what if?

These are all short-term experiments to find out, “what if?” Next semester I plan on developing some of them, but for the time being, I concentrated on trying many different things. I attempted to initially go wide, and only later to zero in on whichever ones seem successful.

I am interested in pairing my brother’s writing—stories about certain places from his world wide travels—with my images to study “urban/wild” scenarios. Again, the juxtaposition of photographs from one place (the southwest landscape, for example) with stories about desolate landscapesor urban centers (which are from different parts of the world and which will be taken out of context or my purposes) might make interesting juxtapositions. Studying one word which is constructed out of different words—or one paragraph which is describing one place but juxtaposed with a photograph from a completely different place—might create richer layers of interpretation.

tokens

Core Samples 10 — In this final project I created another wax book which I gave away as “tokens.” Each person in the class received a page of the book, a personalized plate with their initials. The original quote is from the class syllabus. I was playing with individual parts that construct a coherent whole. Only when viewed together, can the quotation be deciphered. The tokens represent the different individuals as well as the collective group.

juxtaposing signs

Core Samples 09 — Think back over works you have done over your lifetime. Add any strong impulses, things you always “wanted to do.” In considering the works that were unconcluded, what potential still exists in each? Chose an idea from your responses that still has some life in it. Let a piece come from reviving that idea.

Photography is the medium I use to capture what I experience. Space and place serve as my content to document what I see, and re-represent it. I am studying space and time as data to study multiplicity and multidimensionality. This semester I have worked on numerous short studies in trying to define these space/place inspirations. I have constructed several small books which utilize my photographs from the southwest. Signs, building materials, horizon landscapes—they all have influenced me.
These moments—random instances filtered through my interests and my perception— depend on what I happened to see. They now make up my subject matter. I gather information and frame it in new forms. I don’t set out with too specific goals. Yet, the photographs which I capture resonate with similarities.

Close up fragments decontextualized from their original surroundings—these isolated, blown up instances convey and capture the sense of place. As a hunter and gatherer, I do not seek out specific inspiration; I utilize materials which I come across, documenting and transcribing my journeys. The particular place is also almost incidental, as inspiration and source material can come out of anything. From Route 66, I photographed signs and billboards, graphic buildings in the flat landscape.

I like mixing and rearranging, constructing and intersecting. In my project I wanted to work with free association—pairing two things that did not necessarily go together. In this week’s studies, I overlapped letterpress letters on top of printouts of signs from the southwest. I began looking at signs as content, signs that took the place of buildings. The vernacular vocabulary of old Route 66 hotel signs proved to be inspirational. With their colors, overlaps, and woodcut forms the old signs acted as letter forms and as symbols of language. I got interested in the layering of the letterpress on top of the printed photographs to reveal and conceal the information underneath.

materials 02

materials

Core Samples 08 — What materials do you collect, salvage, save for use on something? Make a list of your favorite materials. What are the materials that you don’t know how to approach or use but find yourself curious about?

This week our assignment was to pick a material and create a project experimenting with the material and its opposite. I became intrigued in working with wax, which was an amazing material that transformed its state. I melted it and then dried it back into a solid. From frozen state I was able to quickly reconfigure it into a liquid, changeable state. Solid turned into liquid turned into solid again—the reaction continued endlessly. This transformation from liquid to solid, as well as the ability to embed objects inside of the material made beeswax as well as candle wax attractive materials for experiment. The wax became a canvas for material collages of various forms.

I had used wax once before, but never fully explored its potential as a material which could create collages with embedded materials. I poured the wax into small “pages” which were meant to be put together into a book work. The books became tactile and sensory experiences. The differently colored and differently combined flat pages constructed three book works with different materials and themes. The exploration evolved into a very hands-on experimental process where I kept adding different found materials into the wax to see what kind of relationships could result within the frozen collages.

I like wax. I like how it embeds things, layers things in space, it is away of doing physical college. It is an alluring medium, but I don’t see the content for the medium yet. It is very physical, more physical than anything else. It is breakable. It is a medium that is not solid, that is not permanent. I think a lot of its appeal lies in that fragile state. Hammett and Chris Bertoni suggested reinterpreting the medium and putting it down again. So, taking a photograph of it, so that it is no longer wax, but illuminated wax on a digital photograph. This would be one iterative aspect of how to use the wax.

