Digital Photography

Site Specific-Playgrounds

My concept for this project was to explore lost childhood dreams, when I was a child everyday I would come up with something new that I wanted to do when I grew up, along the years they changed slightly and of course some were lost along the way side . With this project I wanted to explore how to represent those lost dreams as an adult by using some of my own child hood favorite past times, a playground and construction paper. I began what became a series of visits to parks, I went to the parks with no clue what kind of environment I would find. My goal was to let the park guide what I was to make using only construction paper, tape, scissors and string. This was what I came up with, when I arrived a the first site the park was set up as a giant castle. I thought this was a great site since I loved anything that had to do with castles as a child. My basic idea was to
throw tuns of paper airplanes over the castle wall to represent the lost childhood dreams...but as you can see that didn't turn out so well. I ran into the most obvious problem which would happen at a playground...children. I had several children come ask what I was doing, asking if they can help and even asking if I was in high school. At this point I began to get paranoid that some parents would think I was harassing their children so I tried to speed up the process as quickly as possible, because of this I was unable to get a lot of the shots which would have captured the moment well. My original intent was to leave the paper airplanes there so that some other child could pick up my lost dreams and make them their own, but due to the amount of people in the park and the fact that it was patrolled by the police I didn't want to risk it.

Upon my next park venture I decided to take a different approach using the same concept and the same paper airplane idea I created several strings of airplanes to be used within the space. I made small holes on the paper airplanes and ran a string through the planes with a total of 3 strings of air planes. Using the same premise of going to an completely unfamiliar playground I let the environment serve as my guide for the sculpture...

After finding a bridge made out of stairs which said "Game Time" I thought it would be a good site to engage with the paper airplanes. I strung the planes across the bridge as a representation of all of my lost dreams as a child, adolescent and now as an adult, I chose the bridge as away for me to go beyond my dreams and into the unknown. After taking a few photos I wanted to see if there was a way to construct a tunnel using a bed sheet but I wasn't too pleased with the idea so I quickly abandoned it. However I could not leave this playground without incorporating the main focal point when you walk to the park. In the front of the park was a broken pelican , it was the kind of pelican which you ride and it wobbles as you rock but apparently someone rocked too hard on it, and it looked like it was about to fall over. What I found most intriguing about it was the fact that instead of removing the broken pelican they decided to leave it there and wrap it in police caution tape. While at the park I watched several children approach the playground and sure enough all of them were drawn to the pelican to see what was wrong with it, which of course I did the same thing when I entered. After seeing this reaction from people I had to interact with it.. the broken pelican serves as a way to affirm the lost dreams with a broken childhood playground there is no going back to it only moving forward with new dreams.

Identity Project

Everyone deals with stress on some level or another, and everyone deals with it differently. I am that person who has no specific stress release tactic, and because of this I oftentimes become stressed out over things that seem small to others, but seem big to me. At times I will get so stressed that I become almost non-functional, and this disfunction becomes like a web which crosses over into other people's lives, consuming them with stress just as I have been consumed. The all consuming nature of stress makes it a major characteristic of my identity, and in terms of my most prominent stress, the bulk of my burden has been caused by my decision to go back for a second degree in art with a concentration in graphic design at the age of 25. While being an older student is stressful enough, I put additional stress upon myself by trying to produce what I think is the best of my ability at my skill level. I look at this opportunity to go back to school as my last chance to do something which makes me happy and almost as my last hope. If I am not successful with graphic design then what is next? I can not just keep going back to school. I have to make something work and this will be it. My process of making any art piece is very slow which is always stressful because this makes time management always an issue, this causes me to have little or no time for myself, friends or family. When I am not working on a project for school I have the stresses of work, as I must cope with co-worker who either do not want to work, do not know how to do something, or just want to gossip. These are just some of the main stresses,and as you can see, it is the minor stresses which ultimately end up combining into what I would call the "daily stresses." Permeating through my very being, and manifested in the trials of daily existence, this is the culmination of my emotional weight: the stressed web that is my identity.

Stress Web

For my identity project I wanted to create something which would represent both stress and tension, and how those infleunces can either make or break an individual. In doing so, I ultimately wanted to create a web, in which after its construction was complete I could literally break through, in a act representative of my conquest over the never ending battle of stress. To begin, I initially set out on this endeavor through literally constructing a stress web, as I cut 48 white plastic bags into strips, with each strip being a different length and width to refelct how each stress effects me with different levels of severity. After completing this, the next step was to record the factors and influences which cause my stress on each strip. Writing these factors in red, blue, and black markers, I initially selected the color to write at random. Nonetheless, as I progressed, I soon noticed my unconscious use of the red marker to emphasize more intense stresses. In continuing my process though, upon completion of this grueling process (which took several hours), I then connected all of the bags together by creating a gigantic web out of them. This was done to represent how all of these stresses are connected, and how the culmination of these can cause one large stress. After several hours of tying the bags together, it was then time to hang the web. The web was hung in site specific area located in the backyard of my parents home. I choose this due to the fact that my stress stems from my parents, as their stress oftentimes becomes my stress, and at times, they themselves actually become the cause of my stress. With the web being approximately 8-9 ft wide and 6 feet tall, it was hung between two pine trees in my parents backyard in the middle of the night. I chose to construct the web during the day because that is when my stress begins, and hung the web at night because that is when I am at my breaking point. It was important to me to only include one light source because the goal of reaching the light represents overcoming stress, and ultimately becoming a successful graphic designer. The actual process of breaking the web took around 30-40 minutes, and while I had no idea of the amount of strength a web made of plastic bags would have, I had my entire weight on the web at all times, and used all of my force to break the web. After seeing the strength this web could have using only 48 bags, for the final resting place of this web I am considering making a hammock out of it. Of course, if I did this I would have to add more bags, however I think it would be a positive thing for my stress web to make the transformation into something I could use for relaxation.