exhibit a:

working on my package design final for graphic design 1.

it has been for a while

i walked into the hallway this morning and these words were dominating the bulletin board. i loved how they totally activated a space that is usually monotonous and always empty handed. i had to stop and go back to my room and grab my camera. i found out later that cathy was the culprit. i don't know if it was an assignment, or something she just did to simply do. she has such a way with words...

on (enter word here)

i'm feeling good about this one. i finally settled on an idea for my book arts final. and it feels like a good next step. initially i thought i'd do some sort of "desk set" of books. my mid term was a 3 inch binder of found color paper squares, and i was on the verge of doing some out of control indexing. all the elements were ready. i saw a cheap faux-wood plywood desk at the thrift store for $9.90 that i thought i could display them on. i figured i'd finish my rolodex visual dictionary that i started last year. and i wanted to explore doing a perfect bound stack of paper to fit into one of those "page a day" desk calendar holders.

but something wasn't feeling right. the pieces didn't seem motivated. and i put off working on anything for a good two weeks.

after a rejuvinating thanksgiving break, and a huge shopping spree at arnies in houghton lake, i finally came to an idea that i could move forward with. it builds off of a lot of what i've been scratching at with my books so far. one of the books i made (for post binding) was a "slices of life" collection of sketchbook pages and notes and other random ephemera. the thought there was that all of these ah-ha moments sometimes get lost in journals and notebooks, never to be seen again. but if you were to start tearing pages out and compiling them all in one place, you would see common threads that keep coming up. so i went back to this book and pulled words out that kept reappearing. i ended up with at least 30 post-it notes cluttering my desk with them written on it. i then narrowed it down to nine. (for no particular reason.)

now for the key component: i'm going to organize other people's notes and thoughts about those words into individual books. (an "on" series. "on ideas, on lessons, on growth, etc.) the biggest part of that all? doing a final project that depends on people other than myself. and when all is said and done i get to bind them in colored foam covers. (so the color spectrum lover in me is happy.) my move now is to start collecting these notes from people, just handwritten on little sheets of paper to scan and print in black and white for the pages.

painting final

this should have been posted last friday... but finals ended and i got caught in the rapture of packing up my entire life from the past year. (we make way too much art at this school...)

the final project for painting was an "in the manner of" painting. i picked agnes martin from the list just because we had read "in the pursuit of perfection" in my elements class. i had never seen her work, but i loved her writing, so i figured i couldn't go wrong. imagine my surprise when i googled her and found countless canvases gridded out with squares and rectangles.

so why squares? these simple systems contain so much. they are martin's personal pursuit of perfection. perfection and order. together. that's some good stuff. and in my research and reading i found so many good quotes.

"her task was not to consider the viewer's response, but to follow her inspiration. only by truthfully representing her happiness would her work succeed in stimulating similar experiences in others. response to the work, she averred, depended on the observer's condition of mind... 'people get what they need from a painting, you find things... and it helps you make the next step. so, in responding to art work, people sort of make their steps... they've got to come ready, just like the artist was ready for his inspiration.' martin's absolute trust in the potential of people to take these steps and to discover truth about life."

"this tolerance of the human condition rested on martin's deep-seated faith in the goodness of life. she preached that life - and everything that happens in it - is positive; only our inability to perceive the total process blinds us to this."

i like that. i have this feeling that agnes martin and i are a lot alike. so glad i discovered her.

sculptural forms final

more pvc pipes. more dowels. more quality time spent in the wood shop. it was pretty crazy.

ken shared this quote with me during the critique today. (it's from a book titled "the hand: how it shapes the brain, language, and human culture" by frank r. wilson.) he said it reminded him of my work:

"when personal desire prompts anyone to learn to do something well with the hands, an extremely complicated process is initiated that endows the work with a powerful emotional charge. people are changed, significantly and irreversibly it seems, when movement, thought, and feeling fuse during the active, long-term pursuit of personal goals."


i like that. and it's kind of crazy how clear the idea of connecting came into play during the process. i was constantly lining things up, drilling the holes, then taking them apart, putting them back together, plugging in the dowel, and then doing it all over again and adding another piece. especially with the large turquoise piece, plans changed.


