For this week, I decided to make art, mostly as a way to have dedicated time placed aside to relax amidst finals season, a consistently stressful time for any university. I have always loved collaging, but never give myself the time to pursue it as an art practice, despite continuing to collect materials like newspaper and magazine clippings. This week, then, I decided to spend some time collaging.
The first day, I picked up a copy of the Brown Daily Herald and pulled out my stash of collaging supplies, which included magazine clippings, construction paper, glue, and sharpies. I began by cutting up the newspaper so that I had a bunch of little triangles, since I really liked the look of the cut off black and white words, especially as they would contrast with the bright color of the construction paper. Even though I do not consider myself an artist, I did take VISA 100 my first year and I learned that when I do create art, I like to have a clear theme or idea behind the work. Once I had the triangles cut out and a plan to glue them down on the construction paper, I came up with an idea of mixing conspiracy theories with childlike, craft materials like construction paper, crayons, and sharpie as a way to show how juvenile some of these conspiracy theories are. While it is not necessarily a fully formed idea, it was intriguing enough that I thought I could make a series of it.
The first collage I made was the one on the blue paper, where the elements of conspiracy are the small lines connecting the fragmented pieces, like red string on a board, and the annotations of words and question marks with crayon.
The second collage I made was the one on pink paper, where I took an article from The Indy about robots and AI and blacked out the majority of the words with a pink sharpie, leaving only words that I could imagine relating to conspiracy visible.
The last collage I made was the green one, which included infographics from a later article of the Brown Daily Herald. I wanted to switch up the shapes between the three so I followed the circular nature of the graphs to make circle cutouts, where I drew in security cameras.
For the remaining two days, I participated in other art practices. The first was actually a band event, where I went carolling around campus, playing holiday music in the dining halls and libraries. The last day, I worked on my Poetry Final, which was a massive brochure made up of a digital collage.
Reflecting on taking up an artistic practice, I think the biggest thing I learned is how much of artmaking is about taking up space. This was most evident when I was carolling with the band, when we would be taking peoples’ attention away from their studies to listen to our music, but it can also be applied to the collages I made as well. At the end of the day, this art is being created with the idea of making something that people will want to take time away to look at. Being an artist is about taking up space and drawing attention to yourself. I relate this reflection to our discussions in class around Dana Schutz’s Open Casket. Open Casket was her way of taking space in a discourse, space that many saw was not hers to take.
