Final Project Reflection

I was a little bummed I had to rush through my presentation of my final project and wish I could have had more time to present. Also, so many people had left by the time I presented mine that not only did I have to rush through explaining my project, but by the time I was done there wasn't any time for feedback. I was pretty happy with the way my alternative map came out aesthetically. It definitely rendered the look I was going for but wish I had more time to sort out the different meridians so that they led to my three spots (where my dogs live most the time and go to the bathroom) that corresponded with the part of the body affected by that meridian. I tried doing this with a few of them but I think I could have done a more thorough organization of them if I had more time for this project. I wish I could have had more feedback because I would love to know what things really worked and what parts I could improve in this piece. If I ever have time I would love to explore this project again and expand on this meridian concept of chinese medicine in correspondence with my daily paths with my dogs.

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Here is a summary of a project I completed earlier in the semester, check out my website to see the rest of it!

For this project I chose to use an image of the town (Hightstown, NJ) I went to boarding school in. I wanted to dramaticisize the landscape and the emotions 

this place held for me while I attended this school. The landscape is flat and sunny where we as students w

ere supposed to stay symbolizing the safeness bubble we were restrained to. As you move further away from campus toward this menacing cave/mountain landscape, this is symbolizing the fear and risks we all took when moving towards this monstrous outside world. See, we were supposed to stay on campus unless we had permission from our parents that we were allowed to leave. The school was in the middle of a town with a large lake. My boarding school was on one side of the lake while the rest of the world was on the other. The sunny, but rocky landscape that is thriving with vegetation is my campus while the cold, icy mountain range across the lake represents the town students (like me) often snuck off into. I had many friends kicked out of school for being found partaking in illegal activities and so the shadowed landscapes represents this darkness and sadness associated with this mysterious place across the lake. I got in trouble numerous times for being found in town when I wasn't supposed to but it was too hard to resist. Everyone knew they couldn't go over there but the mystery of the life bustling around there was too much to resist. My images mainly focus from the viewpoint of looking at this intimidating landscape because I felt like most of my time I spent looking out at this other world and very little time on the other side looking back.

Final Map Project: Work In Progress

As I am finishing up working on my final project, I thought I should introduce some of the ideas I've been putting together to see if they actually make sense in the big picture! I have looked at a few artists who have used maps as inspiration for their artwork (2 of them I mention below) and really took pieces of ideas from each of them to create my final map of Saint Mary's. I was very interested in using paths as a narration of my Saint Mary's College experience with a dog. Sophomore year I moved off campus and rescued a black lab mix puppy from the local animal shelter. My experience of college without a dog and then with a dog is really drastically different and so I wanted to somehow represent this new life I sort of came into when I got Lilah. 

I was pretty stressed out Freshman year and homesick (I never went home bc I live in NJ and had no car). I had some fun but for the most part  I was pretty sad and lonely Freshman year of college. In October of Sophomore year, I got Lilah at 3 months old and from then on I've had the best college experience. I was always running around trying to find people to watch her when I was in class, starting to train her in my free time, going for walks with her when I needed to relax, and cuddled with her when I was lonely. I loved coming home to her because she was always so happy to see me and I knew she depended on me and trusted me. She was like my security blanket and she never failed to make me smile and ease my stress.

I wanted to take this concept of feeling happy and stress free and relate it to acupuncture, something I have recently gotten really into. The different body meridians that energy flows through captivates me. It boggles my mind how just pressure on certain tiny points along these meridians releases an array of positive feelings and energy. This same type of a energy and feelings I get through acupuncture are what I feel like my college experience has been like with Lilah. I decided to use the 12 main meridians as pathways for representing the paths her and I travel on daily, and numerous times a day. We have gotten to know the roads and trails around her pretty well. For places that we spend the most idol time (at home and where she likes to go to the bathroom) I use Chinese symbols that display a movie of what that spot looks like from Lilah's point of view. I decided I wanted this map to look like a notebook or journal where I write down important places and information as I go along learning. 

This project is almost done and I am still working out the kinks of this idea but this is the general and summarized version of what I have been doing!

Artist: Alex Perry

Artist Alex Perry is another artist I found who explores maps through artwork. This particular piece entitled, Weather Fronts, was displayed in the North House Gallery in London along with other artists with the same inspiration in common; maps. This piece by Perry explores the concept of map making through weather patterns. Perry uses screen printing, applique, and machine embroidery in her work. In this piece in particular Perry has screen printed an aerial image of a location. She then uses different embroideries on top of this image to display the particular weather patterns associated with this piece.

I really liked this piece because you can see the artists hand in the work. Whether Perry used a machine to embroider the images on this or not, the artwork looks very home made. Perry's style of map making sort of resembles a child's view of a map in the simplistic shapes and primary color palette however, a deeper meaning is embedded beneath this simple surface. I think this makes an interesting contrast. As I work on my final map project I realize that I am very interested in using paths to illustrate a narration of some sort. Perry's Weather Fronts may not be about narration but the type of mark making the embroidered patterns make insinuates some sort of narration to me that I want to follow. Are these weather patterns ominous? Do they represent calm weather? The fact that I do not know what these patterns mean generates a lot of curiosity about this piece for me. 

