Exhibit Piece

For our final and conclusion to the semester and project we put together an exhibit to display all of our work and the many iterations that came from a song.

How did I arrive to this point? After completing my dance and the first wooden draft to interpret my dance we were asked create a structure out of wood using at least one type of joinery. The vertical plane with the green string wrapped around it was what I decided to focus on. Not only was it inspired by my favorite part of the dance, I also liked the way I placed the sticks and the space that they actually took up.

Because I am such a planner and an analytical thinker I kept sketching and making different blue prints to try and figure out what I wanted to do and how to execute it. I finally came up with an idea that involved cutting the wood into these saw tooth planks and some how joining them together and staining them to get this dramatic chevron pattern. Well, after much editing and playing around with other ideas of inlaying the wood, making dowels to connect the wood, and even staining the individual pieces black and white, I finally came up with following end result.

As you can see some of the design choices that I talked about above did not make it in to the final creation, but I am very pleased with my results. After speaking with Prof. Mendoza and another student I decided to take their advice and just stain the wood so as to only enhance the grain. I think this was a smart decision. Because of all the movement and shapes that the saw tooth planks create I believe adding color would have taken away from the visual aesthetic of this piece. From the side your eye puts together a chevron pattern on its own. I find it interesting that I did not have to be so literal and forcing the viewer to see a chevron pattern and that due to the way I placed the wood a chevron pattern is suggested, but the viewers eye and mind make the idea an absolute. The other view I like in the piece is the areal view. The way that the wood ends point to the center and direct your eye to that focal point is a dynamic that I hadn't originally planned for, but am glad that it came to life. I thought it was fortuitous that in the previous post "Turning a Song into 3D Space" I talked about how in the song I enjoyed the tribal-like beats the percussions made in the song. When looking at this piece from an areal view it reminds me of something tribal, even Aztecan. The type of joinery that I ended up using was dado that I created by cutting the grooves into the base for the planks to slide into.

The last iteration of the song I danced to was to create a pattern and have it printed on fabric.

The design I created above was filled with a lot of skepticism at first, but I decided to go on intuition and once again, I am very pleased with how well the pattern printed on the fabric. The one thing I would have like to have seen was maybe making the print itself darker. After much editing I just couldn't figure out how to get my brush strokes darker using Adobe Illustrator, so I settled for  this. I think choosing a more limber fabric helped with making the pattern stand out even the more. To present this fabric for my exhibit I thought draping it on a body form would be the most appropriate considering the song, dance, pattern design, and texture of the fabric itself.