14. Midterm Piece

Artist Statement

This piece is an assignment that will be graded as part of our midterm, our assigned prompt being full community inclusion for everyone; no matter race, sexuality, or disability. This piece, besides being apart of our midterm grade, will also be entered in the 2018 Inclusion Awards. Hosted by the Maine Developmental Disabilities Council, the point of the competition is to help raise awareness in Maine about inclusion in communities; no matter who’s apart of them. For this piece, I stuck with pretty basic materials. Plain white paper, I actually drew this assignment in my personal art journal, as when we were assigned this, I didn't have excess to any bigger base materials; and, in all honesty, when I was sketching out this idea I did want to keep it on the smaller side. Besides that, the only other materials that I used was black and gray pen ink.

Compared to my original sketch, the common subjects (the picture frames) didn't really change; they were just organized differently. Originally I hadn't planned for any sort of overlay with the frames, instead originally choosing to just have them placed next to each other and separated a little bit. But as I began to mark up my journal page, measuring out the different dimensions of the frames, I began to lean towards a more clustered design. Something I’m actually pretty pleased with since I think it matches the message that I was going for better, but I will go more in depth with that later. Besides that, I’d also originally planned to include some word bubbles in the piece, the different individuals in the portraits saying the phrases: “Different individuals…”, “But united as one…”, “We are a community…”. But after adding the overlapping with the frames, I thought that if I added the word bubbles the piece would just become too busy.

The connection that I wanted to make in this piece was finding the common threads between a community and the idea of ‘family’. Though we normally connect the definition of family with individuals that we’re blood-related to, I believe the term family extends beyond people that were related to on that basis; one of those examples being a community. So in this piece that is supposed to be centered around the theme of community, and the non-divide ideal of it, I decided to draw inspiration for my piece from a very ‘family’ connected thing; pictures. Creating a sort of compilation of them, all the different people in the pictures aren't family, but with the way that they’re organized, it’s applied that they are all just as close. A community, just a close as family, inclusive to everyone; something that I believe this promote was really striving for.

Overall I really like how this piece came out. My interpretation of the concept I believe is interesting and I really like how it all came together in the end. If I was to revise this in the future though, I’d probably try to find a way I can incorporate the phrases that were originally supposed to be in the speech bubbles, like I mentioned above, somewhere else in this piece. I really like how the phrases are worded a and I think they only have the ability to strengthen this piece.