Final Project

"Pillow"

Leather, Main art t-shirt (as stuffing), Sticky Rice t-shirt (as stuffing), two ex-boyfriends t-shirts (as stuffing), wood pedestal and frame, hardware

"Personal Aesthetics"

Two frames, two digital photographs, photograph from 7 years ago, screen-printed self-portrait with ground pavement from 1000 W. Broad St., wood from sugar printing machine, hand sewn cloth from thrift stores, spray paint, hardware

"It's Called Working"

Worn aprons from Sticky Rice, remnants of meals made for customers over the past six weeks, approximately fifty lbs hand colored sugar, clear vinyl, thread, rope, wood, and hardware

I am very happy with the way these three small works turned out.  They are much more autobiographical than any of my previous works.  In thinking about identity, I knew that I alone experience my identity, and everyone else experiences their own.  In trying to make work to express issues surrounding identity or my experience with identity, there would be a good chance of isolating the viewer or creating work that is overly prescriptive to how the viewer should think when looking at the work.  So I decided to go about creating the work in a way that just showed them how I experience identity and places where the idea of identity is problematic.  

I also try to continue working with some of the interests I have in staging and framing, because I felt that it related to identity well.  How our identities are the frames that we put around ourselves whether its conscious or subconscious really interests me.  Also how our past becomes the framework for our future, and how memory sit in this framed segment of what is remember of an experience and what is not.  The aprons that I wear at work seem to strangely record a past of making, but then the aprons get turned in washed and returned to be worn by a fellow workers in the food industry. It’s as if this identity that I put on, that simultaneously keeps me or the person under the apron untarnished, is traded among the group.  But also this part of my identity as food preparer is just a trait and in some ways is not my identity.  I have not always worked in this way, but it would be unclear and incorrect to say that it is a personality trait.  The history of the clothing with function of the clothing interested me, as well as the transient nature of this part of my life that I identify as something I do.     

The theatre set like laundry line worked really well; in that the viewers understood it.  It was a reference to the stage with out being a stage.  The 3deminsional frame on the "Pillow" piece also was apparent as a framing apparatus to the viewers.  I really like this new way of thinking about working; giving the viewer something not trying to tell them something.  Its a very slight variation I suppose, and I foresee it being problematic when the dealing with less autobiographical subject matter. But for now I like the idea.