Unit 4: Final Project (Lil Reds)

For my final project, I wanted to explore girls' experiences walking alone at night on campus as a sort of modern-day parallel to Little Red Riding Hood. This ties in with my earlier work associated with different fairy tales and female experiences. Night time is important for the young. I've always sensed a change in energy at night; things can become more ominous or more exciting, depending on my mood. On campus, I tend to be ambivalent about walking around by myself after dark. My parents get nervous about it (as I'm sure other parents do). There's a constant tension, I feel, for women who want to walk alone, between feeling apprehensive and wanting to feel brave and confident about it. 

I wanted to see how other girls felt about this often necessary task, so I asked several girls I knew if they would take a video of themselves on their phones while walking somewhere at night. I asked them to talk about their surroundings and how they felt. Some of them seemed unruffled: "I'm walking fast because it's cold," my friend Laurel explains. Other women felt less comfortable. "I usually like riding my bike, that way I can be the one going fast," Rachel explains. 

For the installation, I painted two murals with different shades of green to symbolize a forest. A third board I covered in floral sheets and projected the video onto it. The presentation did not come together the way I'd hoped-I wanted to add in some industrial element like the blue safety light boxes or the buzzing street lamps, but the project didn't evolve to that stage yet, unfortunately. The video also could have used some editing, as some of the audio and some of the clips' resolution are poor-quality. 

Although it didn't come out the way I expected, I still consider "Lil Reds" a success in that it has inspired me to explore new media and new ways of connecting and growing my interest in both fairy tales and femininity.  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdgNxtCpz9Q 

Here are some of the things that inspired me while working on "Lil Reds:"

David Kaplan's 1997 short film, "Little Red Riding Hood" subverts the tale of an innocent girl pursued by a conniving wolf. 

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Kazuko Nomoto

The White Stripes' video for "Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground"

Sara Fanelli's collages

I continue to be inspired by Angela Carter's brilliant book of fairytale re-tellings, The Bloody Chamber. For this particular project, I looked at two stories about wolves- "The Company of Wolves" and "Wolf-Alice," both which depict female protagonists as capable of being as feral, disturbing, and complex as the proverbial wolf. I also looked at Carter's "The Erl-King" for her beautiful prose and depiction of another young girl lured into a dangerous tryst, this time with an elf-king who turns his conquests into birds. 

I looked for different poems and stories that referenced night or forests or both. 

Here are some quotes I thought of while brainstorming: 

"I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root: It is what you fear.

I do not fear it: I have been there.”

(Sylvia Plath, "Elm") 

"I am inhabited by a cry. 

Nightly it flaps out

Looking, with its hooks, for something to love." 

(Plath, "Elm") 

"Awake in a giant night

Is where I am

              There is a river where my soul, 

Hungry as a horse drinks beside me." 

(Anne Waldman, "Giant Night") 

"Though I was too dumb to make sense/I felt her essence/the lonely doll/and turned to leave this pretense/for night, black and immense/the lonely doll" 

(Cass McCombs song, "The Lonely Doll") 

Finally, I was inspired by the language in Neil Fischer's [As if the moon could haul through you], Ron De Maris' "A Cave of Angelfish Huddle Against the Moon", and Henry David Thoreau's "The moon now rises to her absolute rule". 

Unit 3: Psychogeography

For this project, I drew most of my inspiration from The Ice Palace, a coming-of-age novel by acclaimed Norwegian writer Tarjei Vesaas. The narrative follows two 11-year-old girls in rural Norway. Siss is popular and outgoing; Unn, who is new to the school, is quiet and shy. The story tells of how the two girls meet and form an intimate bond that is quickly shattered when Unn goes missing on the day they were supposed to meet at the frozen waterfall near their village. I wanted to convey the emotional and physical geography of the book. The setting is presumably the early 60s (the book was published in 1963) and it addresses themes such as femininity, close female friendships, self-perception, fear, self-loathing, popularity, and other issues that are still relevant and provocative today. My main inspiration came from a quote I remembered from the book. The two girls meet at Unn's house, where they undress and have this strange, ambiguous bonding moment:

"Four eyes full of gleams and radiance beneath their lashes, filling the looking glass. Questions shooting out and then hiding again. I don’t know: gleams and radiance, gleaming from you to me, from me to you, and from me to you alone – into the mirror and out again, and never an answer about what this is, never an explanation. Those pouting red lips of yours, no, they’re mine, how alike! Hair done in the same way, and gleams and radiance. It’s ourselves! We can do nothing about it, it’s as if it comes from another world. The picture begins to waver, flows out to the edges, collects itself, no it doesn’t. It’s a mouth smiling. A mouth from another world. No it isn’t a mouth, it isn’t a smile, nobody knows what it is – it’s only eyelashes open wide above gleams and radiance."


The title of my project, "Gleams and Radiance," is taken from this quote- I constructed a pup tent out of strips of wood molding, a dowel, bedsheets, and a shower curtain. A small hideout, a little escape from the external world seemed the best way to express both intimacy and isolation from the rest of the world. I used items like small, round adhesive mirrors, silver foil paper, and other, reflective objects so that viewers could crawl into the tent and either sit down or lie down and see fragments of themselves. You can look up at yourself and just see a mouth or an eye or hair, without seeing the rest of yourself. In conjunction with the strangeness of the mirrors and reflective surfaces, I chose white floral fabric because it evoked a simpler, sweeter, Old World aesthetic which I think the girls in the story would've had. This is a time way before everything was covered in Hello Kitty and Disney Princesses.

