What feels like the end…even though I know it’s not.

Since I’m pretty much in love with my project, I want you to see a series of photographs taken by myself and Christopher Soo-Hoo. These photos show the process of folding, installing, and ultimately my final installation. Before I post them though, I have to give special thanks to Rosemary Nicholas, Christopher Soo-hoo, Jonathan Conti-Vock, Brian Rowe, and Jim Gangler for helping me make this project possible. I really couldn’t have done it without all of their help.

Well, here goes:

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my last studio project…

So I can’t believe this is it. It has been such a crazy semester, and I have been so busy! I don’t know how I found time to do everything. I feel so much better now that I have posted photos for my other projects and talked a little about what I’ve been doing in the Fall of 2011 for this Installation class. I wish I had time to get on here more regularly to talk about everything though. I guess it’s just weird for me to discuss/post my ideas online. Don’t get me wrong…I love sharing my work with other people, but I’d so much rather draw, take notes, and put things in my sketchbook and then share that with whoever is interested.

Anyway, I wanted to share a project that is very important to me. Not just because I have to, but really because I want to. The Installation class that took this semester has been a lot of fun, and this last project that I did really meant a lot to me because it was the last studio project that I’ll have in my undergraduate career. I’ll be teaching full-time next semester as a part of the certification program at UMBC, so I wanted to make this one count.

For this project, I wanted to create a piece that sparked a conversation amongst my viewers. I particularly wanted it to have a strong physical presence, and also speak a little bit about myself. This is what I came up with:

I designed a piece that would be installed in the stairwell of the Fine Arts building at UMBC. In my original idea, I had three sets of origami that would hang in between the floors: paper cranes, paper envelopes, and paper boats. The paper cranes represent all of the different feelings that I have had over the past five years as a student, mentor, and teacher. The paper envelopes represent the number of questions that I have had, and the paper boats represent the places that I see myself going over the next few years. My original idea though when I designed this was to have the feelings, questions, and ideas/places labeled underneath of each piece of origami. Some of the pieces would be left blank so that people could write their own feelings, thoughts, questions, or ideas, and some envelopes would be left open so that people could contribute to the piece.

Ultimately, due to over-folding an enormous amount of origami and underestimating the amount of time that my installation would take, I ended up modifying my piece. I still kept the cranes with feelings labeled underneath, and I kept the envelopes as well, but I didn’t have time to include the boats. Honestly, I feel really good that it turned out this way because the boats were something that I was struggling with. Not in terms of folding, but in terms of finding enough ideas/places to label each of the 150 boats that were folded.

I ended up leaving each of the envelopes open so that anyone could place their thoughts and ideas into a number of places. I was trying to create a conversation between myself and my viewers. In the morning after I finished installing, a lot of people stopped to add their own responses to my piece. It was so awesome to see

 

Photos of the Miniature Model!

Here are photos of the final product!

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Community

For my second installation project, I made a small model of a space on Nunnery Lane. The building that I chose has been on this street since the 1800s, and it sits on a beautiful property. Specifically for this project, I chose to update the space by adding elements that would invite the community to use the area. About fifteen years ago, there used to be a small children’s playground that occupied the space, but it was eventually torn down because it became an area that was used for selling drugs and other illegal activities.

In my miniature installation, I added a picnic table, gardens, benches, and a mural of the Nunnery Lane- Mount De Sales area on the basketball court. I wanted to make the place somewhere where all of the new families in the area can have fun, play games, learn a little history about the space, and enjoy each others company. I really had a lot of fun doing this project, and it was really neat to see how it turned out.

Take a look at the photo-montage that I made of the space. It’s pretty cool!

These are a few mid-construction photos that I took:

Building with the front part of the property

 

Basketball court mural

 

 

The Room

As promised, here are a few photos of the room installation.

Photo courtesy of Stephen Bradley.

Photo courtesy of Stephen Bradley

 

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Installation One

My original ideas for this installation were kind of all over the place. There is a lot of room on the sixth floor, so I had to really plan out how I was going to use the space. Ultimately, I found out that the best way for me to work was to bring allll of my materials and furniture to the building and work from there. It was easy to make the sketches, knowing that I had all of my materials at home, but it was difficult to finalize in drawings how I wanted the space to look. My last drawing was the closest to my actual final product. Looking back at my drawings really showed me how my ideas developed over time. I’m really glad that I took the time to do a lot of sketches because it helped me organize the space when it came down to the wire.

Here are a few quick sketches that I did when I was first planning for the project:

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Lovely photos and videos will be here shortly!

Installation One: My room in a public space…

I know it has been a while since my last update, but I’m back!

A glimpse of my room

So about a week ago, I had my first experience putting up an installation. This is the first project that I’ve completed where I utilized a space to showcase a little bit about my life, and how I felt growing up as a child. It was actually a lot of fun!