One of the other students said, “Wow, you can make a book out of anything” I have done a lot of books out of very different materials. It can be a hindrance if I keep rushing around, trying new things. Whether it is a cyanotype or wax, book prints or the letterpress, I have a very additive approach to design, and at times it gets to be too overwhelming.

journeys

Core Samples 04 — Think back to the journeys you have made. Consider any kind of journey, defined simply as moving from one place to another. Select what seems important and examine the sequence of events which comprise it.

As the southwest trip was so inspiring for me, I made a second project where I painted the skies. I visited numerous galleries during this trip and was mostly drawn to paintings which were abstract color studies of the southwest skies. I decided to paint skyscapes, which show the changing time of day and became journeys of time. If I captured the essence of the road trip itself, then I captured the essence of a journey.

places

Core Samples 04 — Think about places which have been, and may still be, special or important to you. Recall places where you were able to be centered, to see clearly. Think about where this place is geographically and physically.

My paintings for this week attempted to create emotive illustrations about beaches, and to create assemblages about the juxtaposition of sand and the water. I thought that the words “stand” and “float” conveyed the essence of this point of transition and opposition in long stretches of sand and endless water.

Most of the places I wrote about were outdoor places. Beaches seemed to always hold interest and inspiration for me. When I grew up in San Francisco, I used to always go walking or running along Ocean Beach. It was the open, uncovered place of refuge in a dense urban environment. At the beach, the sky was wide open and my eyes could scan the distant horizon and the calming water. I watched the waves, breaking on and receding from the shore. The rhythm of the waves enlightened a meditative state of relaxation and contemplation.

I went to the beach on warm sunny days, as well as on overcast foggy ones; it was always beautiful and peaceful. I always enjoyed Northern California beaches, and somehow was shocked when I moved to Los Angeles and beaches were no longer natural refuges, but crowded entertainment venues. I liked the windswept, isolated strips of sand, rather than the crowded volleyball arenas.

Beaches are places were two things come together: the land and the water. The sky and the horizon are also visible here, but they are not usually visible in dense cities like San Francisco. Calm, empty, quiet—they are an edge and a boundary, a connection and a separation. Beaches are places of juxtaposition and transition.

people

Core Samples 03 — Chose one person from your list. What is your relationship with them? How would you represent this person in abstract form? What colors would be most accurate? What materials? What shape? What scale? What context? What words would be included?

When writing about people who have influenced me, I wanted to do a project about my previous boss, Pat Ford. I had always felt fortunate for meeting Pat, but did not realize the significant impact she has had on my life. She is unparalleled as a mentor, as a woman who runs her own successful design business. She has amazing design sense, along with esteemed social graces, cooking and gardening skills. She became an inspirational role model for me, in graphic design and in life. I wanted to create a book which symbolized her design style, her personality, and her influences on my life.

Pat had been the person who introduced me to the power of words and letters as forms, as I had worked for her designing signs before I came to grad school. I decided to create a book of letter forms to symbolize her professional influence on me.

The accordion book about Pat allowed me to look at representing space through a two dimensional medium. The book combines type, image, and space, which I thought were the appropriate symbols for Pat. Modernist and Craftsman aesthetics are manifested through the rectilinear and circular letter forms. I first attempted to create a childlike “pop book” to represent working on signs in Children’s hospitals with her. But, the book seemed to transcend childlike pop up books, and wanted to become a manifestation of Pat’s house and design aesthetic, two things I was immediately drawn to.

In a certain sense, Pat had been already represented by her house. The work I did was very much linked to this house, and I felt very comfortable there. She had transformed the house in her own image, from a humble, dilapidated cottage to an exquisitely detail and historically appropriate craftsman bungalow. This house was her home as well as her workplace. Design clients would come and meet on the marble table in a cherry paneled living room. Thus, I associated Pat with this house, and the book I created symbolizes her through symbolizing her house.

The book symbolizes Pat through its colors and forms. The oranges, yellows, and cyans have an “bungalow” association—they are simultaneously warm and modern. The color palette evokes her sophisticated color and material sensibility. Whenever we worked on signs or interiors, she would create color boards which were complex pairings of colors, rather than obvious primary choices.

events 02

Core Samples 02 — Sit quietly and comb through your life over ten important events. Make two pieces: one derived from an event and one derived from a person. These should be taken from the image you assigned it in your writing, not directly about the subject.

I became interested in events which reveal and conceal important truths in my life. Some get larger and keep expanding proportionally while others start out huge and get smaller. I viewed these events as moments of awareness which allowed me to see current situations and bring insight to circumstances in my life.

