Christina (Maria) De La Cruz
"La Llorana"
I resonated with the “she who sees the unknown” series by the artist Morehshin Allahyari. The concept of re-figuring is very interesting and I love how empowering it is. As a first generation Xicana I can relate to a lot of cultural” taboos” that Allahyari experienced and I love how her work unapologetically delves into the taboo. "Allahyari embraces the taboo and wants to bring new perspectives and preserve them as well." Her artwork challenges those power structures that exist and instead “own” them. I was particularly interested in her idea of “re-figuring” and saw a correlation to the stories of La Llorona. I grew up on these stories but never looked much into the origin of la llorona or done much research. I was inspired by the film by Jayro Bustamante and as I did more research I found that La Llorona is an intricate being who has been re-figured various times throughout history. I never thought of La Llorona being an omen in ancient aztec times of the colonization & genocide to come. The film and more research into the origin story led me to refigure this once spooky character in folklore to the pain and grief of losing an entire civilization.
Corazon Downey
"Melting Fact"
"Melting Fact"
“The Melting Fact,” from a developing collection called “The Dollar Designs”
Exploring an mundane object which we interact with through a close study is my addiction. The process and flow of thinking about, reconsidering, rebuilding, forming a new opinion and so forth is the focus. Each piece I create starts with a small object, idea, system, etc. and I work through my relation to it, its relation to me, our individual or combined existences, meanings, messages. I begin to think about how it functions in my life, the people who surround me, strangers, foreigners. This is the environment for my practice.
In my recent studies I have become infatuated with the US dollar bill. I have worked to observe it through detailed studies, reconstruction, research, personal interaction, conversation, and more. Through this focus I have been able to look at money conceptually and physically, and in my most recent project I have been working to understand how it functions in beauty and honor - a perspective I often don’t associate with finances, government, agency, or moreover, the United States.
In my project, “Working with Morehshin Allahyari”, I was able to explore this side of the dollar bill through using the workflow of an inspiring artist. Morehshin’s projects and focus around “Additivism” I found fascinating - this practice of working with archiving, activism, and design was the perfect route to further explore my current subject, the dollar bill. I was able to uncover the historical background to the design of the dollar bill which is primarily centered around anti-counterfeit agendas. I used this research alongside observations of people's perception of design meanings to create a wearable garment that shares a varied perspective of the US currency - exclusive from any bias towards agency or systems.
My piece, “The Melting of Fact”, sports a three piece garment made of a hat, blouse, and pants all decorated with enlarged prints from the dollar bill. The three pieces are made with a flowy white linen material and feature ragged hem. The prints are developed through cyanotype exposure and add a blue and white iteration of the dollar bill’s graphics. Descending from the hat to the bottom of the pants the shade of blue and clarity of the prints declines. The graphics included are all sayings or icons whose meaning has been misinterpreted over time.
The hat is crafted with a white denim and developed to be a rich navy blue contrasting starkly with the white. The hat is embellished with one of the “1” icons, leaves and intricate line weaving, and a block lettered assemblage of repeating and jumbled text of “United States of America”. The structure, contrast, and boldness of this piece represents the true defined structure, considerations, history and design detail that went into the dollar bill.
The second component, the top is a high neck cropped blouse with a cross strap and tie in the back. This piece on the front includes a rich and dark yet slightly blurry print from the pyramid on the back of the bill. On the back are two smaller panels of blurred and lighter flowers. This top alternates printed and blank white pieces with a clean top hem and raw bottom hem. The contrasts in these two design elements is meant to emphasize the contrast between the hat and pants meaning and show a schism between reality and perception.
Finally, the pants are a wide leg flowy pant with a clean high waist hem and long raw bottom hem. The fabric is decorated on either external leg side with square prints that feature zooms of various parts of the dollar. These prints are a light faded blue with blurs and imperfections, as well the pant legs are splotched with the same blue. The randomness, unpredictability, and nonsensicalness of the pants represents the common person's’ understanding or belief of understanding with the US dollar’s iconography. The flowy structure is meant to further amplify this message with the graphics atop showering the mendability of our currency and as the belief in it’s meaning fades, so does the structure.
This overall design is meant to dually understanding vs intention and how the meaning of an object shifts with perspective and relation.
Vera McBride
“Grounded” (cyanotypes)
“Echo” (woodcut reduction prints grouped together)
My overarching question is how do we consider copies in the digital age? And I don’t believe I really have an answer to it, just different ways I’ve approached considering it myself.
“Whose Digital Heritage” and “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” influenced me the most with my project, and I combined ideas from both in the project. The visual material is more influenced by “Whose Digital Heritage” regarding the Nefertiti bust/copies, while the mediums in the project with “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” as it goes into the shift seen with the advent of photography which I find really interesting and see a sort of additional shift with the advent of 3D modeling and open sourcing of materials.
In both, copies are involved to different degrees - the photo process creating a more literal copy, while the print process being a medium more reliant on copies and distribution. Access to the 3D bust being contentious sort of influenced me a bit with the medium, as printmaking typically has a component of accessibility in the means of distribution attached to it, which felt cut off for a time and even now the Neues Museum still acting as gatekeeper to the access of it with their version of the 3D file having a massive copyright stamp on it and stipulations of use of their file.
Jessie Yang
“Augmented Reality Peking Opera Mask”
Ever since the rise of Asian hate crimes, I’ve been seeing posts on Instagram that say things like: “you enjoy our food, you enjoy our tv shows, etc..” This made me realize how much Asian culture has been absorbed and appropriated into American culture through things like food and media and yet the real cultures are still not truly understood and barely studied, and its people are still not respected(ex. nail salons).
America picks what parts of certain cultures to embrace and what parts to reject, and, by doing so, distances itself further from acknowledging real culture and its people. I also feel that by making a mask, I can transform the idea of “mask” from what we have collectively known it to be in the past year with COVID 19 and appreciate “mask” as a unique, historical artform once again. I created a design of a Chinese Peking opera mask with red, black, and white, which are the three dominant colors used for the protagonist in Peking theatre. Red is the main color, representing someone who is loyal and heroic. I then turned the mask into an AR mask with Spark Augmented Reality Studio and published it on Instagram so it could be used by anyone. I hope this mask allows Peking opera and the beautiful mask designs that have existed for thousands of years to live on into the present and future in the digital world, as if reviving it in a way, and, also, normalizing it instead of treating it like a strange, foreign artifact. Secondly, it celebrates Chinese culture for what it really is, beyond Americans values. I also hope it can build a stronger bond between Asian Americans.