Speeding Up, Slowing Down, Speeding Up

Now that midterms are approaching I am starting to feel stressed out about my classes, as well as flustered. While I have been thinking a lot and working a lot in my art classes, I feel that I have been especially unproductive lately simply because I have too many ideas, and need to get back into the groove from exploring to creating finished, well thought out works of art. On the bright side, through thinking so much I am finally beginning to pinpoint the theme that I have been working with in Theme sequence, exploration of larger, grander ideas (the political or ethical) through the personal. I still think that my video has been my most successful piece because it was my story, and although it used appropriated imagery, it was honest, and did not have an ulterior motive. So that is what I want my work to be at least for the duration of the semester, honest and transparent.

So in Regan's glass, constructing a memorial for individuals who have reported being physically gay bashed in the US in 2008 (1,341), having been a victim myself, it is an especially challenging task, because unlike my video piece earlier, I want to link my personal experience more closely to a political/ethical statement. So, with where I am right now I plan to do this with anecdotal audio and a drawing/sculpture work channeling influence from contours from different gestures of christ and texture and contrast from cimabue's cross, so that the memorial is meditative rather than violent like most of my sketches for this project were. I am fairly certain that I will be including 1,341 cutouts in this piece so that the number of victims is represented visually, so ideally the cutouts will add up to a larger composition and more complex structure, but in themselves will be minimalistic. This project relates closely to my work in themesequence, and could count for both classes, but there are other works I want to explore in Jana's class before midterm. Besides drawing at Santa Croche I have been looking for textures that resemble the texture in Cimabue's cross, and utilizing simultaneously some form of cutout or flat shape.

Currently in Jana's class I am wrapping up my second finished video, working on some quick large drawings, and brainstorming for a project about slowing down and simplifying, because everything has been moving so fast, including thoughts in my head, which are becoming diluted and overly complex cryptic.
This idea of over-stimulation was literally manifested in my trip to Venice as although everything was beautiful and inspiring, after several hours of walking around I felt overwhelmed and fatigued. So one way that I started simplifying things was going to my hostel in Tessera and walking around the town which, was partially rural, reminding me a lot of suburbs in from my home in Maryland. Another way that I started to simplify things, was to start taking underdeveloped pictures of the environment around me until everything started to appear more calm and void. I am not sure exactly where I want to go with these images I have collected, but I do know that I want to speed up a bit, as midterm is approaching.
Wow, this blogpost gave me a bit of clarity to my thoughts.
Signing off
here are a lot of images
-Danny