I set up my installation on the sixth floor of the Fine Arts building at UMBC on October 3, 2011. The space that I chose was fairly large and well lit by the lights on the ceiling and along the staircase. It took at least an hour to gather everything that I wanted to include in the installation and at least two hours to set everything up. I had so many different objects, artwork, and furniture to organize, so the majority of my time was spent arranging things.

My intention was to construct an intimate space that was reminiscent of my home. By bringing in furniture, crayons, books, candles, old sketchbooks, and other items that influenced my creative process as a child, I established a space that was very unique to me. I included a fan, lit candles, old artwork, a few posters, bean bags, and textured materials to create an environment that felt lived in, was inviting, warm, and comfortable. I specifically chose not to use the overhead lighting, or the entire space for my installation because I wanted my viewers to recognize that this was clearly a private place within a public location.

The response I received from my classmates and other viewers assured me that I accomplished what I set out to do. I felt like it was really successful =)

***Special thanks to Rosemary Nicholas, Catherine Voss, and Jonathan Conti-Vock for helping me make this project possible.

Photos and videos of the space coming soon!

Practice on Sunday, October 12th

(Sorry the photos are blue! The cell phone didn’t take them the way I thought it would)

This particular practice that I went to had a fairly small group of people. It was really easy to follow along with the instructions, and it was a great day to be practicing! When Neeta, Jon, Drew, and I arrived at the AVAM, there were only about twenty people there at most. Laura and Josh were very inviting and extremely nice. They went over all of the intructions step by step very clearly.

It was such a long walk up the hill! When we got there, Josh went over Intersection, which is the first part of the performance. There wasn’t a whole lot going on that day, but it was easy enough to get the jist of it. The next part that we practiced was walking down the hill in a line, and then crab walking in different directions halfway down the hill (they made it look so easy). My pants got so stained!!! It was a lot of fun though.

Then came Circling with tangents up and down the hill. IF we chose to, we could run up or down the hill very quickly and then return to walking in a large oblong circle in the performance space. The next part was disappearing onto the side of the hill out of view. After that we crawled from the right side of the hill onto the front, and then laid down wherever we pleased. It was really nice except for the fact that the ground was a little damp. Afterwards we practiced Couching and then the Portrait. The rest from there was just lining up, bowing, and then backing away.

There were minor changes with the live performance, but nothing to drastic. It was so different when all of the performers were up in the cafe. There were sooo many people crunched up into that little space, and we were all just waiting to unleash out to the hill. Josh talked to everyone just like he was talking to a group of 20 people, but of course he was a lot louder. I think that he should have made it a bit more clear that everyone should stay for the second performance, but at the same time I think the second performance was more successful than the first.  I think that after doing everything for the first time and getting the jitters out of the way really helped. Even though there were some really great things that came out of the first performance, the second one had some exciting unexpected changes with sound and more public interaction.

If I had to make one very minor criticism, it would be about the food. I was under the impression that there was going to be food for everyone up in the cafe, but there wasn’t : (  By the time I found out where the food was it was all gone!  Other wise, I thought everything was wonderful. I had such a great time just playing around and experiencing all of this. This was an amazing opportunity, and I’m really glad that I could be a part of it.

Photos from the Performance

Thanks to my Mom, we were able to get a lot of photographs from the actual performance.

Public Moves Performance

Sunday was such a great day! I was performing with the sound portion of the project, and I was able to move around with a megaphone at the top of Federal Hill. This was such a blast! ; )

It was amazing watching everyone doing the different sections of the performance. In a way, I was glad that I could stand back and watch how everyone moved around on the hill. At the same time though I had this urge to move around with all of the performers! There was an abundance of people for the first performance, and I think the visual aspect of it was beautiful. I think that it came as a shock for the people already hanging around on Federal Hill and some of them seemed overwhelmed by this crazy intrusion of space. Though when the second performance came around, there was about 1/3 of the amount of people performing, and I think the public felt a little more invited to take part in the event. 

In some cases, there were a lot of people who approached Muyi, David and I about what was going on. I gave them a very brief description of the project and invited them to stick around and join in with the fun. Surprisingly, a lot of them actually did! 

I loved hearing all of the sounds around the performance space clashing (and in some cases coinciding) with the sounds that Steve Bradley and Brian Garner were projecting from the AVAM and Science Center. Everything seemed to work so smoothly. I really enjoyed working with the megaphone and having the freedom to explore the different ways I could interact with it. The feedback that I got was excellent, and while I was performing, some people actually tried to talk to me over all of the noise! The reactions of the public were amazing, and I think it really added to the piece as a whole.

Photos Coming Soon!