{"id":15316,"date":"2020-12-05T00:08:43","date_gmt":"2020-12-05T00:08:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/astoryisnotatree.net\/?p=15316"},"modified":"2020-12-05T00:17:20","modified_gmt":"2020-12-05T00:17:20","slug":"conceptual-art-finding-a-form-8","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/astoryisnotatree.net\/?p=15316","title":{"rendered":"Conceptual Art: Finding a Form"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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One of our first larger assignments in Conceptual Art was to collect evidence of a concept or idea and apply three different forms to the same evidence. My process of finding a form was a difficult one, stemming from my fairly personal collection of evidence. I gathered seemingly worthless objects to build a set of the carefully saved and curated selection of items I have subconsciously added value to. This included bottle caps and soda tabs I had saved, a key chain I found on the ground, disposable gloves that lived unused in my purse for months, an interesting piece of wood, a half-burned candle, and a broken figurine, among other things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I have always been a collector – ever since I was a kid, I would save rocks, seashells, coins, screws and bolts, buttons, paint chips, and anything else I felt was too valuable to be thrown away or discarded. As I\u2019ve gotten older, I have realized that my affinity for keeping broken or worthless things that others would label as trash is directly related to my mental health. The worse I\u2019m doing, the more I feel the need to grasp onto these material representations of my obsessions. My first form is an attempt to visualize the almost holy nature given to these objects by the sort of worship that goes into keeping, protecting, and treasuring them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I arranged the most important objects from my evidence – the gloves, candle, wood, bottle caps and tabs, rocks and shells, and the broken figurine – as well as some other valuable pieces, such as the broken bracelets given to me by friends and my mom\u2019s old political pins. I placed everything as neatly and symmetrically as possible inside one of the drawers of my desk to emphasize the privacy of the thought processes responsible for collecting. This is also why I chose to photograph it with the drawer partially closed. Even when these objects are displayed publicly, as sometimes I arrange them on my desk or nightstand, the significance of keeping and protecting them is hidden.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A few of my classmates made associations with ritual, spirituality, and the divine through both the placement of the objects within the drawer and the inclusion of the drawer itself. I felt that this brought forward an important aspect of the concept, and tried to focus on the mystical and ritual facets of my evidence in the second form, in which I photographed myself wearing the gloves and holding the bottle tabs and candle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I wore all black and took the pictures outside at night so that the focus of each photograph were the hands themselves and what was in them, rather than the person connected to the hands. I really enjoyed the sense of disembodiment and magic that comes across in this series. During my presentation in class, I included a few photos where my face or the ground is visible, but both my classmates and I felt that their inclusion was jarring and took away from the surreal disembodiment and personification of the objects, so I do not include them here. The most effective part of this form was the series which captured the bottle tabs as they fell from my open gloved hands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I think the photo set captures the sense of reverence I feel towards these worthless objects and elevates them from everyday objects into being mystical, divine, and important. I also feel that it captures the distress I feel about discarding or throwing away these things I have assigned such a high value to, especially the last picture of my empty, reaching hands. However, this form placed more emphasis on the release of these objects rather than the need to save or protect them. I tried to bring out that aspect of the project more in my final form, which was a video performance piece with three iterations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n