Mentor Meeting

I met with Julie Graham, my mentor, today. It was an excellent meeting. We discussed my most recent developments, and the possibilities for future development.  This is the work I brought:

The first three were experiments I did with physical cutting. The first one, which is probably familiar by now, was done by cutting the illustration board. The middle two were done by cutting the transfer film first, and then transfer it. The middle two aren't as interesting to me at this point. It was a good experiment, but not worth too much more pursuing. Julie really enjoyed the top piece, and we talked about different shape to cut out, as well as the importance of imagery. It's kind of interesting to see the relationship of geometric and organic, but what does it mean? What am I trying to say? I told her how I began to see it as a digital map, and then we talked about maybe using an urban scene as the base image. Then we also talked about the grid being like perspective lines, and the black and white checkered floors used in Renaissance paintings, and that might be interesting to look for.

The bottom image is some model cycloramas I made. I simply pinned two pieces of foam core together to form a corner, and then attached the printed panoramas to the foam core, creating a soft curve. 

The above image is one that, from a technical stand point, seems to be working well. Julie was impressed by the seamless blend of images, and it's one of the ones I'm happier with. The ones that Julie said she felt worked the best however were the ones that more thoroughly showed a morphing of indoor/outdoor space, like the one below:

When she mentioned that, I had to agree. These images are more imaginative, and not something you could find somewhere. Julie suggested looking for more locations with the architecture I'm interested in. She also brought up the idea of making the images perhaps even stranger, by incorporating more modern elements or other pieces that don't fit in this kind of romantic scene I'm making. This is something I feel is worth exploring. I recently finished the novel, A Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. It was suggested to me during the residency, and it was a fantastic book. It is set between two worlds: a familiar, yet somewhat futuristic version of our world; and an imagined world of a city with unicorns and no memories. One of the links between the two worlds is paperclips. This was an enjoyable link to me because it's so familiar, so common. Something like that, to link this world to my created world, might be interesting to see.