#postcritiqueresponse

I was pleasantly surprised when my fellow classmates laughed to certain parts of the audio that I recorded. I expressed during critique that I felt the visual component of my project wasn’t nearly as successful and the audio, and I think everyone agreed with me. The ideal situation would have been if I had a separate space to feed the cats that wasn’t near everyday human traffic, then the result I hoped for would have been more likely. But because I laid down the charcoal transfer right in front of my stove, it proved very difficult to not step on when cooking. I thought about possibilities in continuing a project like this, and my idea was to find other ritualistic things I do very commonly and record the audio over a span of time, and then compile all the audio together for one soundtrack. My idea for a potential next project is recording the audio of making my bed. I think the sound of fabric on fabric layered many times in audio could result in a very interesting sound outcome. 

I feel overall I elicited reactions that I intended for. However there were some emotional responses that didn’t align with my intent. I intended for a layered, quilt-like representation of my childhood that had a weird fun twist to it, too make it more interesting and bizarre. Though my childhood wasn’t bizarre, I felt that representing the images this way, I was able to erase the background and fill it in with the most important part of the photo; the cut-out portion of myself. Through filling the background with the image that I cut out, the viewer is able to get a sense of who I am in the setting of the photograph, however, they are unable to see it clearly as a normal photograph thus symbolizing the complexity of growing up. On the emotion sheets, there were some emotions circled like: Hurt, Sadness, Irritation, Disgust and others that I didn’t intend for the viewer to translate. On the other hand, the majority of the responses were what I was intending for such as: Loving, Proud, and Friendly among others. I feel that this piece was successful in representing my personal history of identity that has translated to present. Furthermore, I think I’m going to be submitting this piece for my foundations review as it is more easily viewed in a digital format. 

Some constructive criticism for my project that I received was to perhaps have the images in a unifying manner such as majority in black and white. If I were to do this there’d be a clearer connection between the majority of the pictures and the one vibrant color print. Another critique I received is how the arrangement of images fit together as a whole on the wall. Because my wall space was limited, I was not able to arrange the images in the way I originally planned. The point was raised during critique that whenever hanging artwork in a gallery, planning of unexpected space is important, because the arrangement of artwork may not always be in the way the artist originally intended such as was my case. Through my improvised layout, one fellow student commented that ‘the wall space seemed to fit my project well’ without knowing I had wanted to arrange it differently initially. Sometimes perhaps a better arrangement comes about through improvising as well? Some skills that were strengthened during this project was my expanded knowledge of using photoshop. I was able to give the images a neat color affect through using different kind of overlaying transparencies in layers. Another way to unify the images further and is something I want to edit digitally, is unifying the colors more. If I were to keep them in color, there are a few that I’d want to adjust the color of to make the whole piece more cohesive, to translate to a chronology of sorts. I can see myself continuing this kind of project in different ways. In this particular series of images, I wanted to convey grief, anxiety, and sorrow. In another line I could highlight other emotions such as happiness, elation and joy, in another could be anger, frustration, confusion. I could in part make this a series of emotions displayed through body and color language. Overall I think this project came out pretty successful. One more thing I think I might consider in future sets, is displaying a language of system in the orientation of images. Perhaps even creating abstract shapes with the arrangement of images. 

Some of the suggestions I received for ways to improve the work included: change in scale, the addition of color, and the idea of creating a series of works in addition to this one. I think I will continue with creating a series of these works, and envision how the collection of all of the different concepts and social idioms portrayed in each additional piece would work together and create a level of artistic unity and harmony.