Did She Travel or Did She Dream?
Project description: I create a visual fairy tale about the experience of being involved in one's search for self using mixed media paintings and audio/video projection.
1. Did She Travel, or Did She Dream?
15" x 24" Cyanotype with mixed media on paper
Over a cyanotype of my hand-drawn plant materials, I hand-painted a nighttime jungle entrance. The central focus of this painting is the light blue contour of an imagined and confident young girl with an indistinct large roll under her arm. The roll references the potential self as one enters the world.
A massive hand with an accent ring on its finger sits at the bottom left of the painting. The hand taps the girl on her shoulder; it is unclear if it is pulling her back or pushing her forward. Another hand at the right top of the painting delicately organizes the vines that climb through the painted tropical forest.
2. Did She Travel, or Did She Dream?
11" x 48" Diptych on canvas
In front of a collaged dark background of car crashes and earthquakes, I painted the girl from painting #1 in a frozen, perplexed state. The roll under her arm is gone, and her expression is one of whose confidence is on the skids.
3. Did She Travel, or Did She Dream?
130" x 50" Mixed media on canvass
I collaged tracing paper copies of patterns from used knitted samples onto raw canvas. On top of the patterns, I painted an illusionary landscape to elicit the atmosphere of a forest at twilight. Layered onto the painting surface are tracing paper contour drawings of the girl.
I filled the forest with girls of varying sizes with the roll back under their arms. You can see the girl running back and forth and sideways uninhibited, sometimes in a group and sometimes alone; sometimes, she appears directionless. In this scene are two houses on stilts, a windmill, and two women in an intimate embrace. A tall female Gatekeeper sits on the painting's left margin, cautioning the viewers with her gaze.
4. 16 individual drawings
4" x 5.5" drawings on paper
There are 16 grey cards with a line drawing of the imaginary girl. The girl stays the same in each picture, but the indistinct roll under her arm transforms into a bouquet of colorful tulips. The tulips are wrapped in my birth certificate.
5. Poetry Video Projection
7 - 8" x 5.5" watercolors on Mylar
Audio Video projection on the wall
I painted seven stills on Mylar with watercolor markers, repeating the girl's story with the transformational tulip roll, adding various landscapes and weather conditions.
I videoed the seven Mylar paintings and added an audio track of me whispering Mary Oliver's poem Wild Geese. The video was projected onto the wall, casting through the mylar sheets pinned to the bottom of the frame, thus creating both symbolic and physical tension.
In this work, I present the bilaterality of this search for self. The two extremes are a self-search that leads to something explosively beautiful and the nightmare that this search for oneself can turn into.
