Homework #11

For this week's homework, I decided to make work to develop myself as an artist. I have taken the photographs when there was still snow outside, and used Photoshop to add layers to them. I wrote an statement which is like a synthesis of my artistic self. The below is the following, and the images go with the statement:

My alter ego is a time traveler who is on a mystical quest to find her true love. This love is real. It has always existed even before she was born, but she learns to recognize its mystery through traveling in and out of a space that loses itself by the minute. To love is to transcend all things that conform to the ways of this world, so she embarks on a journey to follow her heart. No one knows what the journey will be like, and everything is uncertain.

In this journey, the time traveler creates portals to move across the universe. She seeks to know what is beyond herself, and portals allow entry into a time and a place that holds the essence of things. She needs to extract them like an alchemist, and must find a way to combine and transform them to make portals that will take her to next destination.

The essence of things remain hidden for the most. Sometimes they are missed unaware, and other times they flee so fast that she fails to catch them. However, they also exist everywhere as time does.

Figuring out this paradox is solving the enigma of capturing anything. If the time traveler were to extract the soul of time from moments that remind us of love, she returns her love by capturing it on canvas.

The ability to extract the essence comes from the power of love; art and life are merged when the time traveler releases this energy. I become the time traveler in this process, and make portals with paint. Portals are made with love from my own life, and with love that she discovers in her travels. Without love, the time traveler vanishes, and I cannot make art. Love sustains her travels, and she travels in order to find love that will last forever. Love transforms all things, and time is reconfigured as love.

The world inside each portal presents a place that feels like home. The places that she visits through the portals are the places that I have been to, and the places that I live in my heart. These are the places that bring romance to the world that denies what love could bring. They are found in nature, in our fantasies, and in our dreams that seem impossible. But they also live in the ordinary and the simple.  

Outside the portal, time moves chaotically. It jumps, melts, bends, and suspends without warning. Time has its own destiny to fulfill, and the time traveler surrenders to its force of nature. However, time becomes her lover at times. These moments of love are rare because she does not own it; time is free to leave when it wants to go elsewhere. Only when timelessness becomes ethereal, loving it becomes possible.

Being in love with time is to become closer to reality. I need to be in love with the present to make portals. The time traveler is ultimately after learning about what true love is by falling in love with the present. Time never comes back. It lives in the present. It presents us with a potential to find our own destinies in life before it bursts above the clouds. When the time comes, we can either capture it or let it vanish.

What remains of time travel in our imagination, and I make art to keep in touch with time that allows me to build a sense of my evolving self. Making portals is not easy. Every portal that I make is an attempt to capture a part of myself living inside a dream that motivates me to wake up every day. I want to create an alternate experience of living in the real world, and I dream of transporting my viewers to places where magic come alive.

The time traveler glides between fantasy and reality, but her cosmic wanderlust begins to fade away when she enters the portal. As she settles down in a place that feels like home, the unknown is no longer terrifying. The strange becomes familiar, and the feelings experienced in the imagined landscapes become real. There is no rush inside the timeless space. But time is running out, outside the portal. More adventures await her arrival; she must find a way to realize her destiny.

The time traveler continues her voyage across the universe to find her true love, and I make art to reach mine. The point of departure is always in transformation. Through transformation, I become closer to what I can become in the future. The key to this potentiality is found in the present; it is in the present that I am able to move toward my dream. Making the actual portal is akin to transforming the present, and I want my viewers to become adventurers of their own timescapes through traveling the world inside my portals.

Like the time traveler, I travel to collect the essence of things. I collect images and objects from the places that I visit, and make them into my own before transforming them into portals. By making sketches and taking photographs of the places and things that remind me of love, I gather recipes for creating my next portals. Sometimes it work, and other times nothing happens. But I try again and again to create a map of myself because I am a vessel that accumulates all things that surround me.

Like the adventures of the time traveler, my art is also in flux. I have no idea what will come next. At this time, I place the portals in key moments of her travels and insert myself into these scenes to have my photographs taken. Then the photographs are either digitally edited or manipulated to recreate the moments of her adventures.

While I am currently documenting her travels in stills, I envision myself expanding this quest through music, video, sculpture, installation, and performance. There is no limit to travelling in time, but there is limit in real life; therefore, I make art. Art gives me the courage to fall in love with the present every day, and the boldness to think about the future perfect experiences that I will have captured by the time I stand on the edge of life and death.

Everyone deserves to dream, and my goal as a teacher is to help equip students with open-mindedness and boldness to follow their interests. One lesson idea is that students will create their own "hero/heroine" and insert that self into the art that they are going to make. Through creating their own worlds using a guideline (government, landscape, people, color, food, fashion, health, education, etc.) using digital painting and Microsoft Word, students will create an epic of themselves, and they will learn that anything is possible in art. There is danger when imagination runs rampant, so I will try to guide my students toward making good things for the world. I am not sure how I would deal with special adolescents if they were to use this project for expressing their growing pains/ teenage angst, but I will try my best to talk to them if problems come up. 

For the impact 100 project, I am thinking about creating an online sweepstakes event using Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to give out prizes to those who have many likes. For this project/campaign, I will make one internet ad per day-- Monday to Sunday for promotion. I am planning to use Adobe Illustrator to make the ads.