Here are some images that inspired me during this project:

Unknown

Frieke Janssens

See Creatures

Balmain

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dezeen.com

Ministyle Blog

Bing

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Isabelle Arsenault

Ebay

National Gallery Assignment: Kerry James Marshall

While walking around the Contemporary wing at the National Gallery, I came across the Kerry James Marshall exhibit in the Tower. I was struck by the scale and vividness of Marshall’s paintings, as well as the subject matter, which dealt with issues of slavery and racism in America. Aesthetically, Marshall really appealed to my love of collage. The way that he layers paint, adds in different and I found his use of historical facts to create a narrative arc within his paintings. In fact, I tend to struggle with artworks that do not have a sense of narrative within them. I think it’s the English major in me.

Marshall has been dubbed one of the most important painters of his generation. His paintings in this showing depict African Americans in different stages of struggle: from slaves crossing the Middle Passage to modern-day children still struggling to assimilate into white-washed housing developments.

            I chose Marshall’s painting “Our Town” (1995). I was taken in by the dichotomy of order and chaos in the composition, which depicts two black children and a dog leaving a clean, attractive development. The work, with the cheery red and white letters spelling out “Our Town” at the top, looks like a mural one might see on the side of a building or school to boost morale, were it not for the streaks of paint obscuring several sections of it. There is a vandalized quality to the painting – some of the paint in the letters looks worn away, a splotch of black paint covers the bright green grass, pieces of white paper add to a collaged, haphazard feeling.

            Marshall draws upon sociology, history, and literature in this work. Themes of race and class are inherent- all of the figures are black - even the dog has black spots. The young girl is wearing what appears to be a school uniform, perhaps signifying her enrollment in a private or parochial school. A boy rides a glossy new bike with streamers and a woman stands outside the biggest of the houses, waving at the children. Is she waving them back to the house or waving goodbye? The woman wears an apron, but it’s unclear if she’s the homeowner or the housekeeper. These questions emphasize the sociological underpinnings seen in all of Marshall’s work. The title comes from the 1938 play by Thornton Wilder, which chronicles the lives of a group of townspeople in the fictional town of Grover’s Corners between the years of 1901-1913. The play ends on a decidedly dour note, questioning the point of existence and the idea of eternity. With this knowledge in mind, Marshall’s work seems to lean toward satire, the children running out of the bright neighborhood to an unknown place, mirroring the play’s moving away from convention, towards existentialism and a sense of uncertainty.

            In my own work, I’m constantly trying to balance a cheery, brightly colored aesthetic with deeper, metaphorical, at times uncomfortable subject matter beneath it. Looking at other contemporary artists is always helpful because it gives me perspective on my own work and allows me to see how far I could stretch myself. Marshall’s work is inspiring to me because he’s successfully worked with difficult subject matter (racism, slavery, corruption) in a compelling way that informs the viewer without alienating him or her. My work most often deals with gender issues and the different patriarchal constraints put on women and girls in literature. Marshall’s work will be good to keep in mind as I continue to explore topics of oppression, freedom, femininity and alienation while trying to balance the dark with the light. 

"Our Town," 1995
Acrylic and collage on unstretched canvas, 100 x 124 inches

Unit 2: Reverse Engineering

The first part of this project was a struggle for me because I couldn't get the plastic dollhouses I needed right away. Then when I finally got them, I labored over how to reconstruct them after the dollhouses were disassembled. I had an idea of what I was trying to convey, I just didn't know how to convey it through sculpture. Talking with Prof. Harvey and pulling out some common themes in my work helped. I knew I wanted to make a piece that explored femininity through commercial excess, through stereotypes, and through my own (I like to think) brand of mysticism and dreamy otherworldliness.

 My work is heavily influenced by different narratives I read growing up, usually following a young female protagonist in an isolated setting like "The Lonely Doll"and "Princess Furball." I like making work that reminds people of something they've forgotten from their childhood and something they were daydreaming about yesterday at the same time, if that makes sense. I've titled my piece "The Sacred Heart of Girlhood" because within it, I'm exploring and critiquing gender constructs (like the excess amount of pink "girl" toys, the emphasis placed on beauty and consumerism to young girls) while simultaneously embracing the pleasing physical appearance of pretty objects arranged in a purposeful way. I wanted to create something reminiscent of a shrine because I find the kitschiness of iconography an interesting combination of tacky and beautiful, cliche and unique. In the center window of the plastic castle I have mounted on the wall, there is a picture of St. Jane Frances de Chantal, the patron saint of forgotten people and widows. St. Jane is flanked by two symbols she's often depicted with: the Immaculate Heart of Mary (right) and the Sacred Heart of Jesus (left). The title is a play on words.

Here is my first attempt at the reverse engineering project- an (too) obvious critique of modern beauty standards/female sexual objectification.

I was going to make a shadowbox of sorts out of this old Polly Pocket house but I didn't like how it turned out so I started over.

These are some close-ups of the finished installation I took with my iPhone:

Lastly, here are some images that inspired me during this project: 

Images from Google Images

Julia Fullerton-Batten

Australian artists Pip and Pop

Artist Lucilux's installation, 'Grandma's Den'

Laurie Beth Zuckerman's altars

Pinterest

Altar for Mary

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