Burning Receipts Part 1

I work in the restaurant industry, and like most point-of-sale positions, receipts are a frequent part of regular transactions. Receipt paper is difficult to recycle due to the compounds of the heat-activated BPA plastic in the paper. Although they're not meant to be archival, sure you could keep them for a while, but they're meant to be thrown away. The receipt itself could be thought of as a symbol of industrial interdependence, frivolity, and resource consumption. I'm sure there's more. 

I was interested in the precise ink-less printing of type on this paper. What if it wasn't so precise? What if the information was obscured. What kind of art can I make with this technology?

By holding the paper over a heat source I was able to create this burnt-paper effect. By collaging the blank receipt paper, I was working solely with an aesthetic. Going forward I have pre-printed receipts to burn for a more object-specific resonance in the next renditions of this experiement.

The heat/fire marks on the paper feel like a form of violence.

This format is just a happening of the experiment, and not necessarily what every collage going forward will appear as. The arrays are changeable, I have a frame to play around with, and the background is to be determined.

Bright is a Warning

 Many animals that are brightly colored are highly poisonous or venomous. This bright coloration serves as a warning to other animals not to eat them. We also tend to use bright colors like red and yellow to serve as warning. These were based on that theme.

revisions

 

Silver Tongue Collage

Collage for the idiom 'silver tongue', I would have had 'skin of my teeth' too but my file crashed 👎

New Architectural Shots in Prompted Images - 10/29/24

I wanted to follow through on the feedback that I received today by adding more architectural shots in Prompted Images.

This decision came about because the front/back covers had a quieter feel than the rest of the book. I generated 9 new solutions using 3 different photographs from my camera roll. The subjects include an empty expo hall in Hawaii, a window at HallSpace, and the inside of an old pipe at my high school. I used the same process that I've been using for the duration of this project. 

I feel that this booklet is in a good spot at this point. If other people agree on Thursday, I think I may want to move on to something new in the near future (either this weekend or next week).

Fossils Part 1

 Made with alginate molds and plaster. 

Spoon Poetry Catalogue

 I started cataloging the poetry that I had collected that referenced spoons. I have five sections, Memory, Measurement, Morals, and Madness. These categories veer away from the three overarching themes that I determined earlier on, however many of these poems did not fit nicely into, privilege, nourishment, and measurement. I found that most of the poetry that I had found may have had one or more of those three as underlying themes, but it didn't feel to me that those themes, besides measurement were the main takeaway or the point I was supposed to be focusing on while reading. Of course that is just my own perception of this selection of poetry and might differ from the perception of others, as it did when it came to the visualization of the spoon as a material object. 

Idiom Poster Collages

Using the idioms I have been working with I started to explore photo fragmentation and collage. I had fun trying to visualize the absurd language and logic of the idioms.

Below are “Out to Lunch” and “Hit the Books”. I want to create a poster series using all 5 of the idiom collages. Also possibly incorporating the concrete poetry I made for these idioms as well.

I feel like these collages relate back to my exploration in intuition while incorporating this path of language that I have been on. I am interested in the deviation of language and how these types of provincialism are intuitively understood to cultures of certain regions.

Some quotes from readings that I’ve been thinking about

“Willfully taking a apart what is or what's supposed to be and rearranges it in a ways that suggests what could be” - Lucy Lippard

“This structure (grid), impervious both to time and to incident, will not permit the projection of language into the domain of the visual, and the result is silence. And the grid facilitated this sense of being born into the newly evacuated space of aesthetic purity and freedom” - Rosalind Krauss

Idiom Concrete Poetry

Continuing my concrete poetry work with idioms. Exploring how I can visually interpret the idioms while also pushing their meanings. I wanted to incorporate ways other people have used these idioms, so I started to work with poetry and common sayings.

I’ve been thinking about using these explorations as assets in a poster or infographic systems. I will also add them to my running concrete poetry booklet.

Found uses of the Idioms:

Hit the Books
The origin of the phrase is unknown, but it may be related to the early idiom "hit the trail", which cowboys used when starting a journey. It's likely that the phrase became popular in the mid-20th century. 

Melting Pot
"This Land Is Your Land" by Woody Guthrie.

"...The melting pot of America that promises a land without woes but alas, there is only hysteria for those that refuse the status quo…"

The Melting Pot by Joylanda Jamison

Out to Lunch
"The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship” Charles Bukowski

“ No grand schemes shall I devise, No other plans shall I complete, For I have gone out to lunch.” - Christopher Tye

Silver Tongue
I am a silver-tongued devil, they say,
Where my words, like coins, often stray.
To hearts of gold, my falsehoods go,
A weaver of tales, a story of old,
A player of words, a devil in guise,
A sheep among wolves, a cunning devise. - Asmondues

Skin of My Teeth
"My bone cleaveth to my skin and to my flesh, and I escaped with the skin of my teeth".
Job 19:20

The skin of your teeth,
Is the strongest tie to life.
Yes, we can hardly breathe,
But we cannot really die.

Lev Brekhman