Skip to main content

Final, Untitled


Untitled, Ethan Swanson, 2022

    I am really happy with how this project turned out, out of what art I have made, this is what I am most proud of. With other projects I feel like I haven't completely gotten what I wanted out of it personally, or people didn't totally react to is how I wanted. But this one was really meaningful all around. It was so wonderful to make something that feels super personal to me, but also exists on its own without being connected to me. 

    It was so fun to learn how to make plaster casts (thanks again Charlie :) ), as well as figuring out how to use the space. The physicality of putting it together was also so rewarding, I feel that there was a lot of meaning created by putting it together alone, with my own hands. Using direct animation was also so fun, and I really look forward to doing it again. Although I love film, I often find that it is kind of distanced because of the use of a camera, but this resolved that for me, I liked creating my own little worlds of paint right on the film stock itself. 

    I'm looking forward to continuing to think and work on this project, because I feel like theres still some things to work out with it. But for the time being I felt this was the perfect way to express feelings of loneliness, isolation, and some of my body image issues. And in that respect it was a really rewarding thing to make, somewhat exorcising, or at least working through those feelings. Plus I just thing it looks cool lol. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

My Flickr Findings

  My Flickr Blume No. 2 "Something is happening here and you don't know what it is, do you, Mister Jones?" (Bob Dylan, 1965)          I just took this quote on a very literal level instead of its total meaning. I like the idea of something that is happening that is under everyones radar, so that's what I tried to do with the abstraction in the photos. I like making people see things in a way that they can't with their naked eye.      I took all these photos on a walk in the evening this past weekend. I focused mostly on making more abstract pictures because that is what I generally like to do in my art. To support that I manipulated them quite a bit in photoshop. I had a lot of fun in messing in the 'Curves' menu, I found that was a really good way to mess with them (especially in black and white). Overall I think that most of my photos are  successful, about 16 of them I'm happy with. There were some I included to just reach the 20 photos. I am intere

Representative Activism

Justice MMIWG, Valaria Tatera, 2019-2021     I found Valaria Tatera's talk incredibly moving and informative. I had absolutely no idea Enbridge pipeline 5 existed or that Wisconsin even had residential schools. I think growing up in Wisconsin gave me the impression that most of the injustices meted out against native peoples were in other places, it was worrying to find out the same happened here. Although sadly it's not that surprising.      My complete ignorance on the topic shows just how deficient the school system is in the US, where the majority population can just choose to leave out the more unpleasant parts of history that make them look bad. This is why Tatera's art is so necessary, not only is it a healing process for herself, which would be important enough by itself, it makes people focus on what  they'd rather ignore.   "Whence did the wond'rous mystic art arise, of painting SPEECH and speaking to the eyes? That we by tracing magic lines are taugh

Picnic Projections

      I really loved making our installation piece. The freedom we had to do whatever was so liberating. I was so impressed with how we had a bunch of different themes emerge from all the random stuff we brought, and how the piece felt pretty cohesive overall. The piece to me has a feeling of a picnic gone wrong. The front half especially is full of such vibrant colors and flowers, feeling inviting at first glance. Then as you look at it longer and read the writing on the walls, it feels a little more ominous. The back on the other hand takes this aggression further, with the book on the wall yelling at you along with all the 'Not for Sale" signs. It felt very current to make something that also seemed to be commenting on the environment. All the greens in the room and the flowers coming out of the trash definitely added to that, along with the fact that the possible consumerism of our 'store' was aborted by the 'Not For Sale' signs. I think it would be interes