Methods Of Inquiry

I'm Jay, a freshman at STAMPs, and this is my tumblr for documenting my work in the class Methods of Inquiry

[ajaydw]

Reflection

This piece was an amazing opportunity for me. I adored every part of this class and doing group projects was a breath of fresh air, but I’m glad I got to step back into my own space and do something I really enjoyed. During this project, I went through several different iterations of this piece and was eventually able to cut the fat and some of the unnecessary difficulty I was creating for myself and just have fun with it. I think allowing myself to make a project I enjoyed, allowed me to be more introspective, instead of getting stuck in the fine details of making and missing the bigger picture of the project: to self reflect. Overall I’d say I was able to reach my goals in this project, and for the class through the project and I ended up learning a lot about myself and my process.

[ajaydw]

Creative Statement:

This piece is a reflection of myself; of myself as I see me, how others see me, my work, and myself in this class. I chose to do a self portrait, a rather direct reflection of the self, and involve other people in my life in the making process by asking for color palettes from friends, family, and classmates and splitting the portrait into sections and finally, ascribing a color pallette to each section. I kept myself and my own ideas about myself in the piece by 1) making it an illustration in a medium I enjoy 2) making it my height and 3) tying the entire piece together with one color shading.

[ajaydw]

The final piece digitally as well as physically. I am so happy with the way it turned out! The entire thing is shaded with one color. My next steps are to fix a couple issues and reprint the whole thing as well as backing it this time.

[ajaydw]

The beginning of the end, last step is finishing touches and the piece will be complete!

[ajaydw]

A selection of color pallets I used for the mapping project, how are they used? Wait and find out!

[ajaydw]

My final photo I chose for my project as well as a selection of the reject photos (though I still love a lot of them).

[ajaydw]

Done!

Thank you for your patience, I’m excited to announce that I’m finally done with both my mapping project and my first year of college. Look forward to more posts about my mapping process soon!

[ajaydw]

Changing Directions

After a lot of prep work I’ve decided to change directions with my mapping project as I 1) bit off more than I can chew and 2) a new direction will overall create a better, more well balanced piece that isn’t so disjointed and overwhelming. I have several ideas that I’ll be implementing shortly and I’m really excited to see this project to completion.

[ajaydw]

The introduction presentation to my mapping project. How will this actually turn out? Only time (and a lot of hard work) will tell!

[ajaydw]

Part of my initial sketch before I lined it up and after I lined it up and re-sketched some of it so everything lined up better. I still have a bit of work to do to get all the proportions right but I’m excited about the direction this is going!

[ajaydw]

My very preliminary work for the Mapping project! I always have to write and sketch everything out before I can actually start any sort of drawing. I used this as the basis for how I wanted to photograph myself as well.

[licoj]

ARTDES 130: Body Extensions in Use

Reflection:

As soon as our sculptures are visible as an actual extension of our bodies, it becomes clear there is a purpose. In this case, the purpose is to form a connection, a pathway between them to which a greater substance can maneuver through. That substance is water. Water because with a vast range of differences between us, water remains the same within us all. Each extension is built around a particular aspect about each of us that makes us unique, however designed to carry the same exact substance across us. This goes to show that despite all being different on the surface, we all must play by the same rules. Water will not change person to person – the way we handle it is under our control and ultimately what makes us unique.

My extension in particular references my strengths intellectually and physically. I find myself as a curious person. If something catches my interest, I like to physically engage with it. That means using my hands to manipulate the way I perceive it. I am a hands-on person, not afraid to get them dirty. I exploit that by being the only extension in our group to utilize the hand and the degrees of freedom it has. Additionally, I am a practical person. While I do consider myself creative, I am just as much logical – and I think of that as an advantage. When conceptualizing this process, I knew that water is bound first by gravity, therefore in order for water to pass through five people horizontally, the initial height needed to be high. My extension is the embodiment of both ideas – creating a utilitarian device that exploits the use of my hands, as well as creating a significant height at which the the potential for the water to engage with our extensions was much greater.

[ajaydw]

We Did It!

I’m incredibly proud and grateful to my group members @amgara @laurentrail @victoriasurewould and @licoj for their amazing work and dedication.

Next up is the Mapping project which I’m very excited for and will be posting more about soon!

[licoj]

ARTDES 130: Body Extension Project Video with @amgara @ajaydw @laurentrail @victoriasurewould

[licoj]

ARTDES 130: Body Extensions Documented

Reflection:

Each extension, on their own, does not give much indication of the greater whole. Some may indicate or hint at being a container of a liquid, but nothing more. They very well could be sculptures in and of themselves. But when engaged with a user, the perception changes and it suddenly becomes one of a utilitarian purpose.

[licoj]

ARTDES 130: Body Extension Progress with @ajaydw @laurentrail @victoriasurewould @amgara

Complete! ✅

[amgara]

Body extension progress

With @ajaydw @licoj @laurentrail @victoriasurewould

 So far we’ve made really good progress on the project. We began by a long discussion of ourselves and what we wanted to do. We played around with a gear motif for a while, but in the end dropped it as we didn’t feel like it would be meaningful of visually interesting enough.

We came up with the general concept for the project with rough sketches, and then began to model it to visualize it in the program sketch-up as done by @licoj. We discussed mechanics and feasibility a lot, trying to talk out possible problems with the design.

After finalizing the designs we put the shapes into illustrator, to prep them for the laser cutter. We decided on using the laser cutter because we decided to make multiple stacks of the layers to create thickness and more stability. We wanted our pieces to be neat and clean and it would be easier to achieve that by cutting with the laser cutter.

We’re currently in the process of finishing cutting the pieces out and beginning to assemble them with glue gun. We plan to use chipboard for extra support if needed and to coat the cardboard in a primer so it’ll repeal water, which we intend to use in the project.