Semester in Review: Fall 2020 Senior Studio
Reflection
This semester was monumentally challenging for many reasons. For one, we are currently living through a pandemic whose ripple effect has touched everything from how we learn to how we are limited to create. For another, successfully completing the semester before graduation was daunting. Nonetheless, with much perseverance, effort, and bravery, I learned lots and grew exponentially the past few months, both as a designer and as a person.
Project 1: Impact and Empathy
For this project, we were assigned to read articles from a website and then choose a certain topic to react to. I was placed in a group with Abby and Marianna. After reading the Hyperakt articles and comparing notes with my group mates, we collectively decided that we were all interested in exploring the concept and production of protest art. Afterwards, Ivan joined our group. Following a group meeting, we decided to each research our own topic to protest. We additionally each chose different mediums commonly used to manufacture protest art to experiment with, as the idea of iterating in multiple mediums was super interesting to each of us.
I chose to research LGBTQ+ protests and began to process that research by iterating with stencils and spray paint. I made lots of stencils inspired by artists who were major activists in the movement alongside stencils inspired by LGBTQ+ symbolism and proceeded to collage them over top of one another. I also photographed the intricate details of imperfections the spray paint with a micro lens. I then compiled all of this content into a cohesive book that documented all of the research I performed followed by my extensive iterations.
I enjoyed this project a lot, especially because I got to indulge in a newly found passion: the art of tactile creation. I also liked coming up with a cohesive idea with a group and seeing how differently each of us interpreted it by the end, making for very different outcomes.
Project 2: Research Video
This project was based around telling a story about artists or movements that have inspired your work in the past and will continue to do so in the future using a time based media. While I was at first overwhelmed by this assignment, I was able to determine that a movement that has so clearly influenced my work is the rise of street art. I took this concept and ran with it, researching artists who fronted the movement in addition to designers who reference it in their current practice. This led me to the discovery of many new influences that made their way into my finalized video. After making storyboards organizing my research, I began editing an immense amount of content consisting of videos, screen recordings, screenshots, and images of work and aligned them to an unreleased Kanye West beat. This content depicted people spray painting, iterating, and being overall incredibly creative. In between the clips of other people’s work, I included my own, tying how the influence of street art is seen throughout many of my projects to date. The final video resulted in an energized piece of work that felt exciting and upbeat. When I watch it, I feel a sense of excitement about where my design is now and where it can continue to grow with the aide of influences such as the raw creativity seen in street art.
Project Three: Design in Question
For this project, James assigned us two very extensive readings about design and instructed us to come up with at least 25 questions responding to these articles. We were then placed into groups, with mine including the wonderful people and designers Abby, Eme, and Kendall. Together, we shared our questions and attempted to answer each of them over the long course of three hours. The experience of discussing design at such length with such intensity was both exhausting and freeing. By the end of our discussion, we had come to the conclusion that much of design had become way too pretentious for the reality of what it is today and wanted to break the feeling of being trapped in the confines of what design “should” be by just making for the sake of it. Taking this and running with it, I felt as if the most personal practice of creating for the sake of it is journaling. Taking circumstances and then responding to them through forms and color alongside text that I’ve written myself for myself makes for an extremely personal document that is the most true representation of my consciousness.
From this inspiration, I took scans of my journal and blacked most of the entries, leaving only certain words exposed. I then experimented with layering these scans over top of one another on the risograph printer, collaging them with color. The result was sometimes muddy and distorted, but I loved playing with the idea of layering with the different inks.
For our installation, we took our many (!!) iterations and pasted them on the wall. Abby and Kendall began the process by making an organized color grid and then as a collective we began collaging iterations over top of one another. It ended up being super cathartic to just paste things to the wall, take a step back, and then put something over top of it as a response to what was happening in the rest of the collage. The result ended up being a beautiful mess that looked as if the risograph printer had thrown up on the wall. We overlaid a vinyl print of one of Eme’s doodles of a figure dropkicking its brain across the wall. It tied together the piece as it perfectly summed up how each of us had felt about the process. It was refreshing to avoid treating our work with such delicate preciousness for a brief moment.
In all, I had a lot of fun collaborating with people that I’d always been inspired by in the design community at Boston University. I also greatly enjoyed the ability to just make for the sake of it, as I unleashed my fears and inhibitions in the process of letting go my thought process behind every decision that can sometimes become overwhelmingly driven by anxiety.
Project 4: Thoughts on Thesis
As it has so many times in the past, the quickly approaching end of the semester really caught me by surprise. We ended this semester with a proposal for our final thesis project, which overwhelmed me to a great extent because I was not immediately sure of what topics I should tackle in my final semester of college as an undergrad. Eventually, I figured that I should just choose things that I have a great interest in researching about either in or outside of design.
I had already established my extensive interest in street art through the first two projects I completed earlier in the semester, so I knew that was something I wanted to incorporate into my thesis. After picking my brain for another topic of interest, I realized that I quite often am absorbed by the idea of mortality ever since taking a Death and Immortality course at Boston University in the Spring of 2020. I drew connections between the two topics and find them to be fascinating each on their own, but especially compelling when combined. Thus came my thesis proposal:
Laura King, professor of psychological sciences at the University of Missouri,
Columbia, studied life and death from an economics perspective, as commodities. Her research showed that death awareness enhances appreciation of life. Death represents the scarcity of life, and understanding life as a scarce commodity enhances existence, according to King. The prospect of the end is what makes existence precious and we already know this. King explained in The Atlantic: “If life never ended, think about it, right? Isn’t that like every vampire story or sci-fi movie? If you live too long, after a while, you just lose it. Life no longer has any meaning, because it’s commonplace”.
Street art is an unofficial and independent visual art created in public locations for public visibility. For me, street art is an art form that combines typography, collage, illustration, and color theory without boundaries, fueling a raw creativity unique to its practice.
For this thesis, I would like to combine my interest in both studying mortality and the practice of street art. I find street art and death to be synonymous in their finite limitations and anonymity, for both exist temporarily and both become anonymous after their decay. They additionally both require documentation to prove that they ever existed. I would like to exemplify this relationship by taking iterations of people’s “souls” and placing them around the city so as to temporarily immortalize them. These iterations would exist through mediums of spray paint, stencils, wheatpaste posters, silkscreen prints, and chalk. I would then document these iterations and create a book, video, or combination of the two, to include in my installation. I plan on iterating these souls by having your conscious draw itself through the practice of putting pencil to paper while looking at your reflection to reveal what your subconscious interprets.
I would additionally like to examine how other street artists and designers have handled the topic of death through a variety of other mediums including fashion and architecture, begging the question: how do you design for death? I would take these influences and incorporate them into my iterations that I leave behind.
After having read my proposal and listened to my ideas, James suggested that I look into other forms of media such as fashion and architecture in addition to street art and how designers have responded to death. I really like this idea and have incorporated it into my thesis statement.
Overall, I am excited about the prospect of this project and all of the different directions it could take me. I will begin researching and iterating over the quickly approaching winter break. Because I am so passionately interested about each of these topics, I know that I am capable of putting my energy into creating something truly fascinating and am looking forward to the feedback I will receive regarding this thesis idea during the final reviews.
