the Identity reading response, but the internet is becoming more of the “real world” and the world that we live in outside of the internet is turning into a place to make content for the actual real world on the internet. Another thing the reading mentioned was creating an imaginary space. I like this idea because a lot of times when describing how I feel l imagine I’m just a hollowed-out body with a little world on the inside that controls everything on the outside. (Kind of like Warner Bro’s “Osmosis Jones” or Pixar’s “Inside Out”). One of my favorite books in high school was It’s Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini, and I have always loved the look and concept of the “brain maps” in the book and movie. I would consider those to be illustrating an imaginary place, that's based a little bit in reality. I think that’s possibly something I could explore in a drawing and see how much detail I could add that represents my identity through metaphor.

#place #identity

[maggie-parks]

Identity: Reading Response

One of the things that stood out to me in the reading was the idea that we don’t have a fixed identity, and that we are constantly shedding old versions of ourselves. I also appreciated the topic of questioning sexual and gender norms, specifically the gender binary. “Chicken” by Catherine Opie was used as an example of an artwork that makes viewers question what it really means to be a man or woman, what that looks like, what it means to be somewhere in between, and to consider that gender is a social construct that is fluid and neither stable nor consistent. The piece makes viewers question an aspect of identity in general. Other artists draw attention to identity politics that can be applied to large groups of people, for example, the guerilla girls and their art exploring identity through a feminist lens. Another aspect of identity the reading explored that I thought was interesting was virtual identities. This is very relevant to the current times we live in. The internet and social media platforms have become the “real world” for many people and the world that we live in every day is just a space to make content for the more real, online world. People spend hours photoshopping pictures of themselves and curating the perfect image of themselves online only for the version of them in everyday life to be very different. There was also a mention of having multiple identities depending on who you’re with or the situation you’re in, and I relate to that a lot. Depending on who I’m with or where I am, I’m wearing a different mask that highlights different parts of my identity. 

#identity

[maggie-parks]

Pre-project writing: Identity & Place

My name is Maggie. I am 26 years old, born on July 19,1996. I am going to school for a BFA in K-12 Visual Art Education. I’m on track to graduate in the spring of 2025. I stopped going to school after I got an associate's degree in 2017 and moved to Bloomington, Indiana for 3 years. I stepped away from visual art and focused on making a place for myself in the music industry. I started a small indie music label, I was a promoter booking shows every weekend, I was steadily growing a roster of artists as a booking agent, and I was doing my own graphic design for admats, album art, and merch. I really felt like I was playing my cards right and was on my way to working with more prominent agencies and festivals. Live music was what I lived for and it became a huge part of my identity. It helped me break out of my shell and take more initiative, I was becoming more outgoing and pushing through my social anxiety. 

And then 2020 happened. And everything shut down. And suddenly everything that I had taken years to build was gone. I felt lost and like a part of myself was missing. And then within the span of a year my grandma died, my grandpa died, and my dog died. My mental health rapidly regressed. I became extremely agoraphobic, my eating disorder became unmanageable and I lost a lot of weight, I was unhealthy and unable to work. I’ve been spending the last 3 years slowly getting healthy again and rebuilding my identity. I started making art again and decided to go back to school. I’ve been trying to come to terms with the fact that I lost a sense of normalcy for a significant chunk of my twenties and I’m never going to get that time of my youth back. Instead of taking that time to build a sense of identity for myself and figure out who I am as a person, I’ve been reduced to a list of symptoms and diagnoses. 

As much as I would like to say my identity feels like it’s defined by something else, like being a woman or having a cultural background, it’s not. I would like to say there’s a place that feels tied to my identity, but there isn’t. People roll their eyes and say “don’t make your mental illness your whole personality”, but my mental illness controls my whole life. It plays a huge role in who I am and has undoubtedly shaped my identity.

If I think about a place that feels tied to my identity, it would be more metaphorical than physical. It’s not uncommon for people to say “I’m at a place in my life where…” or “I’m in a bad head space right now.”. I tend to think about my life like I’m moving along a visual timeline and right now I feel like where I’m at on the timeline is in between two places. One place in my life is being a student in the second half of my 20s, in a long-term relationship, and taking medication for mental illness. The other place I am approaching is being a teacher in my 30s, married, and pregnant/with children. I won’t be able to take medication while pregnant, and there’s a chance that I’ll slip into postpartum depression. I plan to work to get to a better place by then, but there’s a possibility I’ll end up back in the same place, or worse than before. 

#identity #place

[maggie-parks]

Documentation: Project 1: Time

(3/17) Added a new skull to the mix on the same day I made the new solution.

Left the skull to sit in the solution for a few more weeks. I checked on it a few weeks later and then put it back in the solution and forgot about it.

#time

[maggie-parks]

Documentation: Project 1: Time

(3/17) Let the bones sit in the solution for another week. The crystals on the bird skull are starting to grow bigger and form a noticeable thicker layer. A piece of the skull got stuck to the bottom of the tub and broke off.