This piece really inspires me to think about different ways of representing paths and I realize I definitely want to include paths in my project that tell a narration without the viewer necessarily knowing what this story is through the representative lines. I want them to explore my piece and try to work through the images I present to them to come up with a conclusion.

Artist: Shauna McMullan

After searching online for different sources to use for my map project, I stumbled across a bunch of artists or both make their own maps for artistic purposes, but also use maps for inspiration and material in their artwork. Shauna McMullan is the creator of the artwork pictured here. It is called Dislocations and is an installation piece McMullan created using maps that have a personal meaning to her. Finding road maps of cities and "topography of metropolitan centres", she uses these maps as materials that she physically manipulates through cutting them up, rearranging them, and hollowing them out. These maps she has collected of four places in particular. These are places McMullan has lived and include Ireland, Mainland Britain, France, and the USA. The mutilated maps are suspended by glass rods giving them a transparent and opaque visual appearance. 

What first drew me to this piece of work were its visual qualities. The lines, shapes, and shadows this piece creates is extremely captivating and I found it to be mysterious, pushing me to figure out what it was all about. As I read about McMullan's process in creating this piece of work, I became even more attracted to it. She focuses on one thing in particular, places she has lived, and begins pulling these places apart, putting them together, and forcing them to be something together they never would have been. McMullan's fresh take on map making is inspirational and I hope to use some of her ideas as sources for coming up with my own ideas for this project. 

Reading/Listening Response to "Mapping"

When I think of a map I immediately think of a road map...probably the majority of people do too but there are more types of maps out there then I could ever imagine and that I even fail to notice each day. After listening to the Chicago Radio broadcast on "Mapping", I realized there is a whole world of maps out there I have yet to discover. In this broadcast they introduce the topic  of maps by describing how, every year, a group of people go out in NYC and make a map of all the cracks in the side walks in all 5 boroughs. When I heard this it blew my mind. I'm an hour train ride fro the city and go there quite often when I'm home and even worked in the city last summer. I know the city pretty well and thinking about all the side walks that stretch from the Lower West side to the Upper East side, there must be over a million just in one borough. It wasn't just the amount of sidewalks that blew my mind, but also the idea of making a map of all the cracks in the sidewalk.

 When I walk on a sidewalk, especially in the city, I'm not paying any attention to whether there are cracks on the sidewalk but I'm focused on getting to where I need to go and not getting run over. Making a map of all the cracks in a sidewalk not only makes a very detailed map but, artistically speaking, it creates a strong surface geometry filled with lines and shapes. One of my first thoughts (after I got over what a ridiculous task this was), was how I would love to see one of these maps. After looking at Denis Wood's illustrations of maps, I only felt more excited by what I saw. It was not only a map but it was aesthetically pleasing, captivating, and mysterious all at once. As I listened on about 5 different artists who map the world through the different senses, I really started thinking hard about making maps and how they are not only informational, but artistic.

According to this broadcast, the heart of map making is found by ignoring everything else but one thing. Maps "focus out the chaos in the world by focusing on one thing"; they eliminates all the distractions but that one place, one object, or one thing. I had actually never thought about maps in this way. Maps not only focus on one thing, but they take this thing and dissect it till every part of it is revealed. By focusing on only one thing in maps, it really allows the maker to understand this thing and explain it to his/her audience through different visual cues. 

Taking the information I gained from this reading/listening experience as well as the visual experience I got from Denis Wood's maps, I really understand maps and their context as well as the process that is behind their creation. I think this knowledge will help me in creating my own map for the Alternative Map of St. Mary's project and I hope that I really explore different ways to explore mapping as a whole.

Artist: Anne-Marie Schleiner, Joan Leandre, and Brody Condon

I have decided for this artist exploration I would pick a piece of work I really do not like at all. This is what I came up with and I have to say, even thought I have stared at if for a good amount of time, I am really not liking it anymore then I did when I first saw it. This piece entitled Velvet Strike just seems completely hodgepodge. It looks like the artists just took screen shots from a video game and inserted them into an unexciting environment. The images are unexciting and don't seem to have any real purpose in the piece as a whole. There is nothing visually exciting about this piece and it looks as if I child took a stick book and just covered an advertisement in stickers of fire flames. This is how I feel about this piece but this is what the artists had in mind: basically the artists were inspired by both the computer game Counterstrike and the events of September 11th. Artistically exploring the phenomenon of both of these, they developed an interactive site where their viewer could physically insert "graffiti-like" military images from world events into the virtual space of Counterstrike. 

I understand the artist's intentions and inspirations behind this piece I just don't think that it was nearly as successful as it could have been. Counterstrike is a very interesting game that involves a lot of military issues. September 11th is also, obviously, an extremely issue-filled historical event where tons of artistic inspiration has been derived. I think the artists intentions to converge these two concepts into a piece their audience could interact with was a good idea, just not executed very well. There are not many visually pleasing characteristics involved in this piece of work despite the heavy content issues involved in it's creation. I think the artists could have a found a much better way to integrate these two ideas and create a piece of work that did not look so juvenile.