Project 1

Line

In this collection of line drawings I aimed to capture the movements of quintessential New York. The facets of daily life here that are often unspoken of but an integral quality of my city culture. To do this I portrayed a variety of daily occurrences that I often ignore and explored the compositional qualities they posses. I began with my start into New York city being Staten Island. In doing these projects I used different styles of lines to represent different strengths and sizes of their respective counterparts in reference to Certeau’s description of how “Style specifies a linguistic structure that manifests on the symbolic level” (101). When I stay grandparents house I was able to diagram their household movements and then chronicle the harbor and the Staten Island Ferry, including the Ferry Terminals fish tank coming back into Manhattan. I also chronicled my weekly routine as this is usually a mindless path to me that others that do not live in an urban landscape would find interesting.

Writer Michel de Certeau inspired me to compose this with his piece “Walking in the City” in which he describes “walking, which alternately follows a path and has followers, creates a mobile orange city in the environment a sequence of phatic topoi.” Additionally, I wanted to depict the beauty facets of humanity I experience on the regular living in Greenwich Village and particularly close to Washington Square Park. Almost always there are street performers and various artists exercising their skills to the publics and their motions are often lost in the mass. I found a particular dancer that was representing the University’s dance program and documented her movements as she practiced her own mundane routine to the parks audience. To do all these demonstrations of movement, I used lines in varying colors and weights. In doing this I synecdochally represented the facets of urban life down to lines of motion. Certeau describes the synecdochal quality as “a spatial element in order to make it play the role of a “more” (a totality) and take its place” (106).

Project 2

News

In this project, I recontextualized current events from the news into visual metaphors. I focused on stories that are commonly seen in American news outlets including from the recent surge in sexual assault victims coming out, Amazon corporation domination, environmental events (including the Green New Deal), to the obituaries and stocks. Similarly to Sarah Charlesworth, I wanted to explore these modern day themes with visual metaphors due to how the “newspaper forms our perspective of history.” For each of these categories, I researched three newspapers from one day and gathered relating articles to make each category its own collage of stories. I was inspired by artist Aleksandra Mir to use the newspaper because there is “something beautiful in the nostalgia and it has a life span.” This allows the viewer to understand the frequency in which these topics appear in our daily lives and their relevance with the exception of the obituaries and stocks as I wanted to include one recurrent segment in the newspaper. Likewise to another artist, Nate Lowman, who inspired my categorization of the work in conjunction with painting over the articles, I painted visual metaphors on the pieces corresponding to their articles with the intention their interpretation would be up to the viewer.