WRITING
LINE
When I set out for a line project, I was having trouble finding a set of rules that could relate not necessarily to me as an artist, but more to me as a person. I suddenly recalled a post I had seen on Reddit that was a bar graph displaying which swear words Gordon Ramsay had said the most when he appeared on Hot Ones. I decided to provide my own take on that for the bulk of this project, my first 4 cards being a graphic representation of Gordon Ramsay's potty mouth, where each type of line represented a different swear word. For my second project, I decided to make two computers play a game of Connect Four, and record the results of the game in a grid format. This created a very interesting and truly random tiling pattern. For the final portion of the project, I used a random number generator to decide who got to draw a random line. If the number was odd, I drew a line. Even, my suitemate drew a line in a different color of ink. This project displayed to me the roll of data and math within art.
NEWS
For my newspaper project, I was inspired by a recent investment in Reddit by a large Chinese corporation who is largely responsible for the large scale censorship happening in China right now. I created The [REDACTED] Post, a faux-newspaper that was entirely unreadable due to the censorship happening within it. I also was partly inspired by cliche photos of government documents that had been redacted with a thick black Sharpie to prevent others from discovering sensitive information. All in all I believe that this project was most likely the most politically charged work of art that I have ever created. Though creating work like this is not my forte nor do I believe that it is my duty as a creator, I thoroughly enjoyed creating something with a meaning that was important to me.
MUSEUM RESPONSE
I tend to hold a grudge against modern contemporary art. I am a type of person who wants to see a piece of art and be able to decipher the meaning of it using no resources other than the art itself. With modern contemporary art, however, this is not the case. This style of art is most commonly fairly abstract, yet somehow obvious that the artist had a motive driving them to create the work, yet is extremely hard to decipher at times. In the New Museum exhibition, however, I was pleasantly surprised to find a wonderful balance between this contemporary art style and art with a more explicit meaning. This exhibition taught me very much about the internet in its infancy, and the strange place it was at that time. A specific piece of a dictionary with all of the words that are censored even went so far as to inspire the topics of my news project. It was amazing to see such a range of art that spawned from the early days of internet usage, and was truly able to provide some context to what the web space was like in the late 90s/ early 2000s.
PATTERN
Dressing myself have always been very important to me, and I try to craft every outfit to be the best possible version of itself. doing this has involved me looking at many patterns, and deciding which I find beautiful, and which I do not. Pattern is a beautiful thing. Patterns are so assertive in their presence that you most often cannot wear more than one pattern at a time. The shapes that make up these patterns can be more interesting than the patterns themselves. I created patterns using kendamas and yoyos, two skill toys that I like to play with. the interesting shapes of these objects led to a pattern unlike anything I had ever seen before.
COLOR
Reading the journal over the scientific history of color in photography, as well as how color photography was shaped by the general public, was an enlightening experience. I was not aware previously of how the color balance of color films was created, and these journals offered me insight to how the colors I see on the prints of my colleagues every wednesday afternoon were generated. I was also interested to learn how science follows art, considering that many animals have their nomenclature following the names of colors that represent them, and even elements such as sulfur had an impact on art and color.
COLOR
The two most interesting things about color to me are the emotions they can evoke, and the interactions different colors have with each other. In this image, the pale blue and purple sky of the sunrise is calming and sleepy. You are able to tell that New York is just now waking up. this creates great contrast for the intense red and orange light that is being flashed in the middle of the frame. This light evokes intense emotion that serves to heighten the intensity of the sticker of a skull that it is illuminating. The contrast the colors in this photo is somewhat reminiscent to me of the first image of the black hole, dark, cool colors surround a central subject, engulfed in warm colors that display the great intensity of the subject.