Devil’s Advocate: A Snapshot of America
September 2020
As I’m sure many of you are aware, our country is divided. The canyon of separation between the two parties’ ideologies, caused by the repeated political earthquakes over the past few decades. Has resulted in Americans finding themselves swallowed up by this cavern. Forced to climb the wall to whatever party that claims they can help regardless of the party policy, agenda, and intention.
This semester I hope to challenge that and ask the interpreter of my work to reflect on their own beliefs and held basis, as well as that of their opposition. In doing so I hope to chip away at the paint, by repeatedly showing the polarity of the country, and expose the rough exterior of a subconscious America. A country operating on fear, reflex, and ridicule of the opposition.
My interest in the subconscious stems from the surrealist movement and their ideas around automatism. Now in hindsight, this movement has played a critical role in my development as an artist having been unknowingly exposed to the ideology in art classes growing up. However, automatism plays a crucial role in overcoming creative hurdles even to this day. This concept is what lead me to fill notebooks and sketchbooks alike with doodles, drawings, and dribble all penned with the confidence of an ignorant hand. Through this project, I hope to regain that confidence from the educated perceptive knowing oceans more now than I did at the time.
Moving forward concerning the surrealist movement I did come across some tools from their bag of tricks; I would like further to employ in my arsenal of design solutions outagraph and collage. I have heard about the latter, I would like to use of more it, with text. However, outagraph was a new concept to me and I would like to explore the implications it has for the relationship between photographic media and text.
Now for the project, I intend to produce a book that covers hot-blooded topics, abortion for example. My current approach is to juxtapose the opposing arguments across a spread with the left and right pages arguing for their corresponding place on the political canyon. You may now be wondering why I would want to make a book that any given interpreter is guaranteed to take issue with half of the content. To that, I say good question my reasoning for this project currently referred to as Devil’s Advocate: A Snapshot of America is I want to force the interpreter of my work to experience their views sympetalous to that of their opposition. My goal in doing this is I want the interpreter to confront their previously held beliefs. I also hope that the experience of the work can start to kindle an understanding of the opposition. In a perfect world, although we don’t live in one, that understanding could blossom into feelings of empathy. This understanding and empathy could help erode the plateaued cliffs of our political canyon and fill it in giving America access to bipartisan accomplishments.
The White Rabbit Experiments
May 2020
Throughout my time spent at Montserrat, I have developed a contemporary and minimalist design language. This has lead my practice to focus on exploring three critical, in my opinion, areas of design: Typography, Application of Color, and Use of Grid. This gives my work a tendency to have a clean, neat, and structured appearance. This can be attributed to inspiration from the modernist and minimalist movements. In addition, my design occasionally refects influence from the surrealist and psychedelic movements of the last century. Over the course of the semester, I would like to practice assimilating the latter two influences into my design language more homogeneously.
For my thesis project l want to continue to explore my three core focuses, however, as I eluded to earlier I would like to incorporate a more surrealist methodology to my application of type and color. My reasoning for this is, I have noticed an influx of surrealist influence in the social culture of today. Personally, I think this has to do with the evolution of meme culture and it's influence on the modern social context.
I plan to explore these ideas throughout a series of typographic works based on excerpts and quotes from the writings of Lewis Carroll currently referred to as The White Rabbit Experiments. These typographic works would then be possibly used in applications including but not limited to promotional collateral, limited edition screenprints, laser prints, and of course, a book encapsulating the entirety of the project.
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