SENIOR THESIS EXHIBITION

This was the piece that I did for MIAD's Senior Exhibition '09. It was a huge success for me personally, and I was fortunate enough to have been given "Best of Show," for the Integrated Studio Arts major- a personal goal that I had in my mind since my freshman year at MIAD.
The piece developed into a merge of video, sculpture, and performance; and was based largely on concepts of personal reflection, intensity of process, and perceptual relativity. For the final few weeks leading up to the senior show, I spent most hours day and night, drawing circles in phonebooks. I would start with a rather large circle, and I would continue drawing that circle with a pen, until eventually I would draw through the entire phone book. I did this with nearly 20 phonebooks, and after the second or third phone book, I even had a developed understanding of how to control the aesthetic outcome of each phonebook i.e. swithching pen types, colors, or the angle of my hand. The result was that the books themselves b
egan to have a beautiful layering of pristine colors, almost like what a jaw-breaker looks like if cut in half.
In the space that I was given, I projected a video of me that was split screen. half of the video displayed an emphasis of my facial expressions while drawing these repetitive circles, and the other half was a close up of the phonebook being drawn through. Along with the screen, was the embellished acoustical presence of the circles being drawn over and over again- a strangely dominant factor in the hypnotic tone of the space.
In the very center of the space, was a large wooden circle that I attained as a result of drawing a circle all the way through the wall using MANY MANY pens! Using the circle as a platform, I arranged the meticulously collected circles from the center of each phonebook on top of the wall circle, and placed them in front of the projection of myself and the phonebooks.
Finally, I placed 6 unmarked pedestals throughout the exhibition, and I displayed the actual phonebooks themselves, in small groups on these 6 pedestals. The intent of this placement, was to draw attention to the strange un-named phonebooks as objects, and to allow viewers to question not only WHY they were oddly placed throughout the exhibition, or WHAT the significance of this was- but also HOW had these strange objects been constructed.
By seperating the unexplained physical objects from my actual space in the exhibition, people were led through a series of questions that they would not normally be forced to consider. By seeing the recurring object a few times on their way to the 4th floor gallery, they had the object in the back of their head- THEN, upon seeing my space, and finding the video installation as well as the presentation of the phonebook centers- viewers were prompted to put together the puzzle, and were lead to discover the answer of HOW exactly the pieces were constructed. This helped to emphasize the great deal of meticulousness that pertained to the construction of the pieces, and added to an even greater appreciation of these objects on the way back out of the gallery when viewers would again come across the object with a newly found sense of appreciation.