Mid-Point Reflection Essay

While the first half of the semester has certainly been a great exploration of the personal, I'm not particuarly pleased with the quantity of work I have produced. It has always been difficult for me to clearly convey my words and thoughts through visuals and vice versa. There has always been a bit of a disconnect there, which is an issue that I am working on; the creation of art has always been more of an impulse for me, a gut reaction. I think this is part of why I've struggled a bit this semester and why I've only created one piece thus far.

The video piece I have been working on is a great example of this. I had a theme in mind that I wanted to work with. I was able to get a lot of great, vivid footage that I became very attached to, probably too attached. I found that I became too engrossed in the visuals that I lost track of the message I was trying to convey.

I did realize, however, just how integral the writing process is to the artistic process- at least for me. The more I forced myself to sit down and write, the clearer my message came through in the piece. It didn't necessarily even matter what I was writing either.

I was lucky enough to get all sorts of feedback on thie piece. Not only did I get advice from my fellow classmates and professor in Kinetic but also from a ton of different people this past Thursday night at the installation. Mike Sanford asked some great technical questions about the piece- why I chose certain footage, how I created the music, why there were pauses between certain cuts, etc. I also benefited from Lilian Ball's critique this past Friday. Considering the wide variety of feedback, I'd say that Submersion turned out to be a pretty successful video project. (not that there isn't still room for improvement!)

As the semester continues, I want to seriously focus and expand upon my thesis body of work. The more I worked on Submersion this semester, the more unsure I became about my actual thesis: exploring the landscape, mythology and lifestyle of the American West. While I love and am intrigued by the West, I am not as emotionally invested in it as I am with the themes I worked with in Submersion. There was so much sentiment in the footage and I was able to draw from my own experiences with time and memory. I think that the reason why it was such a successful piece was because it was so emotionally influenced.

I have decided that for my thesis, I would like to instead focus on the aforementioned themes: memory and how it relates to time- it's intense changes, complications, limits. The passing of time is the only certainty in life. As with submersion, I want to vivify time and to show through visual and aural language how I feel about the passage of time, how I make my way through the world and hopefully help others to relate.

Submersion: Mental Vomit (eww...)

Some very random, unorganized mental vomit about semester-long project:


(Cool picture from Shelagh Stephenson's play, The Memory of Water)

-CHANGE

-Exploring the relationships between memory and the natural world

-Separation, drowing, reflective

-Not being able to put words to my feelings; trying to speak or breathe through water

Water has dual meanings: Life giving/ renewal/ rebirth vs. unknown/ mysteriou/ dangerous

-We can drown or be trapped in our memories

-PANIC; constant worry about losing something

-Underwater is a different, foreign world

-Inability to verbalize a feeling, desire or memory; something that must be done through a visual image

-Duality of memory: How beautiful and vivid they are; so much so that we may become too engrossed, too caught up in a time that has passed and that can never be recreated or revived.

-Trying to relive an experience is futile

-So preoccupied with a time that has passed that we lose sense of the present

-Recalling these memories is difficult, so hard to verbalize, to put into more of a concrete form than what is laying dormant in the back of my mind

-Trying to remember but not be consumed by an intellectual and physical relationship not only with an individual but with a landscape and a way of life as well.