Orange You Glad We Have A Three-Day Weekend?

Hi all! This weekend, I got to go home to Chicago for the weekend! I went there to pick up my cat from home and fly him to Boston to have him live here, and it was great to have a couple days to relax at home. After that though, the week definitely picked up speed and I’ve been playing a lot of catch up. We had our last session of a four session painting on Monday, so that painting is finished and we’ll start a new one next week. In Contemporary Trends, we’re in the middle of a two-week group project focused on altering a certain environment. The big deal this week was finishing up our Janus Project for Seminar!

I started out this project wanting to make 2 self portraits: one concerning the data (maps, ticket stubs, lists) from when I was abroad in Florence, and the other concerning the emotional side of my time there shown with journal entries and a map from my memory. I decided to go forward with the memory map idea from there. I made a few sketches of Florence from my memory with watercolor and ink, but I kept getting stuck. I switched over to something much more 3D- I started using thread and pins to make a map. A big memory trigger and symbol of my time in Florence is an orange: oranges in Italy are often a little red (like blood oranges) and amazingly delicious. I ate so many there that whenever I see an orange from now on, I will think of my time in Florence. I decided to take my 3D idea even further and extended my pins and threads onto the round surface of oranges! I took a bunch of oranges and sewed into the surface of them. Each orange, in my mind, is a different city I visited while abroad and the threads sewn into it are my memory of the streets and landmarks there. Then, after I placed these oranges/cities into a bowl, I connected different landmarks from different oranges to each other with pins and more thread. I am satisfied with the result and I think it accomplishes the project and gets my point across nicely. It feels great to have my first piece up in the Fine Arts Exhibition Hallway!

In the afternoon on Tuesday, our seminar class took a trip to the ICA! The new show up there right now is by Amy Sillman, and it was very interesting! Sillman had a large array of different types of works which she brings together with a series of similar questions and themes. Some of her pieces are huge abstract paintings and some are stop motion cartoons made on an iPad. I really enjoyed seeing the whole span of her work and was inspired by her variety and depth of skill in each area.