Hotel of Secrets

Our class's theme for the hotel show was secrets. We each interpreted them in our own way. What I wanted to do was make an interactive piece where the audience could pick through and touch and read in any order and however many they wanted to.

I chose the refrigerator as the house for secrets that I gathered from a website that posted anonymous secrets (postsecret.com) and from my own followers on tumblr. I asked them to send me their own secrets and was able to gather a lot! I then sifted through and took out the ones I found most interesting, printed them out, sliced them up, and put them in glass jars. This way, people could pick them up and look at them.

Site-Specific Installation

 I have a a hobby of going by or near spooky places at night. I like to do amateur ghost hunting because even though I am usually afraid of the dark and I don't like being alone outside (because I am a small woman). I have a deep fascination of the afterlife and have had a lot of strange encounters with the paranormal before, so whenever I can incorporate something scary in my work, I will.

The site I chose was one I pass every day. Markland house is the oldest plantation home in the area (or so I have heard) and has been around for a very long time. It was build in 1839. The original owner of the house died of the yellow fever epidemic. Though nothing comes up about there being any actual slaves living there, or anything else for that matter online, I had heard rumors of it being haunted and it has always given me a creepy feeling.

I then decided to just do a reaction piece to how I feel about the house. I made little simple ghosts out of black model magic and posted them in places together. I wanted them to look like they were oozing out of the structure or out of the shadows. The idea is that they slowly come out after dark and just chill out there. Their design came from a piece of photo manipulation I did a while ago for fun.

With all of this in mind, I made a bunch of little ghosts, using glow in the dark paint for their eyes. 

Communal Art: Peepholes

Working with Sphere was a pleasure. After I was unable to trust my first choice to allow me to put art in their window, I found an older store that didn't have the same strict rules put upon it. As someone who is spiritual, herself, I found getting inspiration for this project- with the idea of Sphere and their new age theme- extremely easy and serendipitous. My first thought was to do something that was very obviously connected to Buddhism. But the way I saw it in my head was so fabricated and not natural that I didn't like it and didn't work on it for a long time. When I started to slowly move away from the idea of my own religion and just create something that used nature and my own personal meanings to it, I was able to come up with a whimsical shrine that I really loved.

One artist that inspired the initial shape of the hole for the peephole itself was Andy Goldsworth who used repeating shapes and places them in a gradient in nature to make these pulsating, curious earth works. Specifically, the piece that inspired me directly was this one:

I just really like the visual idea of it. But I wanted to make mine more chaotic. As if it was put together by something other than human, in a way. Something not manufactured. 

Work in Process Images:
I started placing twigs around the mouth of he black box I made with foam board. I used black because I wanted it to be less obvious in the dark. It definitely looks better in the dark.

I also added mulch to the sides to keep the color scheme and all over theme. The cloth inside is saffron that I had in my room. The pastel, vintage pink goes nicely with the light coloring of the twigs. 

The lights are LED lights that I had set so that they would twinkle. It ended up turning into a small fairy nest which pleased me a lot. I just let it evolve itself and went with what it told me to do, if that makes sense.

Philosophy On The Way to Ecology

I started with what Phenomenology was and then wrote a poem about a situation I went through as a child and how my memory presents it to me. How I relive that memory is not correct (because I always see everything from the sky and I obviously wasn't floating when all of this was happening) and  that is phenomenology.

I remember seeing it from the sky.
Fire on the stove.
My little sister sitting underneath.
My mother screaming.
My step father, not there.

I’m at the backdoor watching two men run in.
They are our neighbors,
Refusing to stop,
Bringing in jugs of water.

My mother cries and hugs my sister.
I am in the air.
The fire trucks arrive and everyone is relieved.
I saw them coming from my seat up high.
I knew it was going to be fine.
The breeze was very soft.

Ecology of Magic

This chapter was a beautiful mix of a person learning and understanding nature and an unfamiliar culture. It was filled with layer upon layer of beautiful imagery and words and it was difficult to come up with something solid until around the end of the chapter. After he found the "house spirits," and after he watched the spiders make their webs during the monsoon, he mentions something about real shamans understanding nature on a more serious level than westerners who are just trying to achieve that same level.

I started thinking about how many different ways one could get closer to nature and how it could be shared. I then remembered that there is a tea site where you can make your own blends and sell them for points so that you can continue buying teas.

I made an account and then chose tea flavors that complement each other. I chose tea because it reminds me of the natural. It's a way to ingest it.

http://www.adagio.com/signature_blend/blend.html?blend=62521