my close-up

It's getting to that point in the semester where I'm starting to look around and see just what I've got going on in terms of work and what I'll present and how I'll present it at my review board in just four to seven weeks. This time around there's the added pressure of thinking seriously about what form my thesis might take. My main goal this year has been to completely abandon any pretenses toward the idea of progression or creating a cohesive body of work. But, not only did I start to see themes and methods recur across projects that seemed, at least superficially, really different, now that I'm just nine short months away from my final thesis exhibition date (December 6-20, 2007) I'm trying to wrap my mind around those themes and make connections in some cases between past and current projects and what I have in mind for the near future. Without writing about my tentative thesis idea just yet (premature discussion could lead to abandoning the idea before I've even started...that I've done before, believe me), this kind of thinking has led me to the obvious - objects and commodification and the like - and the not so obvious - mapping (in many senses of the term).


I've been really resistant to the idea of creating a whole lot of new, physical work in the way of prints and paintings. In fact, I haven't painted in almost a year. And while I am working on a series of designs I will actually print and may one day screenprint or paint on, much of this endeavor has entailed a return to past work, including revising and adding to the where we are not website. There's an "about the project" page as well as a image gallery of the screenprints that made up the original installation. I scanned the prints and blew them up, abstracting the clarity of the original digital image even more, and making the CMYK screenprinted process really evident. The full images are too large to put online (I only have 35 megabytes of storage for that site; pathetic, I know, but when you start a site and you don't really know what a megabyte is - they could've called them la-dee-da's for all I knew at the time - it seems sufficient) but if you click on the gallery thumbnails, a pop-up window will open with a detail to give you a sense of what the process really looks like. It's like digital pointilism.