The interminable burden of summer classes has kept me from 1)finishing anything and 2)posting anything. I almost feel like I get more done during the school year, not to say that the delicious prospect of early graduation isn't just that or that the classes weren't a choice and pretty awesome unto themselves. This is an old image I made, freshman year, collage on a piece of cardboard with gel medium and ink, I believe.
Also, This has been my main focus recently, writing about and uploading portions of my found photo collection as the ongoing final project for an art history class I'm taking.
I think I'm going to call this series "who shot MLK J.R.?"
I should take photos of these as opposed to scanning them. The first one is about 11"X20" (maybe longer) the scan is a little green. I used black ink on all of these. The second is the same image on a shorter, white piece of paper, and the third is about 11"X17" as well.
I listened to MLK's last speech, in which he talks about his own death, and thought it was moving. The shape in the first one reminds me of a monument, the other un-posted images I'm working on have the same solid cut out shape feel to them.
When my family moved from Chicago to Indiana my junior year of highschool we were all confused about why we didn't have school off on MLK day because it was standard in every Chicago school I'd gone to. My mother asked the office at school and they explained that the reason we didn't have the day off was because there were no black people there.
Another thing I'm trying to think about with these lithographs, and anything else I like to make, is the use of pop images. I think there's something at once sort of important and pathetic about my interpretation of Martin Luther King as this sort of image. Images like these and even things like the cut out chests I posted earlier are images that my world is inundated with. Neon, glitter, googly eyes, chests, and the news don't seem like fine art subjects but the nature of collage is the nature of art. Collage is a method of processing the world around you using the actual world around you as your medium.
I think that's pretty sweet, but, it can be intimidating to begin to think and act on that idea. I wonder how respectful or sophisticated it is and whether with all the baggage of the images they're composed of if the pieces are still readable and accessible.
And, as a side note, the title of this post is from the song "Indiana wants me" by R. Dean Taylor. I misheard some of the other lyrics as:
Chicago looked very beautiful from the bus this morning. I woke up for a minute to see the skyline in such subdued pink, grey, and blue. No black and grey sky. I wasn't unhappy to be arriving.
My sister made the sailboat collage, and I made the lady one and the painting (I did it with wet pastel chalk). I was here for her birthday party. It was pretty fun. I like how she matched the horizon lines and used an ugly picture of a clown. I never would have done that. She might be a genius.
