comfort food

You might have noticed I haven't been blogging much about the thesis...or much else, for that matter. I'm usually pretty open with my process and imagery, but for some reason I feel like the installation I'm working on for my thesis show is a brand new magic trick that has to remain as cryptic as possible until it's unveiled on the 29th. There have been some changes since my recipe post, however. For example, there are only 22 tubes now, no owl figurines (although I have a feeling they'll make their way into a future side project), not nearly as much screenprinting ink as I'd anticipated, some additional lumber and hardware I wasn't originally counting on...Oh, and make that six weeks of second-guessing, another week or so of brainstorming, and only about three and a half weeks of frantic production.


Fortunately, for the next couple of weeks my schedule is so light I'm almost embarrassed to admit it. Between now and November 26th, the first day of installation, I have one dinner engagement, one-half day of class, one doctor's appointment, and one Thanksgiving holiday. And much of the work is done, including my general postcard to advertise the show. Rather than try to photograph some element of the installation, I went with a floorplan approach, which will hopefully function with the installation in a slightly more interesting way than a simple advertisement would.

In fact, I'm suddenly feeling so relaxed about the whole thing that I'm even contributing to the group effort that will make up the thesis exhibition of a fellow artist. There's a lot of back-story to the piece that this image will soon become. In other words, there is a reason the image is made up of M&M's in custom colors as close as I could find to cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, and there's a reason this image will be screenprinted in the 4-color separation process (think "meta"). The real M&M's may or may not be included in the final piece. I'm not sure yet. I guess it will somewhat depend on whether or not I can keep from eating them over the course of the next couple of weeks. With the stress of my impending thesis show, I've been seeking comfort in the obvious (food, like my favorite candies shown here, and t.v.) and the not so obvious (frequent, spontaneous trips to the mall and switching occasionally from NPR to soft rock radio stations while I'm driving in my car).