1st Semester Personal Project (September, October, November)

This project was not for a class. I put this together myself to show the photographs I took of birds that died in Philadelphia when they hit the large glass windows of tall buildings. I wanted to record every bird I saw so I could count them. I chose the best photographs for this collection of prints.

I made a box to put these digital prints in. There are 28 prints total. Each is 8"X6". When one opens the box to view the prints, one slides the prints from the right side to the left side. This way, two prints are visible at a time. I placed the prints in a certain order so the sets of prints compliment each other. I got this box idea from the Editions Artist' Book Fair I saw when I went to New York City. Many artists put collections of prints into boxes like this.

At the book fair, I saw the work of an artist who was also photographing dead birds. Her name is Susan Silas. Her photographs inspired me to take the time to print out my digital images. Her work also inspired me to select photographs that captures the locations of the birds right after they have fallen (Susan Silas's work is different because she photographs in her studio and records decay).

I was interested in the photographs I'd taken where there was minimal decay. To me, these birds look like they could still be alive. This state makes the photographs a little more unsettling to me.

I made this collection of prints to officially end my personal project of photographing the birds this past semester. I titled it September, October, November because these were the months when I took these pictures (this was when the birds were migrateing so I saw many birds of different species). The prints look great, but I'm relieved to be done with this personal project. I learned a lot while working on it, but I'm looking forward to a new spring semester.

Final Computer Project

This was my Final Project for Computer Foundations. We had to do an autobiographical presentation. I chose to make a triptych showing me and my favorite stuffed animal named Puppy over time. I found pictures of me and Puppy from when I was little. I scanned Puppy and used the fur texture to make landscape forms for the figures to exist in.

My computer professor, Eva Wylie, commented on how it is both humorous and serious at the same time.

This maybe my final post about my finals until the Spring Semester. In the spring, I'll start this blog again as I make new work.

Updated 2-D Project

At the end of the semester, everyone was preparing for the Foundations Student Exhibition, which is a show of work done in foundation classes. Students could re-work past assignments to improve them for the show. I chose to do this with my Space project.

My teacher suggested that I add more complexity. I chose to add more shapes in the negative spaces. I used positive and negative images of stars because I wanted a pattern that wouldn't take away from the squares but would still go with the theme.

On the left is the new version. On the right is the old version.

Yeti Defense

This project was a group project that me and my friends Josh and Katie did. Our 3-D class was challenged by the other Wood Shop 3-D class to make a response to their Yeti project. They made sculptures of Yetis that they put in the large green hallway at Tyler. For a response, our class decided to defend against Yetis.

Our group decided to defend against the Yetis by putting a Yeti Detector by the front door to Tyler and "wanding down" people as they entered the building as airport security does (the wand and the detector searched for Yeti DNA instead of metal).

It was a short lived performance piece but we had a lot of fun doing it and putting it together. Some people loved the idea and got really into the new Yeti defending security measures. Others were less thrilled to be "wanded down". All in all though, it was a fun project that nicely complimented the other group's performance piece of recruiting people to join in an Anti-Yeti-Alliance Army.

These pictures show the Yeti Detector, the process of "wanding down", and me sporting the Yeti Defense uniform.

Leda and the Swan

For Drawing Class today, we brought in references to make our own version of Leda and the Swan (story from Greek mythology). Artists have been depicting their own version of this story since the Renaissance when it and other Greek myths became more popular.

This drawing was meant to be a preliminary drawing, but David Noyes told me not to add anything to it. He said it has a very elegant quality that would be lost if I went back into it later. I might make a second version with paint if I have time.

Field Trip to the Rodin Museum

In Drawing Class on Thursday, we went on a field trip to the Rodin Museum to draw the sculpture. We worked in pencil and focused specifically on The Burghers of Calais (One of Auguste Rodin's most well know sculptures). I had been to the Rodin Museum once before on College Day.

David Noyes suggested I block in large areas of value and then go back into those with smaller areas of value. The images above show this technique. He wanted us to focus on using value (not line) to describe the form. The one on the left is more finished. We had to leave before I could complete the one on the right. David encouraged me to go back to the Rodin museum often to draw the sculpture. He said I would learn a lot about drawing that way.

David Noyes also warned me to be careful not to get too concerned with getting things accurate, because I could lose the element of my own personal voice in the art. He says this is a problem he often encounters with students who had a lot of academic training (academic in the art sense; drawing lots of still lives for accuracy and taking many art classes). They are trained to become render-ers but they don't have their own voice. He says it can be more stimulating to the artist and viewer if the artist puts their own interpretation on what they are seeing.

Science

This project was an ongoing 2-D project. We would work on the little 5 in X 5 in squares a little at a time.

First, we picked a theme and did images on the squares of people and things based on that theme. I picked "science" and so I got lots of images associated with space exploration and quantum physics. We then chose words that helped to define or expand on our theme, and made squares of those. We used many different methods to get variety of techniques, values, and shapes. Finally, we picked a way to arrange the squares that reflected the idea we wanted the viewer to come away with.

When I was working on this project, I was thinking about science as exploration. I was also thinking about how all human beings from different times and places have been exploring the world and universe. I used a circular shape to reflect the circular shapes of orbits, planets, stars, molecules, and other forms associated with science, order, and systems. The circle is a 'universal' shape, that works well with my science squares.