Thesis Response

There were a lot of decisions that were made about my thesis that came after writing my paper. I often felt while writing my paper that I had a lot of elements that were undecided that I gave only a general description of. Originally, I was not planning on counting the times that I would break each restriction. Once that was decided, it was then how do I show this information? This I had mentioned but I had no idea how I was going to display the tracking of this rule breaking. For awhile I considered just marking the pages with a marker using some kind of tally. However, after many design crits this proved to be sort of unclear and I knew I had to take a more direct approach. It wasn't until literally the week before installation that I decided on using a stamp to mark the progress and changes in my thesis as I break the rules during the duration of the show. This was not mentioned in my paper since it was a last minute change before the week of installation. Deciding to use the word "Broken" and in red ink was decided the Thursday before installation. Also, knowing how much space I was going to need in the gallery was something that was totally up in the air until the first day of installation. I had tried getting into contact with everyone in the gallery room to see how much space they needed and to discuss a fair space for everyone. My piece since it was the tiling of flyers had a little more breathing room for editing width and height. However, due to some last minute requests by other people in my room and I was left with only a small corner on the opposite side of where I was originally assigned which then after speaking with Caetlynn we figured out a fair space for me so then I could start planning the height of the installation. Idealy if I could have figured out the exact dimensions of space that I could use I would have figured out all of the measurements and figured out exactly how the tiling of the flyers was going to work. I started installing sort of "guessing" if you will my way through it and I had the wrong measurements for the height of the ceiling and was able to fit one more flyer than expected with about a 3 inch breather from the ceiling. I lucked out with how my piece worked in the space. I wanted to preplan everything so that I would not run into any errors or issues along the way but there were so many factors that were unknown up until the week of installation that unfortunately I couldn't really plan ahead too much. I wish that the paper was due maybe by the show opening or the week of installation because I had made a lot of last minute changes and decisions about my thesis. Picking the 4 variations of colored flyers was something that took me awhile to decide. Each color represented a different category of restrictions. I knew the look I was going for but I could not find the exact subtle variations in 11 x 17 papers for awhile until I decided I needed to special order samples from Mohawk papers and hope that they looked the same in person as they did online. Even the pins were something that was decided after my thesis proposal. I knew I'd be using only 2 and only on the top of each flyers but the type of pins were undecided. I went back and forth between map pins and push pins and having them be white on the head of the pin or metallic. I love the way the metallic pins worked out. They created a nice contrast to the papers as well as the red stamp. My thesis had gone through so many changes since the beginning of the semester. I went from having 75 rules to 135 and I couldn't even fit them all. I started with 8.5 x 11 flyers and decided to go with 11 x 17 because it allowed me to go bigger and clearer on the typography as to create less hyphens and more legibility. I went with Impact as a typeface because it is bold and reminiscent of signage. This was unclear in my thesis paper as well. 3 of the 4 papers I used were linen paper so it created a subtle texture and the 4th paper was fiber paper which had a subtle pattern as well but different from the rest. Another extremely last minute decision was that how do I let the viewers know that this is an interactive work and that I will be stamping the work as I break my rules. Up until Thursday before the opening of the show I had originally planned on leaving a stool next to my piece with the stamp and ink somehow secured so no one could steal it but to signify that this is an ongoing additive piece. However, literally 3 minutes after I put the stamp down for the purposes of my very last design critique before the guest critics the next day, some unknown student came into the gallery (before the show was open) and took initiative to start stamping my piece. After 4 days straight of spending hours in the gallery installing my thesis I finally felt done and then this girl stamped 3 of my flyers signifying that I broke those 3 rules. She stamped cheat on boyfriend, weigh more than 120lbs, and one other flyer. I never broke any of these. I was quite devastated because I knew I'd have to reprint these and not have them up in time for the guest critic to come and see. After that disaster, it was clear that I could not leave the stamp in the gallery and Gerry suggested having a blog that I upload pictures to showing the 'performances' of stamping my piece over the next 2 weeks. I was a fan of this idea so I created a blog and started uploading images to it. Unfortunately, even though I told the person in charge of the wall vinyl that I needed to mention the blog address so people can visit the blog it was not ever printed on my wall vinyl. So pretty much no one knows about the blog and/or about the performances. I don't know if I can fix this before the show closes. Any suggestions? Anyway, this was not mentioned in my paper either. I am extremely happy about the outcome of my thesis. Although it was a long and crazy road to get here I think it turned out well whether people understood it or not.

Crit Response

During critique I was able to put up a mock up installation of how I want my thesis to look. I changed my flyers size to 11 x 17 to ensure that I can make the flyers reach the ceiling in the gallery space. During crit I had the flyers printed out on 8.5 x 11 white sheets of paper which people responded to. However, I categorized all of my flyers into certain categories that I wanted to demonstrate through colored sheets of paper. However, after discussing it with my teacher and also the crit group it was agreed that colors have their own connotations to them which then distract from the actual content of the type itself. The group liked the stark black and white feature of the installation and I used red pins only as convenience because that was what was in the room but the group really like how the red pins jumped off the white paper. I'm not going to use colored pins because I'm afraid they will be too distracting. Recently, I've looked into using slight variations of off-white sheets of paper for the actual installation that will have extremely subtle differences but still be able to represent the different categories that I created. I was originally thinking of not only making the installation from floor to ceiling but actually having flyers go onto the ceiling and onto the floor. I still like the idea of the floor but the ceiling I don't think is necessary. If I put the flyers on the floor.. I was thinking of having an entire second set of the flyers either spread out on the ground or neatly in a stack so that people could look through them individually and really get to see all of them up close. Some of the problems that were seen were the typography not being consistent in each flyer. I roughly put the text on each sheet however now they're all consistent with each other, centered, and don't have too many ragged edges that make weird shapes when you stand further away. Another issue brought up were certain restrictions I had on the flyers weren't as personal as some of the other ones such as don't get arrested, don't hurt an animal..these things are more of a common sense thing that most people will want to follow so I took out some of the more generalized ones and added more than pertain more to me and my personal restrictions.

Crit Blog Response for Princess's Thesis

I couldn't post on Princess's blog because hers is on tumblr. I really like where she is going with her thesis. In crit we briefly spoke about the scientific info behind all of the hair relaxers and chemicals that are used in african american women's hair to straighten or curl their hair and the dangers involved in using these chemicals. We spoke about possibly including a salon chair or the actual chemicals in her thesis display along with her paintings however it was concluded that it was not necessary. She included one 'before' picture in her series that included a head on shot of this woman amongst all of the stereotypical 'after' portraits that were awkwardly posed and not natural. I really liked the inclusion of this picture because it creates a nice balance between all of the other paintings she has worked on so far. I like how she has a corner in the gallery to fill with her works and all in a line which I think would like really nice. Basically, she's pretty much on the right path and she just needs to keep working on them but they look amazing so far.

Crit

For crit I didn't have too much material to show other than some content I have organized and also some sketches for how I'd like to lay out my thesis. My thesis is based on restrictions and I created an organized list of my own personal life restrictions and are using them as my content. I'm illustrating all of about 100 of them in individual flyers that I will post on the wall from floor to ceiling. Each restriction has a short narrative attached to them and I plan on presenting those in a separate catalog. Over each flyer, I want the same printing X on either vellum or clear paper to signify these are all of the things I 'can't' do. The group was concerned about the visibility of the flyers behind the possible vellum paper with the printing X on top and this is a concern of mine also. This coming week I plan to have actual mock ups to see how the really look and try and figure out how to communicate my message in the most clear and interesting way. I organized my restrictions into categories: personal, personal appearance, work, money, parents, school, fears, health/food. Each flyer will be color coordinated to match each category. I also realized I sometimes break my own restrictions. I want to organize the flyers based on how often I break my own restrictions. I basically want the installation to be an overwhelming list of things that I can't do.

Just thought this was an entertaining psa.