Spring, sort of..

fireworks at Cinderalla's castle!
fireworks at Cinderalla’s castle!

All we need for spring to start is for the weather to cooperate! Luckily, I had a week of warmth in Florida for spring break. A few of my friends and I went down to stay with my grandparents near Orlando. It was sunny and warm all week, and on one of the days we went to Disney World. We did what’s called the Disney Grand Slam, which is squeezing in all 4 theme parks into 1 day! Mission Accomplished; we got to Hollywood Studios by 9 am, then Animal Kingdom, then Epcot, then stayed at Magic Kingdom until it closed at 1 am!

They Are Hanging Out Without You
They Are Hanging Out Without You

Before spring break, we wrapped up our first seminar project. I’m really happy with how my final product turned out, and I’ve been getting a lot of good feedback! I knew that wanted to work with text, so I came up with a few possible phrases. The general feeling I was getting from brainstorming was that my phrases instilled a sense of self-consciousness in me, and when I showed them to other people they felt that way as well. I didn’t want the viewer to feel attacked or insulted, I wanted them to become suddenly introspective. Each person I showed my phrases to had a different experience or memory connected with them. I was originally going to paint theses phrases on large canvases, but when I discussed the idea of medium with my professor, mirrors came up. since looking into a mirror is looking at oneself and I wanted the viewer to mentally look at themselves. I thought about painting directly on a mirror, so that when the viewer read the phrase, their reflection would be partially obscured by the words. My professor then told me that in the case of most mirrors, it is a piece of glass with multiple layers of thin metal and paint on the back that can be scraped away. What I ended up doing was stenciling my phrase on the back of a large round mirror and scraping the mirror away where there were letters. This made it so that when the viewer looks into the mirror, they can only see themselves where the words are not, and they’re forced to read the words and in turn be introspective.

"This Is Not You", my mirror alongside some other art from the art show!
“This Is Not You”, my mirror alongside some other art from the art show!

Since this mirror was so large, I only had time to do one of the phrases that I came up with for this particular project- over 24 hours of scraping with an exacto-knife was needed for just that one mirror! This meant that I still had a couple of phrases that I wanted to put on mirrors. This worked out, because a friend of a friend who goes to Berklee College of Music had asked me if I wanted to put together a pop up art/music show at some point! We knew that we wanted to show our own work as well as some of my NESAD friends’ work, and include some of his friends’ music performance. We hosted the show at a friend’s apartment right before spring break and I think it was a big success! I had made flyers that I put up around NESAD, and that combined with all the different crowds mixed together got us an awesome turn out. It felt great to organize something on our own and put our own work out there instead of waiting for someone else to do so.

Audrey Goldstein with her show, Issues of Trust II
Audrey Goldstein with her show, Issues of Trust II

This week in in Seminar, we took a field trip to the south end galleries, specifically Gallery Kayafas where my professor Audrey Goldstein has a show up! We looked at her work and talked about her studio process and her physical process through each piece. It was great to have an inside scoop to a gallery show, especially to such an awesome show!

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