part I: creative journey & thoughts on process
At the beginning of this year, one of my key resolutions was to nail down the direction and intention of my creative work as I have been feeling very frustrated and stagnant for a couple of years. I realized I have been consistently spending a lot of my free time dedicated to this process of making images (because I have to or I’m sad), but not in an intentional way. I am bored with making pretty pictures. I want them to mean something and resonate with people. I missed the sorts of projects I had developed in undergrad that were conceptual, physical, and new.
I considered going to grad school, but for me it is simply not worth going into crazy amounts of debt. In lieu of grad school I have been independently seeking out education and looking for mentors in both the fine art and design fields. This includes classes, workshops, residencies, critique groups, art events, free talks, and studio visits. I happened upon the Picture Berlin program while browsing wooloo.org and immediately saw it as a perfect fit. But would I get in with such a commercial portfolio and foggy artist statement? Thankfully, I was accepted and I began the process of saving money and arranging my life to make the five weeks in Berlin happen.
We were given an assignment to create a project for the opening exhibition that was quite challenging: the work should be about Berlin but created in your current city, it should be tied to the theme of ‘Subculture’, and oh yeah, it will be exhibited in a field. I had several ideas for installations but they all involved a lot of materials that would be impossible to transport or collect in a couple days in Berlin. What I finally settled on was the Makers & Creators portraits of local artists in Brooklyn, because connecting with the art community relates to both subculture and Berlin. I was still concerned with how I would install the big prints, but luckily there was a huge rainstorm and we were forced to move indoors. I created a faux-living room environment in a small room and it was the perfect warm environment to view the intimate portraits:
photo by Dian Mcleod.
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coming up next… what I thought I would be doing and where I ended up.