Moved the bird skull to a new solution in hopes a new layer of crystals would grow. I checked a few days later and the crystals dissolved off. My motivation to keep doing this project started to dissolve away at this point as well.

I covered up the skull and put it in a corner to forget about for a few more weeks

I checked up on it again a few weeks later and the crystals were a lot chunkier this time, more clear, and less fragile than the first time. They didn’t grow much beyond this point and my mental health wasn’t in a well enough state to remember to take it out every week and photograph it .

#time

[maggie-parks]

Project 2: Language

[maggie-parks]

Documentation: Project 1: Time

After leaving the bones to sit for 2 weeks in baking soda + peroxide paste to whiten and remove any odors, I made a highly saturated borax solution (3/1)

Left the bones to sit in the solution for 1 week

Small crystals starting to form 1 week later (3/9)

#time

[maggie-parks]

Project 2 Ideas: Language: Storytelling through literal metaphor

Idea 1: Zine

By creating a zine, I could decide to focus on a general idea/topic and make 6 pages of text-based art to flip through. Topics that interest me are climate change and/or pollution, feminism, and LGBT+ issues. Having 3 pairs of pages opens up the opportunity to illustrate things that aren't necessarily following a chronological story but are closely related enough to create a narrative. Maybe a small comic could be included on one of the pages.

Focusing on current topics, I am gravitating toward illustrating a zine that shines a light on the tragic aftermath of the chemical spill + fire caused by a Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.

Idea 2: Comic

Considering approaching the same topic as I would for the zine, but using a comic grid layout to illustrate a story. Having a static image on one page instead of flipping through pages of a zine forces the design to be consistent throughout a chronological storyline. This one opens up the opportunity to create a dialogue between characters.

Idea 3: Word art inspired by Kay Rosen

This one would take a bit more thought, but taking the time to brainstorm a word that could have a double meaning by making some of the letters a different color. It could be approached similarly to Rosen's "IOU" painting, or it could be inspired by some of their other designs by playing with the spacing of letters and repetition of words to reveal a double meaning. Despite this one being the most simple execution as far as tracing a projection of font and then painting in the lines, I think this one would take just as much if not more thought during the planning process to try to think of how to approach this in a new way.

#language

[maggie-parks]

Research Journal 2: Language

Artist 1: Kay Rosen

Form: Flash paint and acrylic gouache on canvas.

Content: "IOU" (2017) is a play on words that nods to hollow promises made to indigenous peoples, in this case, the Sioux nation, in North America

Process: Rosen's work is painted by hand. To create clean lines I imagine she uses a projector to trace the outline of the font she wants to paint.

I chose this work by Rosen because I'm drawn to the simple design yet straightforward and powerful message. There is only one word, but the careful choice of letter colors adds another level of meaning.

Artist 2: Faith Wilding

Form: Performance art. Poem recited as a monologue.

Content: "Waiting" (1974) is a 15-minute monologue recited by Wilding. "Waiting" is recited in a repetitive, monotonous cycle that describes a woman's experience of waiting for her life to begin as she spends her whole life serving and pleasing others.

Process: This monologue required memorization and to be recited in a monotone rhythm while rocking back and forth.

I included Wilding's performance in this journal because it was the first thing I thought of when I considered what a performance art piece that focused on language might look like.

Artist 3: Chris Ware

Form: Comic, poster. Ink, pencil, and white gouache on bristol.

Content: Ware creates intimate comics that tell slice-of-life stories about people in suburban Midwestern neighborhoods.

Process: Drawing lightly with pencil and going over with paint for the pictures, white gouache for the text bubbles, and ink for the text. I imagine this would be easier to design and type out the words in a digital format & then trace the comic onto a larger bristol paper using a projector.

I chose to feature Ware's comics because I love how simple his illustrations are while perfectly capturing the complexity of everyday moments that so many people can relate to.

Artist 4: Derek Erdman

Form: Digital media/graphic design print: poster

Content: A parody of an actual PSA poster about rat control in the city of Chicago.

Process: Using the original poster as a template/guide, recreate it in photoshop with a satirical twist.

I love Derek Erdman's art simply because most of the time it's hilarious. He has a few pieces like this that are either posters or yard signs that aren't what you expect when you first look at them. It's one of those things where your brain is conditioned to expect the usual messaging, but with a closer look, you notice the subtle changes.

Artist 5: Josh Eberhard AKA This Is A Zine

Form: Graphic design/ digital media. Print- Zine

Content: This Is A Zine is a collection of zines that each focus on a different social issue. "GUNZ 47" is a zine focusing on the issue of gun control and violence.

Process: Creating a digital file that can be printed in multiples. Cut and folded in a specific way to make a booklet without the need for glue.

I've been interested in making zines lately and this is just one of the people I looked at when browsing artists who make zines! I love the "no rules" freedom that comes with making zines, and I like ones like this that incorporate a powerful message instead of only pictures.

#language