kai arnone's art blog

My and @weddingsonmonday’s responses to the “Self Shape” Art Assignment*. This was a super fun idea to explore and we both had a lot of fun drawing different iterations of our shape before settling on the current designs. It was also really great talking with each other about our thought processes and the symbolism/ideas we incorporated. I highly recommend this assignment for other people to try!

For me, this was a really cool challenge to try to represent myself in a single shape or symbol, while trying to stay away from simple visual signifiers. I found myself experimenting with more abstract ways of representing qualities I associate with myself and then distorting those even further to the point where they lost most immediate connections to realism or a common symbology. Of the many self shapes I drew, the one I’ve posted here is by no means the final, definitive version. Working on designing my shape, I developed lots of different versions that felt very meaningful and personal. I think this speaks to the larger effect of this assignment (at least for me) as an act of continuous self definition that serves as a metaphor for the struggle to articulate identities in our lives; employing or rejecting existing symbol systems, and continually building, destroying, and recombining different parts to attempt to form a unified whole. The fact that I felt personally invested in many of my shapes additionally made me think (probably p obviously) about how reduction is an inherent part of creating a symbol– in order to make a clean, simple, easily readable design, a lot is left out.