it really started though with just genuinely getting turned on by the color. when i saw them at lowes, it was as close to love at first sight as one can get. unfortunately that was back in auburn hills and i figured that it wouldn't quite work to bring a 12 foot long pipe on the plane back to baltimore. so i kept them in the back of my head. when the opportunity came up to revisit an idea from a previous sculpture done in class for the final project, i knew immediately i would go back to pvc. i only had to convince my neighbor to take me to the lowes in timonium. i purchased three of the turquoise pipes and told myself that i would figure out later what to do with them. so their development was a much more organic process than the other sculpture (which ended up being very similar to the first pvc piece, only free standing and bigger in scale.) once i started playing around with them and connecting them, it was totally like connecting in real life. sometimes a connection is obvious and super easy to make, other times it's a stretch or the thing holding them together comes out. (i'm realizing as i write this that it might not make sense to anyone else but myself... oh well.) it's a perpetual give and take. and in the end you just have to get in there and make it work. just one of the many lessons learned in good ol' sculptural forms.

three down, two to go.

elements final

at one point this past semester, i was at a pretty strange state with my elements stuff. i was working to push it from a more personal place, yet still keep it something that anyone could access and find meaning in. i finished the floor plan project before spring break, and knew that when i came back i would have to decide: do i keep pursuing the yellow? on one hand, i didn't want to milk it too far past its point. (and people in class were starting to get pissed.) on the other hand, when you get to a stopping point like that with art that you've been working on for a long time, it can also mean that you should keep pushing. because what if a major breakthrough was just a few steps away?

like i usually do on breaks, i brought a big stack of books back to tackle. and there was one i had been wanting to delve back into for awhile, heart of darkness. this book was one of the contributing factors in coming to mica. i was reading it in ap english when i came for the open house here last spring. and after driving around baltimore at night, i somehow convinced myself that the decision to come here was like choosing between a life of apathy and action. (and i guess it kind of was...) so i picked the book back up, and grabbed a different color pen than the one i had used a year ago, wondering what i would pull from it this time around. (heart of darkness is one of those wonderful books that never gets old. despite only being like 100 pages, you could spend a lifetime over analyzing every line. which is my favorite thing to do.)

it wasn't so much about imperialism anymore. that was too obvious. too typical an interpretation. not too far into it, i found this:
"there was a vast amount of red - good to see at any time, becase one knows that some real work is done in there, a deuce of a lot of blue, a little green, smears of orange, and, on the east coast, a purple patch, to show where the jolly pioneers of progress drink the jolly lager-beer. however, i wasn't going into any of these. i was going into the yellow. dead in the center."
i almost didn't catch it at first. the yellow.

i've learned to listen a lot more to random signs like that. (i tried explaining it to my roommate, tara, today. it's not skepticism at all. it's more of a belief in a greater meaning manifesting itself in everyday things. things you could totally overlook. unless you tune into it.) so, stubbornly, i stuck with the yellow. but it had a totally new meaning. which was important. because somewhere along the line i had stopped making art about what really mattered to me. and I found myself lost in a line of yellow projects. when i really get down to it, i need to make art about what i'm thinking. and my thoughts have been consumed for so long with baltimore. and that is where i end with elements this second semester. i say “end,” but it is really just the beginning of these baltimore/yellow explorations that, because they are so engrained in my thoughts, i know won’t be able to stop scratching at when the class is done.

two down, three to go.

drawing final

if me and closure got along, this critique would have done it.

fabienne talked about just how much i have grown this past year, in drawing and in general. and not growth in a cliched sense of the term. but real, nitty gritty growth you can feel. and i think that is what college is all about. it's overwhelming. even my hair and my clothes have changed, she says. i visibly more comfortable with where i am at.

we talked about my work and social justice. and she brought up kate. it's crazy to think that it was a whole school year ago that i got here, and brought all of that history with me. and no one knew. the first full day of drawing, fabienne had everyone share a piece they had done that represented them, and a piece by an artist that they liked. the piece i shared of my own was advokate. i still can't believe i actually shared it. it was me at my most vulnerable. but i knew i had to put it out there in the atmosphere. i needed to. but in the same breath i shared calliebotte's "rainy day, paris street" as my favorite piece. fabienne challenged me right off the bat. how could those two possibly relate? how could i find pleasure in a painting that simply hung on a wall when all the art that i did was about actually getting things done? i froze. i remember answering by saying that i didn't exactly know, but it was something i hoped to figure out this year. and i think i have gotten closer to a resolution.

