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[1428492]

[1428492]

[1428492]

Thesis I  (a narrative)

The idea for my thesis spawned from a conversation over chipotle (most good ideas do). I was prompted to try and remember any of my mother’s boyfriends prior to her current one, whom she has been dating since I was six years old. So I started to think, a guy named Dicky came to mind. Memories started pouring in; the house we lived in, activities I would watch my mom do, her old friends, and experiences we shared. All of these things sort of dipped in and out of the 90’s rave scene in one way or another which my mother was heavily involved in at the time. I remembered one experience in particular, the first drug I ever took. When I was the age of 4 or 5 I mistook some sort of rave drug for an orange mini M&M. I remember biting into the unmarked tablet, it had a really bitter taste and I almost immediately thought “this isn’t an m&m”, I shrugged it off. Halloween was every weekend growing up with my mother. We would sit on the floor listening to house music. I would watch her construct elaborate costumes for parties she would be attending without me. Overalls made out of bubble wrap, tops out of astro turf, pants out of twister boards. These couple of memories influenced my first three pieces of the semester. At that point, my thesis was solely exploring 90’s rave culture influence on my identity. They were inspired by techniques I picked up in the “Photo to Sculpture” course last spring (2016). I wanted to do more material studies and explore making pieces that were three dimensional. The works were “first generation” and didn’t embody the feelings that I wanted to interweave into the pieces. Out of the three pieces only one felt finalized to me, the other two needed to be revised.

As the semester progressed, my research furthered. We were now deep into Themes of Contemporary Art. The class broke into groups by theme, I fit into the “memory” group. I had made a trip back home in order to gather materials from my mother. I was most interested in picking up the outfits I remembered her making. However, most of what I collected included just old photos, memorabilia, and a diary that she used to bring to raves and have people sign. My group and I looked over the pieces I had brought back, the rave journal seemed to reveal a lot about my mother and her friends. There were photos in the journal corresponding to each message. A lot of people mentioned how fucked up they were on whatever drugs and a few even mentioned me by name. From Themes of Contemporary Art, my ideas evolved. I started thinking more about not only constructed identity but also about how memory is unreliable. For example, how “we argue about the past with others when we do not recall the same events or when we interpret the same events differently” and that “we omit other people’s stories if they do not serve our needs” and also how “not having a perfect memory is invaluable, for it allows us to prioritize and generalize, to think in abstract terms”. I was still interested in making objects and became interested the idea of creating fictional places, objects, images or experiences based on unreliable memories that have conceptual undertones that are based on social constructs. For our second critique of the semester I wanted to create an experience that reflected my child like perspective of the 90’s rave scene. I took apart an old speaker and rewired it, then stretched pool float material over the speaker portion. There were stickers all over my mother’s journal. There was one in particular I wanted to recreate though, it was a turntable and needle on a rainbow gradient. I made it into a 7ft print and displayed it on the wall behind my speaker. Then I deconstructed house music to it’s core drum and bass characteristics and played it loudly over the speaker so that the plastic pool material would vibrate to the low rumbling of the bass. I performed the sound piece that I created on a Roland TR 909 emulator. During the performance I played “dress up” and took on the persona of what I thought a deejay would be like when I was a child. The scene was not meant to feel like a rave, but instead a deconstructed depiction of rave characteristics. The performance was titled “RAVE BABY” and lasted about 10-15 minutes, and was ultimately a failed attempt. It needed to be revised. I didn’t have control of the audience, there were no cues for direction, and honestly I was nervous and shaky. I needed to study more performance artists and come up with an ingredients list for a successful performance.

My mother and I had been having conversations about my ideas, she doesn’t want to be seen in a bad light. I assure her she won’t be, but I can’t guarantee it. Viewers want a miraculous story, and from my childlike perspective that’s exactly what this is. One summer my mother’s boyfriend Dicky picked me up and threw me into the deep end of the pool. How could my mother let this happen? I didn’t know how to swim, I was only 4 years old. I plunged toward the bottom and saw my mother, waiting to “save” me. As she brought me to the shallow end of the pool she reassured me that it was all fun and games, she would never let anything bad happen to me. I felt betrayed. In effort to escape the pool as quickly as possible, I latched onto the exit ladder. While climbing out I experienced a sharp pain on my side. My hustle out of the pool frightened a bee nearby and as a result I had gotten my first bee sting. My mother walked me over to an aloe plant, we broke it off, squeezed it’s gelatin onto my skin, and rubbed it in. Looking back on that day I thought, why do we hurt some things in order to better ourselves? My mother and I talked about what happened. She found the story humorous. I thought, I want to make a piece about this story. It was important to me that the piece try to represent both my mother’s and my perspective. I had an idea that I wanted to CNC route a piece of foam with a water texture and epoxy over the top to emulate the look of water. The piece would look have an appealing gloss and an attractive aesthetic on the surface, but it failed at embodying the trauma that I experienced from the situation. If anything, it was an alright representation of my mother’s perspective, “fun and games”. I struggled with a graphic that would portray my feelings to my viewers. I wanted the piece to be uncomfortable, to feel like betrayal. I threw together a graphic in a couple of days, I had to UV print as soon as possible if I wanted the epoxy to cure on time for crit. The graphic included some of the main points of the trauma, but were too on the nose. The piece held to much weight, I tried to crowd this complex experience into one 24” X 28” piece. It was failing. Not to mention the UV printing services would hold my foam until the day of final crit. I worked hard on this piece, but it wasn’t going to come through and I couldn’t show up with nothing. So I improvised. I created a piece out of leftover materials that vaguely referenced rave/drug culture.  A square piece of foam with neon installed around the border, the center was cut out and in the center lay a coke tray. It wasn’t made to be deconstructed by the viewer. It was made fast with only aesthetics in mind. What a let down to end the semester with.