Thursday Thoughts, A Selbe 10.15.09 Artist statemen rough draft

Another week has flown by in a wink, and midterm crits are right around the bend! I present on this tuesday, so i am stretching myself a little thin trying to get everything ready for the printers.. and finding a good price for my long prints.

In the past week, I boiled down and defined the reasoning behind the pieces that will be presented on Tuesday. I did a lot of thinking, and questioning of myself and my work trying to figure out all the questions i might be asked and how to answer them clearly.

I hope that my pieces will be visually intriguing, i know that they are to me i just hope that others find some meaning behind them. I wrote a rambling rough draft of an artist statement:

Artist Statement

Rough Draft

Time is a strange thing. We cannot rewind or freeze as much as we may want to. We do not get redo’s in life, there is no pause or erase. Every decision we make is concrete in that second. Children always seem to wish for something different. To be finished with school, to be in college, to get out of their parents house; and their elders are always telling them to slow down and enjoy it because it only gets harder from here. Well I am still that child, wishing to speed up time and be somewhere else.

While creating this project I happened on an idea that reconstructed visually and ideally the concept I am working on. I started out with making comparisons between the “chaos” and “calm” in people’s everyday lives. I had my heart set of taking a picture of an egg just as it is breaking when it hits the hard floor. I wanted to show the chaos of the viewer not being able to stop the breakage and compare it to a similar image that represented calm. As I was working and stressing over getting the perfect image of this egg, I didn’t realize what I had stumbled upon until my teacher Jeff pointed out the visual significance of the contact sheets I had made. This is where the whole project is flipped around.

The contact sheets of the eggs created this greater picture. It is almost the evidence of failure, the visual strive for perfection falling short; each individual image is a failure, not capturing the exact moment I wanted to find in this shoot. Even if I had found that perfect image, no matter how perfect if might be, would it be as compelling and interesting as seeing all 1,000 failures at once. It is a metaphor for the journey in life. You have to fail a million time to get where you want to be and have the things you want to have; so in the long run what is more important, the individual goal or the journey that gets you there. Ultimately it is up to the individual what is more important. Some people might be ok for suffering for 20 years to get to one point. For me, everyday is a blessing and it is important to have goals, but it is more important to me for everyday to important.

This is what is project is, it may have started out trying to achieve something that is almost impossible, the end result…… is the journey. Does it matter that the goal was not accomplished? Maybe, maybe not. But the beauty in it is the journey it created. So it’s not the egg anymore it is the everyday... Some days fly by like nothing happened. Some crash and burn, and others are a perfect moment.

I know this statement is nothing near to perfect but this is how i write to figure things out. I am going to boil this down to a few sentences for an easy to understand explanation for the critique and i will develop this idea into my real artist statement for my power point.