ART 112 – Studio Research
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Taken during my Spring 2023 semester, Studio Research functioned as a continuation of ART 111 – Studio Practice I took the previous semester. This class focused more on concept development and creating art with intention. I felt myself grow immensely as an artist by the end of it and made some of my greatest work yet.
The first project was a piece centered around a few key prompts that we could choose from a list. I ended up going with the concept of aging and connections over the span of one’s life. The piece is titled “The Inexplicable Act of Growing Old,” and is made with cardboard, twine, pantyhose, and hot glue. The varying length of twine is meant to represent the varying lengths in which people are a part of someone’s life. At the other end of the cube, only a few remain while holes represent where the ones left behind would be. This piece was specifically made to be displayed in a gallery space, and luckily, it was accepted into the 2023 OMAS Show by juror Claudia Dishon and put on display exactly as I had envisioned it.
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The next project was a collage. We were tasked with making both a piece for ourselves and a more portable piece to be exchanged between each other. Both pieces, “A Natural Relationship” and “A Natural Form,” are based around the idea of interconnectivity between humanity and the natural world. It shows that we have co-existed with nature in the past, so we can find ways to do so again.
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In our third project, we were given a medium and a mode through which to create a piece of art. I was given wood scraps and the prompt of a freestanding sculpture on the ground. What I came up with was a generative piece of art titled “Fibrous Connection.” First, I created 27 unique structures using the woodblocks and put them all in a bucket. Then, I laid out a boundary with masking tape on the floor. Finally, with a roll of black string and scissors, I cut pieces of string around three to four feet in length. The instructions I gave my classmates were simple: you can place two wood structures wherever you want within the boundary and you have to connect two wood structures together with a piece of string. The results are documented in these pictures.
The final project was separated into two parts: The first part was dedicated to teaching ourselves an art form we had never learned before. Once we chose our craft, we were tasked with creating a handout detailing the history of it and an instructional section. I decided to go with origami. The second part was using our newfound knowledge to create an art piece based on one of three prompts, of which I chose “ceremony.” My project is a video that talks about the rhythm of daily life. Origami parallels how we create “steps” in our routine that eventually become second nature. It can be easy to fall into patterns, but sometimes that can create a false sense of comfort and make us disinterested in change. My goal was to point out the “steps” that I found in my own life and make the viewer more conscious of their personal routines.