The two main events which I kept focusing on were unfortunate circumstances which had occurred to me this summer. In one incident, I woke up to find a bat flying in my bedroom and in the other incident I fell off of a horse. The bat had started out small and almost insignificant but it exponentially increased in the amount of trouble it brought into my life. A little bat flying over my head ensued in numerous emergency room visits, heath insurance problems, and painful shots. The problems resulting out of this event grew and grew, immensely and violently. The horse incident, on the other hand, was a seemingly huge deal—I blacked out, had a concussion, and found myself in an emergency room. Yet, after this scary initial shake up, the ensuing events quickly diminished in significance. I healed and things gradually subsided.

The other bookwork has wave-like or topography-like cuts. Waves and the architectural topography maps serve as metaphors for gradual, incremental increases and decreases. The rising or lowering of altitude in a topography map represents growth or decline. Change and transformation are conveyed in the stacking of the cuts which are progressively getting larger or smaller. Some cuts start out large and get smaller; others start out small and grow significantly. This form represents how certain events grow larger with problems, while other problems others start out large, and resolve themselves away. These cuts represent events which gradually evolve and change, but constantly affect me.

events 01

Core Samples 02 — I completed two bookworks in which I cut into existing books to represent the transformation of cause and effect in the events of the summer. The formal explorations in my book works allowed me to express how events in my life revealed and concealed other events, and how they played out over time and affected my life. The layers between the pages become apertures for framing ensuing content. Some holes reveal; others conceal. All show transformation and transition, cause and effect.

The first iteration utilizes random incisions—angled and unplanned. They are sharp, surprising, and violent. When sequentially turning the book, I cannot foreshadow the types of cuts in the following pages. The cuts come quickly and abruptly, and do not have longevity in their repercussions. Likewise, the concussion started out suddenly and abruptly, but it subsided away.

transforming skies

Core Samples 01 — What is it that you must do? What is your work about? What are the roots of the things that feed you? What are the common threads, those things that have been in you all along? What is it you care about? What are your values? What are you manifesting in your work? The first impulse often is the choice that our intuition is instructing you to do. You have to trust what you live, and stand in your center. Trust your own inclinations and develop them. Find your vocabulary and find your own voice.

I need to explore painting and get back into doing creative things with my hands. I want to mix architectural concepts with graphic forms in visceral mediums. I want to allow myself to explore and play. To investigate rather than to problem solve. To take a road that leads into unknown. To start something without knowing how it will end. To start and see what happens.

For our first project, I became interested in capturing an almost “non place” place—the sky—through my paintings. The sky is an object which thrills me. The sky is a place that is constantly changing and is never the same color or form twice. It is a place of constant transition. I am drawn to the colors that are constantly changing and shifting, especially at sunset and sunrise. I wanted to capture the sky as a dreamscape and to create a piece that blended skyscapes as landscapes.

I wanted to start painting and see what would happen. I had not painted in a few years and my hands were quite rusty, but I enjoyed the experience of painting, layering and wiping off, adding pigment and covering up layers underneath. The process of covering and uncovering is a process which I worked through in different mediums, but it was especially rewarding to play with it with the very tactile and malleable oil paints. I enjoyed brushing the canvas with a rag, while responding to the shapes and colors which appeared or disappeared.

The two paintings I did for this project attempted to capture the dynamic symphony of color. They translated the two extremes of dawn: the fuchsia of daybreak and the periwinkle of daylight. They represented the gradual evolution of the sky simultaneously, and only while painting the panels did I experience the blending and transformation of the sky as I had experienced that August morning.

evolving dawn

I have seen my share of sunsets, but sunrises have been rather rare. The photographs I was painting from had been taken one morning in Phoenix, Arizona, when I had awakened up to watch a sunrise. This was probably the first time I had dragged myself out of bed before 4:00 am—rather than already being awake and pulling an “all nighter”—to see the sun come up. I was surprisingly motivated to hike up the path above our hotel before dawn to see the transforming sky. Somehow knew it would be spectacular. Despite of—indeed, maybe because of—the cloudy sky, the astounding show did not disappoint.

Over the course of an hour, I photographed the gradual shift of hues which were blending above me. From dark indigos and lavenders to fuchsia swipes and then orange and crimson highlights, the sky changed quickly and dramatically. During the time I stood above the valley, the most enchanting spectacle revealed itself before me.