Capstone: Final Summary

There are so many things that go on within each of our minds, and I find I have so many things within my own that I have yet to explore. I’m interested in body image, sexuality and identity, the ideals of childhood, and the re-examination of mundane objects. Because of my struggles with body image and eating disorders, I had always avoided depicting the body, especially the female form and instead focused on material objects. Within the last year, I've come to appreciate the value of the body and how it can express more things besides the physical form we see. The body can mean vulnerability, insecurity, power, and desire, which I want to continue to explore as I work through my own mental blocks. Similarly, I’ve also begun experimenting with my expression of my sexualitty and gender identity, what that means to me, and how I choose to portray that. I’m finding stability and beauty in expressing the hidden parts of myself through mediums such as printmaking, drawing, photography and video, where I can utilize layers to reflect the complexities I feel regarding my upbringing and internal conflicts.

I tend to frequent a hand-drawn style when portraying things that I identify as traits of childhood, the pure ideals that only a child can truly feel because they’re not yet corrupted by all the negative influences and pressures that we face every day. I struggle to remember parts of my childhood, so I have a fascination with imagining the feelings that I might’ve felt, the way I may have seen the world, and how I can portray that in a reflective and contemplative way that shows that feeling of loss. In the spirit of childish exploration, I think there’s also a fascinating phenomenon in the age of technology and the overlooked nature of mundane objects. There are so many things that we use, walk by, and overlook every day because we take their existence for granted, but what happens when we stop to really look at them, what happens when we change their context, their appearance, their use?

I am currently working on expressing gender, sexuality, and data in unique ways through printmaking by exploring my relationship to iconic imagery, color, and material to create a new form of expression.

Unidentify Unity

Identity is something that is central to our lives as humans, and yet will take us our entire lifetimes to figure out, and maybe not even then. It can be especially difficult for those whose identity falls into marginalized and minority communities including LGBTQIA+, poverty, people of color, and intersectional identity. In Unidentify Unity, the experiences of those who have intersectional identity are investigated, particularly looking at the queer experience. Several people were interviewed who are members of several minority communities in an effort to understand their stories, experiences, and to retell them through an abstract video documentary and individual screen prints. Every story featured unique colors and imagery that matches the stories told by the individual to represent their experience in an image, as well as feature indirect representative imagery that the artist associated with specific themes discussed in the interviews. The expectations around coming out, perceptions of society, and how these judgements affect their abilities to exist in their identities.

The individualized prints feature multiple data visualizations of that person’s brain wave, heart rate, and oxygen level data that was monitored during the interview, and used to situate the print within the context of the person, and how their thoughts, feelings, and emotions were affected. This project serves as a study in how the traditional arts and data can be used to create artistic representations that are informative and artistically expressive.