I knew at the beginning that I wanted to have my collage be about this new headspace I feel that I’m in right now. After a serious car accident in January that forced me to take a semester off, and now that I’m back in New York after spending so much time immobile in Texas, I feel that my feeling about being in New York is different, and I think that when I explain my car accident to my friends I tend to have a somewhat lighthearted or even humorous slant to not bring the mood down. I wanted a car to be at the center of this, and so initially I cut out a photo of a silver Prius in Photoshop, because that was the car we were hit in.
Then, I took photos that I had saved from my Snapchat since the beginning of the year as well as downloading the photo of the wheelchair and the woman using the walker from the internet. I played around with where I wanted to place these,and eventually placed them into what ended up feeling like nodules around the center car, moving some pieces that I felt were important to be in motion, like the car, the woman using the walker, and the statue from the library. After my conference, I realized how I had separated all of the elements, and wanted to increase the size of individual pieces and change colors to make the collage make the viewer feel the dichotomy between the violence of the car crash with the familiarity of the art pieces from on campus, Mr. Softee, and the snow (none of which I can access while home in Texas). I initially enlarged my face in the corner.
After some more photo editing where I changed the colors and edited some of the photos, I think that the piece came together in its cohesion. I also repeated the photo that says “Cliffs of Depression” in the background to add to the business and make it feel more connected to the rest of the piece.
I decided to name this collage anti-violence, which is also one of the text blocks in the collage, because that was a term I put in a poem I wrote, and I think that it really represents the third space I’m trying to evoke. While this violent car crash and broken leg did happen to me and are on my mind, I’m also still living in a world of art and sweet things, which makes for a strange mental state.
I think that I could still improve this collage by making the pieces from the library more clear in what they are to a person looking at the piece who has not been to Sarah Lawrence or someone who doesn’t remember the pieces of art in the library. I also think that while I tried to clear up the colors and use that to make the piece more cohesive, I think I fell short in that regard. Overall though, I am proud of how this piece turned out.