fabienne told me she gets so excited when she finds a student who pushes that envelope. and we both agreed with how lucky i am to have found a place where that dialogue exists. when she went to school, that wasn't heard of. and especially in grad school, she just felt frustrated. there was no room in the technical and conceptual rigor of art school for art that screamed social justice. and coming from canada to the us, she realized the urgency of such art. here, she said, those issues surround you even more intensely. it's almost impossible to separate your art from these things, but at the same time, it's that much harder to find harmony between the two.

she said the challenge for me will be to keep challenging myself for the next three years. to not let mica get too easy. to study abroad. and i think next year will be drastically different. actually taking graphic design classes will be totally different for me. and i am so glad that i have had the foundation of classes like drawing, because i know that my idea of design does not have to be limited by a computer.

my final was a project i never would have done first semester. first semester was about assignments. and feeling things out. and making typical art. i finished in december and realized that i was playing it way too safe. so i came back in january and sought to not only blur the lines between classes, but to blur the lines between my life and my art. if i felt something, thought something, i wanted my art to be a direct composite of those things. this final built off of a very open ended assignment about presences and context. it was due the day i got back from states. so i had this elaborate plan to take advantage of all of the time in transit and draw in the airport. i wanted to pick text as my presence (or more fundamentally, just a letter itself) pull it out of context, and abstract everything around it. i got one done on the way to traverse city. and i started to realize it was a bad idea. i was letting art interefere with my ability to experience something huge. why would i worry about an assignment when my life right now was about spending a weekend in emmanuel's presence? coming from the airport after picking up emmanuel, we drove by these park benches and picnic tables all leaning up against each other. the ice had just thawed on the lake behind them. and these arrangements spotted the side of the road for at least a quarter of a mile. it was the most beautiful thing. simple compositions. it was like my drawing project just got handed to me. which does not happen often, so i took advantage of it. so my final became about that instance of finding the art in the everyday. and actually installing it in a corner of my drawing room - coming in the night before and responding to the space and getting it done. i love making art that way.

one down, four to go.

elements crit

it felt so good to bring this all together into a culmination. the entire left side of the elements room was glowing yellow. (which was really so important. i had documented everything in a yellow sketchbook with pictures & such, but instead i opted for making 4 trips back and forth from the commons to main.) shamelessly sunny. (which helped off set such a dreary day. it was very reflective of my current emotional state... wondering what i'm going to do with myself for five weeks and already missing this place.)

throughout the course of this semester, all this yellow became a lifestyle. i had high points and low points with projects and kept pushing even when i had probably already taken it too far. it was an invaluable way of investigating my creative process and who i am as an artist and individual.

which led me to finding my spine. this has been the basis of everything we've done this semester. starting with an object, making 10 pieces, 5 pieces, 1 piece. moving to an idea, making 10 pieces, 5 pieces, 1 piece. finally just using whatever process worked to do whatever project you wanted. i realized how much i had been beating around the bush. yesterday, it just all seemed so simple. this is what i have been interested in through the medium. it all goes back to that give and take.


one thing i've been honing in on is the idea of plans. i've been thinking so monumentally about them, that i forgot the most basic artistic association with plans... architectural blueprints. my next project (winter break!) will be investigating that. (i mean, there had to be some reason that i collected house plans and kept binders of them when i was 10.) imagine, graphite plans on yellow tracing paper...

emac crit

our emac final was to go back and revisit and expand a previous assignment. i went back to my gift shop postcard project inspired by walter benjamin's "the mechanical age of reproduction." (the assignment was a material virtual collage. my ah-ha moment was realizing that i could actually print them as postcards, and add that layer into the concept too. so it kind of became this installation of overlapping postcards within postcards spilling out of a gift shop bag.)

i went through a few crazy ideas for this final (i actually considered printing and framing a huge caillebotte "rainy day, paris street" reproduction, cording it off, and hiring a friend to act as a security guard.) and finally mina suggested simply doing a website. great. thank you mina. it meant that i could have a little fun making up stuff and do something graphic designy. it ended up being a spoof on museum gift shop websites, focusing on the art institute of chicago in particular and how one of its most famous pieces is used as a branding tool. check it out here. (and let me just say that the testimonial page is my favorite. that guy was seriously what came up when i googled "art enthusiast." he totally matches my color scheme.)

