This next project is a pinhole camera, also known as a “time changer.” That title is accurate, as time has definitely changed since I started it in March, and finished it in May. We began this project just before Spring Break, as butterflies danced atop the heads of dandelions reaching towards the sun, like arms, emerging from a verdant sea. Birds were singing, rainbows straddled the horizon line, and all around, the inescapable promise of life born anew!

Now we’re in the midst of a global pandemic. Those verdant fields have been replaced with crimson streets awash in blood, the sunshine, with rains of smoldering ash. I fall asleep to distant screams and wake up to cacophonous silence. The apocalypse has come. Is this blog post still a homework assignment, or an epitaph for mankind?

In all seriousness, it feels like a lifetime has passed over the course of this project. When I brought it home from school, it was a fairly intricate clay sculpture: A monstrous head, sitting upon a column wrapped in a twisting knot of intertwined appendages. When I took it out of its box last week, it looked like a tin can sitting on a pile of cocaine. Within 2 months, all of the clay had disintegrated into dust.

The focus of my work thus far has been on technology addiction, so my original concept involved a beast covered in eyeballs holding a dozen or so digital devices around its periphery. I was trying to communicate a sense of stimulus overload. When it broke, I needed to come up with a more abstract method of conveying the same idea, but using the limited number of supplies available to me during quarantine. Was there a way I could rebuild this with 17 cases of Diet Dr. Pepper and a monolith of empty pizza boxes? Ultimately, what I settled on was covering the tin can with broken shards of old CDs and the salvageable clay eyeballs I had leftover from my previous attempt. I liked the way the shiny surfaces of the CDs acted like dozens of small mirrors, catching and reflecting light and images, providing too many sources of information to focus on. I also appreciated that the CDs represent an archaic form of digital media, used to construct a relic of a digital culture. It’s awesome when I blindly stumble into unintended metaphorical gravitas.

(Click to advance images)

This isn’t what I had in mind when I started, it was much more difficult to execute than I imagined, I made a huge mess, and went through a lot of frustration and discarded materials to get here, but I made something. This seems to be the recurring theme of all of my projects this semester. And yet, I’m not complaining. I’m a control freak and impossible to please. In the end, learning to let go, embrace failure, and make the best of a limited skillset will probably be the most valuable thing I’ll have taken from this class.

One of the blog post requirements for class was to share our workspace. Oof, this is going to be a disaster. Before the pandemic, I had a pretty nice set up going. In the den of our tiny apartment I had a drafting table, bins full of supplies, canvases, a custom made, wall mounted drawing board, stacks of sketchbooks and pads of paper, a smaller drawing table, lightboxes…just tons and tons of stuff. It was a lot, but it was organized and relatively neat. As I took these photos, my “studio” looks like it was tossed by the mob looking for the Maltese falcon. It’s in total disarray. In very short order, this had to become my office for work, which meant shoving things aside and bringing in a computer, a different chair, installing more practical lighting, running cables across the room etc. A couple of weeks into things, I remembered I’m still a student, and I needed to reclaim some of that space for homework projects. This meant shoving more things aside, and putting the stuff I need in a place where I can get it, and use it, with more thought put into ease of access than feng shui, aesthetic appeal, or common decency. Scatter a few animal skeletons, and you’d think a cave troll lives here.

A few more weeks of working from home, and one might.

Anyway, here’s my half impractical, barely functional studio, half impractical, barely functional office space.