Kahalla Bandy-Pasibe
“The Sweetgrass Anthology”
I started this project when I wrote a poem in response to the themes of the course that resonated most personally with me. After compiling footage, I started crafting a visual story to go along with it, and shot new footage to start weaving the imagery together. The result was my short film AMNESIA which is featured in the final project. My final project consolidated down the strongest interrelated concepts and materials from my original "database" of current and related art and community work into a prose-like text and image essay that explores the question "How can the individual or collective rejection of colonized understandings of time and historymaking allow for multidimensional futures and ancestral knowledge to manifest in the land and in the body when catalyzed by the experience of earth's patterns and natural tactile relationships?" The semi-abstract media essay incorporates the transcript from AMNESIA, my personal sketches and paintings, reference and process photos, and an interview I facilitated based on materials from the course. The media essay loosely follows a narrative structure with a rhythm created through the combination of titles, first-person poetry, imagery, and insertions of "found", collaged, or primary sources. The repeated language and themes/motifs are the unifying elements of the narrative.mostly interacts with RAQs Media Collective's text "Now and Elsewhere" and “Braiding Sweetgrass” by Robin Wall Kimmerer, taking direct quotes from those readings and responding directly to them with notes, analyses, and reflections in visual, literary, and abstract forms.
Sylvia (Wenheng) Gao
“After-life Art Museum”
In addition to the after-life art, there is also some after life art, such as mummies, frozen corps, and so on that we discussed in class, which are all possible media for afterlife art, but these mentioned afterlife art are limited to the human body. I think Afterlife art is diversified, and there are many kinds of afterlife art with different performances that deserve to be explored. For example, animal specimens can also be afterlife art, and some paintings describing death can also be related to this theme. As for the viewpoint that death aesthetics has become an aesthetic theme, I actually want to explain that although death aesthetics is related to the fragility of life and excessive soul, death itself also means the transformation of energy and state. This change, or transcendence, also brings its own aesthetics and beliefs. I think the art of death can also be defined as that people can see the traces of the years and even the signs of life in passing away. It is people's natural fear of death, and they want to portray death with their own strength. The creation of these artists is to convey an idea, but in fact it is better to visualize the artist's problems. The difference between this idea and questioning is actually the key point to understand and think about the aesthetics of immortal life and death.
Yuxin Shang
“Time gallery”
I read the materials and works of Raqs media collective this semester, and their thinking about life, space and time attracted me. In Raq's readings, the worries of time are faintly permeated with the acceleration of the center of daily life. The accelerating heartbeat will produce different emotions, stimulate our rhythm, and countless hours constitute life. But how to record the disappearance time has always been a problem. How time is represented and what can be used to represent time. My project hopes to start with time and daily emotional state, record daily experiences into the clock, and record it for 50 consecutive days to discover how time is around me and how it exists.
My inspiration came from Raqs Media Collective, "Escape", 2009. It has a different clock composition, although it represents the mechanical watches and mechanical devices in the clock, such as the escapement and the valve that releases the heart to allow blood to flow between its chambers. Like an escapement, setting the basic rhythm of life, the escapement of a watch regulates our perception of the passage of time. From this, I think that for me who likes painting, the passage of time is like the memory of every day. Memories are emotional, and depicting the emotions of each day is to record the time. I used black and white illustrations to draw the different emotions expressed by each clock. The project is to transform daily emotional records into paintings to illustrate the concept of time. I painted the feelings I experienced for 50 consecutive days on each clock and pasted them on the wall. Every clock is time, and 50 consecutive days clock is also time. Looking back at these 50- day works, each one is a symbol of time. I think time is composed of emotions and memories. It can be a moment or a period of time. How to record time changes, I think the feeling is the best record of time, and whenever I recall an emotion, it is time.