cap crit

i don't think any of us had any idea at all of what we were getting ourselves into when we selected "finding baltimore" as a foundation elective. i could not have foreseen finding paula and fletcher as mentors. finding other students with the same passions and drive that i have. finding a need within myself to seek the truth in baltimore. and also finding how i can speak my own truth as a member of the community. finding a way to immediately impact the dynamic of the neighborhoods we visited with the "a neighborhood called baltimore" project. finding a whole new leadership lexicon and mentality. finding myself in the middle of what is truly a community arts movement. finding countless reassuring examples of art that is truly making a difference.

it was so neat to see everyone share their growth from this class in a culminating project: johanna's examination of food as a social gathering conduit, maria's "skinny white girls" clothing line, ellen's organic "planting of the seeds" in labeled jars for each neighborhood, lauren's huge neon yellow "aware" on the front of the brown center (right next to the "bullet hole") and her "driving drawings," stephanie's performance paralleling cap and faith, tierny's knitting club project in brooklyn, sarah's broken glass self portrait and map of baltimore, alder's illustrations and poems, anna's banner of journaling and words, meg's "give and recieve" hands installation, emily's honest stream of conciousness, maggie's warm fuzzies, and the other maggie's "holding hands in a circle" pictures.

i can already feel that not having this next semester will leave a big void to fill. i'm going to have to make sure that i am replacing the energy that was coming from the class in other avenues. like the mount royal elementary + mica portrait collaboration i've been working on with katherine. and trying something new for tier two of my cap internship. and, of course, everything "a neighborhood called baltimore." really watching it explode. and the great thing is that now, all of this comes together under my new role as arts and education program manager with student activities. (like today in class i started thinking and talking with fletcher about how baltimore is presented during freshman orientation, which was through a charm city "slide show." i remember that clearly. not only was the powerpoint itself weak, but there was just something off about the whole thing. my mind started going a mile a minute... why does it have to be "charm city?" why can't it be "a neighborhood called baltimore." that's the mentality we need to be presenting to incoming freshman.)

i know i will keep soaking it all in and growing and connecting the dots. that is really what this college thing is all about. i can't compartmentalize and keep these things separate. (even though i am an organizational machine.) it was too hard to come back from a neighborhood tour and switch back to making conceptual art for assignments. and it will be too hard to contain this experience in one class. it is now ingrained into who i am as an individual, and just as importantly, an artist. whether i realize it yet or not, every choice i make in the rest of my classes at mica will be influenced by the revelations that have come from the "finding baltimore" experience.

i am going to miss this class so much! (can you say community arts concentration?)

drawing crit

our final project for drawing was a narrative, using figure drawings from in class as a prompt, & working big (5 ft x 5 ft.) i got a studio for this one, hoping that it would give me a chance to separate drawing from the rest of the assignments i was working on in my room... and to truly focus and spread out. that was a good idea.

i decided the only way i could dive into the term narrative was to pick a song as a basis. i listened to it over and over again. i tried to find marks that would mimic the music. i thought about distance. and solitude. this was a spilling out for me of so many comments/critiques/thoughts: using layering, but having each layer be distinctly different. not worrying so much about starting light... skipping the vine and going straight to compressed charcoal. being decisive with marks. experimenting with acrylic (and realizing it doesn't work so well with charcoal.) my inspiration was an exercise we did in class. our model would pose and we would draw for 30 seconds, and then each rotate to the easel next to us and continue the drawing for that person. by the time 10 people had added to it, things started getting messy. you would look at the drawing and think that there was nothing that could possibly fix it. but then someone would add something, just one mark to make a difference, and it would completely bring the piece back to life. that kind of surrender of control, so not me, was exactly what i needed to embrace when drawing.

it was so cool to pull everything from the semester together and curate it. it doesn't seem like much when you're wrapped up in it all, but when you look back at everything you realize how much you really did. drawing was definitely a class that i struggled with first semester. not so much that it was hard, but that i knew i was lacking passion for it. it seemed like just a requirement that i had to get through to get to the good stuff. but when i see how much i have grown in just a semester, i am so glad that i'll have drawing two next semester. it's shaking things up for me, which is always a good thing. i'm constantly questioning my definition of drawing, and beginning to realize that i don't have to keep it separate from the rest of how i create.

it's not so bad at all

it's the day before final week starts, and i'm thinking, it's not so bad at all. i guess once you survive something like avondale homecoming, planning a leadership conference in a week, submitting 10 college applications, or taking ap tests/being in the spring musical/chairing spring fest, this finals business tends to not freak you out as much. a little stress is a good thing. especially when coffee is involved. and getting more than four hours of sleep is unproductive anyway.