Artist In Residence Project

This project was a huge jump for me in terms of solidifying my artistic voice and finding a certain way I like to work. It was one of my favorite projects this year and I found it exciting to work on everyday. Having a partner definitely helped and both 5am and I were able to collaborate together really well and build off of each other. Working abstractly and presenting a situation in which the materials and (paint and ink)  devices we used to spread the materials did most of the work was a fun new way to play with our art. The sense of freedom and movement we had in the project was also invigorating. Everything felt very natural which made it a lot of fun. In terms of our intentions, we changed our expectations a little bit as the project went on, but it was mostly about experimenting on different surfaces. We wound up incorporating a certain amount of detail and the idea of reconstruction/deconstruction in our work which also made our pieces more intriguing. In our first two, we captured a sense of cosmic life as well and tiny, bacterial life. Adding fine detail to those really helped bring them out and create a path for the viewer to follow. Our deconstruction/reconstruction pieces originated from rejected pieces where we had fooled around with color and texture. Yet when we took the most interesting parts and smashed them together, we came up with two coherent pieces. We really only used one or two different inks and paint, but using both a little water and different spreading devices, we captured a great array of different textures and outcomes. It was fairly simple but it was exciting to challenge each other to come up with the next cool idea. This project will provide me with some great guidance moving forward as this type of work really resonated with me.

FOR LUKE:

Working with Luke helped out a ton and it was nice being able to run our ideas by him and get quality feedback. He provided good insight for us and really propelled up into our reconstruction/deconstruction pieces. Once we fleshed out our ideas with him and got his honest feedback, we were able to dive in completely to the project and enjoy ourselves.

Our Final Works:

Picturing Places

Maggie and I started out this project with a vision of creating a jungle-like atmosphere with lots of greens, yellows and other vibrant colors. We wanted to create a scene that was serene and felt very peaceful, but as the project went on, we managed to do this in a much different way than we intended. We wound up creating a piece that did have a sense of peace, but also something mystifying as a result of the darker colors and the fog. Our scene became almost swampy as we did not anticipate how dark the photos would be. Personally, I think this project really reflected my artistic voice, yet it did so in a way that I had not experimented with before. Incorporating photography in the project offered me a new medium to play with and learn about, while I also kept some of my abstract tendencies. It was interesting to spend so much time working on how we wanted our piece to come out and having it take a very different turn than what we anticipated when everything was put together. In the beginning, we did not have much that was specific or detail in our work, but as we added a third dimension to the project, we ventured into some previously unexplored territory. Once we got to play around with the camera and the fog, our work took on a whole new life and though we did not intend to get the result we did, we wound up creating arguably a much more interesting piece than we had dreamed up originally. Going forward, I am excited to continue experimenting with newer mediums and pushing myself to try new and unorthodox techniques like I was able to do in this project.

Here is our final piece:

Here is our work while in progress: