Katie told me about a fundraising project she was putting on, to benefit Working With Artists.
She took 5 bucks from me and gave me this:
A 4" square card with a few marks. The idea is that a whole bunch of people take one of these (after forfeiting $5) and create something on them - everyone's design has to somewhat correspond to the marks on the card. Then, we'll all put them together, and when we do, we'll make an exquisite corpse.
"More like a tiling", I told Katie, as with an exquisite corpse, you either see a little bit of the other person's drawing or the last few words of a sentence. In a tiling, you just want all the tiles to match up, somehow - and that's what the marks were - match points.
Now tiles and tiling are
"fold, bend, crease, close, collapse - crash.", May Installation, Andenken Gallery, 2' x 10' x 10'
"Step Out", July 2004 Installation at The Assembly
"And Dodd, Jul. ", January 2005 Installation at Pod/Capsule.
something I know quite a bit about. And I really didn't want to make a patterned tiling. The few examples Katie showed me of other people's work were patterns. I really didn't like the marks, as they had four points of reflective symmetry and four points of rotational symmetry - this can make a design somewhat dull and having perhaps, a hundred such designs - seemed like a snore. I wanted to break that up a bit on my own. And I like being a smart ass.
So, I asked myself: what's something that has many similar points, but all points are unique?
Well,
A city built on a grid pattern, like say, Denver:
has many physical points and each location is different. The points are laid out on an actual grid, so that you can almost fold a map of the city and all the streets will still align up - downtown Denver
has relective and rotational symmetry.
A good start.
Then I asked myself,
What could contrast a human made system, based on the logical grid? How about something natural? How about, the human face? Its form isn't based on the layout of a grid, but rather how muscle, skin and fat are attached to a framework of bone.
How about this face?
But, let's draw it - a drawing is an abstraction and also a unique and personal view of the original:
Could it be fun to see if we could find similarities between this drawing, and a map of the city that the person whom I drew lives?
Could these two different things share any visual similarities?
Well, no that really doesn't do it. More playing...
How about like this?
Even though most of the city is on a grid, some major arteries and highways, aren't. There's many reasons why this is, convenience of the placement, but also physical features of the terrain - rivers, hills - just off the map is a huge mountain range where it wouldn't be possible to build a gridded city.
The ability to see the similarities between these highway routes and some of the lines in the drawing is a human talent - if you look at the design long enough, most likely, you'll see the similarities. I think humans like figuring out how to disparate things fit together. We like making sense of what we see.
Just to finish this all off,
I can play with the colors of the map,
and switch the map around,
since we're not really using the map as a map, but instead as more of design element. Playing with the colors and flipping the map around introduces a type of abstraction - it becomes less apparent that what you're looking at is actually made from a map.
Color the woman blue and Viola! We're done!
The idea that the woman drawn is from Denver is a personal thing - if I didn't tell you, you wouldn't have known, but you may have inferred.
The drawing of the woman is colored blue and the maps has been colored red - with a fairly similar degree of lightness. This gives the design a tendency to look as if it's fluttering - this is a basic lesson in color theory.
The whole idea of joining two opposing things in one design reflects and complements the idea that this one design will soon be joined on four sides with four different designs. This is the basic concept and allows the idea to have sort of a fractal dimension to itself.
I guess this little piece is going for auction - it'll soon be shown publicaly. Hopefully, it'll raise a little more money for the non profit org.
--alex - with much design inspiration from Alan Fletcher and his book, "Beware Wet Paint"
