Lately, most of my studio time has spent mostly sitting, staring and thinking...little time creating. But at least if i'm thinking, i can write some of the thoughts...
Urban Poetry. A title or phrase i've been pondering. It conveys my feelings towards urban environments as well some of the art found in those environments. It begins to give some structure to the art i'm looking at and what i'm trying to create while still giving some room to play around with specific ideas and themes. Unfortunately, the specific ideas are hard to organize so I think staying general with my thesis paper will be best as I continue to experiment with the work. Being too general isn't good either but calling the work Urban Poetry narrows it just enough.
of course, using the word Urban suggest the presence of the city so the work either has to have visual elements of city life or has to actually appear somewhere in the city... so do i need to spend more time in the studio or in the streets? The fact that graffiti is technically illegal causes some hesitation. also, writing on a public blog about what I may or may not do in the streets is probably not a smart way to not get in trouble... however, street art is losing a lot of its stigmas and becoming a more accepted art genre and most of the artists involved got so big from posting their work online...
But then that's got me thinking... if street art is becoming more mainstream, does that mean its losing its "cool" factor? if the rebellious undertones from which it started are now a celebrated as a standard, is it time for a new wave of rebellion? the pattern goes: rebels, avant garde, mainstream, commodity. Is there a way of keeping it new and fresh to hold of the final stage? Is there a way to avoid that stage and make a new pattern? or is it just time to restart the cycle with something completely new?
Given that I have no idea how to restart a new cycle, for the moment I think i'll stick it out and try to keep the current one fresh with my own perspectives. ...which are...umm... yeah...
i'm taking a look around my studio... I have my city grids...that didn't turn out quite like i had hoped but i still think there might be a way of using them somehow... Another grid pattern is of the post-it drawings. Grids...a way of my mind creating structure and order in an otherwise chaotic brain? maybe. Back to the post-its... the ones on my wall are portraits..of me, family and friends. People. Simple sketches made from candid photos. I want to do something with them but they are kind of perfect on their own.
I have a couple drawings of dead birds and "dead" bikes. Definitely some mortality symbols. Which make a connection to the memorial pieces i've been trying to do for my mom. So... memorial. mortality. ephemeral. temporary. Connects to street art really well and the memorial sites. I kinda want to make huge memorial pieces about my mom... might be a somewhat self serving desire to see her face still in the world but whatever. I could use some of the old pictures I have of her when she was younger, and the ones with me and my family... I envision a wheat paste print with maybe some other collaged images and symbols having to do with my mom, mortality and transcendence. But need to be careful not to ripoff the style of Swoon. But I'd say she's a big inspiration and most likely a person of note for my thesis paper.
I could also apply this idea or aesthetic to the images of people from the post-its. It wouldn't really be a memorial images then. But i still think i could get some fun collages from combining some of the images.
I also still have notes that I've collected from the street that I've tried to work with before. I still want to play with them. The note that I am really drawn to is the one that starts out "You keep me a rebel" the rest of it is ok, kind of a silly girls love poem, but that first line hits me. So i'm gonna steal it and use it somehow. Going back to Urban Poetry. and maybe this is where I can connect images and text. Maybe come up with more lines that have a similar feel. Make my own love letters to the city, people, my mom.
A more random thought I've had is incorporating video. Some people really liked the wave video I did after Ireland. I liked how it turned out but it was a pain to edit. Still, I've had thoughts of working with it again. I've taken a couple short videos while riding public transportation. It started as a quick way to capture images of the city and this idea of moving through the city but I need to develop the concepts behind it to know what i'm trying to say with it to know how to edit it. But it could be interesting to play with projecting video over the other images. Don't know if this is trying to force a connection to my other ideas.
I also have been thinking what I want to see for the final show and I have this idea of building a wall that I can cover as if it were an outside wall. and then I don't have to worry about destroying a gallery wall. Plus if i do want to have video, I could make a fixture in which to mount a video display. Or instead of a wall, I could build a shed-like structure... this could all be an influence of watching too much DIY network and getting an itch to build something. But it could be fun to live in the structure those last few days of the semester and make art all over it... CRAZY! but fun.
I also want to make an interactive element... kinda like with my undergrad thesis show... but not sure what... that'll have to come later.
And then there's always unicorns and dinosaurs...
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