Monday, February 22, 2010

Back at it.

Today was the first day of my last semester of architecture school. Whoa...kind of amazing.

After a week off, I've had time to reflect on Wintersession and our final critique, which was two Fridays ago. Overall, I think the comments were really good and ultimately helpful. The critics were Thomas, Jon Hartmann, his wife Gia, poet Stuart Blazer, Brian Goldberg, and Anastasia Congdon.

Here are some of the major comments and topics of discussion:
Brian commented on the idea of 'lack'. Lack = the abscence of life or prescence. The tendency may be to introduce life into something that is temporarily dead (as in the buildings I've mentioned before that go dormant at times). Instead of an answer being to activate the lack, accept it in a serious way, the lack or emptiness as potential. "The richness of lack"

Gia made a good comment about representation, which I know was part of the problem of what I had pinned up. She was drawn to the time lapse theme, and as I hone in on a project, it may inform the physicality and representation, whether it's small films, comic strips, narrative mode of representation.

Gia mentioned thinking more with material and Jon's response was to explore the subtractive process more. Essentially, I've been looking at the subtraction of people and use in a space, which causes the dormancy, and have begun to touch upon the materiality of that through the woodblock prints. Woodblock prints emerge through the subtraction of the wood and Jon suggested doing more models that are only subtractive.

With that, Thomas mentioned then doing castings, which then take the potential of the subtraction and form a new positive model.

I think all of these comments are right on and are good ways of moving the project forward. I think that the representation comment is the really important because up to this point, I don't think what I've produced conveys my thoughts. At least, not enough. This is something I've been aware of and grappling with this whole Wintersession.

I'll also be doing another woodcarving tomorrow for the grad show. I'm going to take Anastasia's advice and film the actual piece of wood and not me carving it. Makes much more sense

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