Project 2 Final - Kathie Trela

The name of this series is I Will Always Be A Strong Polish Woman. It is a series of four 17 inches by 11 inches and one 30 inches by 11 inches poster. The series is telling my story by each poster has a headline and a subtext. The posters go in order from “Time is moving forward. (goodbye childhood)”, “Traditions are changing. (going our separate ways)”, “I am changing. (from a girl to a woman)”, “In my heart (and my soul)”, and the last and most important poster says “I will always be a strong Polish woman. (Zawsze będę silna polska kobieta – direct translation in Polish)”. All of the posters have pictures that I found in my family photo albums and I added filters to them. The typeface of the headline is Bebas and it is set on each photo by numerous layers of blending modes in Photoshop. The main colors are red and white (Polish flag colors), black, and grey. It is a deconstructive series.
My main message is that I am growing up and life is changing. My Polish lifestyle of when I was younger is changing. However, I will always be a strong Polish woman because my Polish heritage will always be a part of me. It will never disappear. It will always be a part of my identity. I am 100% Polish blood and nothing will change that. The first four posters contain photos of me when I was younger. The “I am changing” poster contains four photos of me of different ages. The “In my heart” poster has a close up photo (where my heart is) of a young me wearing a traditional Krakow folk dress. The last poster contains a recent photo of strong Polish woman, including my sister, my mom, my two aunts, and me. The subtext on each poster is intended to give further information regarding the headline.

Identity Final Critique-Hundman

Identity Final - Becky Holloman

This piece is entitled “Family Values” and was created by me, Becky Holloman. It consists of 4 individual pieces each measuring at 8 inches by 16 inches. The pieces were created using Adobe Photoshop and feature a 4 nearly monochromatic (blue, green, purple, yellow) color schemes, one for each piece. These pieces were created over a period of a few weeks but most of the process work and the finals were created from February 21 through February 29.
The medium of this design is a digital projection that will also be a print at a later date. The subject of this piece is my personal identity and how I believe major parts of my identity come from my family. This piece is geometric because of the grid I used to layout my images and text.
This work relates to me because it is about my identity and my family. It is about values and lessons that I have learned from my family members.
I had a hard time with this project, I think mostly because it was a shorter amount of time and a much deeper subject compared to our Worst Job project. I struggled selecting an idea because neither my family nor I really associate our identities with ethnicities, cultures or religions, which were the main prompts given. I finally started thinking about if those subjects don’t identify me, what does? I came up with the idea of using values that I have learned from my family members because I feel that these ideas are lessons that I have learned from my family and have taken as part of my identity.

Identity Final- Leo S

For my self-identity project, I chose a more abstract approach to the framework of questions we were asked to complete in class. I find self identity to be a troubling topic that raises many ideas, which I would assume is a common feeling for most individuals.

The questions and maps that we were asked to conduct in the pre-design portion of this project seemed to not apply to what I associate as my self identity. What instantly came to my mind were my friends; but more than just our friendships.

Many of my close friends are gay. They may come from small towns, extremely conservative families, or extremely liberal families. No matter the upbringing, we seemed to have banned together as a community of artists, each with unique skills and crafts. Many of us travel a lot living in different places, making each day I have with a person extremely vital. I have come into a web of individuals with similar artistic aesthetics as mine, and of course we build and learn from each other. I wouldn’t describe it as a subgroup or an anti-commercial group, but it’s most definitely not geared for the majority. Also, to say we break a gay stereotype is an understatement. Thematically, we have developed a fascination for people and ideas on the fringe of society, playing with structures of sexuality, gender, abstract beauty, and contrasting imagery. To quote one friend that co-founded TAG magazine that sums up this idea well, “TAG is is a periodical devoted to individuals, artists and groups who identify as queer including trans, non-white, non-monogamous, poor, gender non-conforming, intersexed, fat, disabled, unemployed, infected, pansexual, polyamorous shit-starters who feel stigmatized with social negativity by the gaystream”

Most of us don’t carry strong ties to our families, religious history, upbringing, or geographical locations. But, many of us have been harassed based on our sexual orientation growing up and continuing still today. We also view our current worlds to be very impermanent. Each time we get together is unique to the individuals present. I find that I link my self identity to the collaborations I have with these influential people in my life. I may have known this person two weeks, or maybe my whole lifetime. Either way, each run-in, each creation, friendship, and collaboration is just as important as the next. I find my self identity to be the timeline of these artistic encounters. We value documenting the integral pivots in our lives as well as the menial daily grind; the things we create are inevitably documentary expressions of our current states. Things like how we look, what we wear, who we were with, where we were, the time of day, how healthy we are, are always recorded in some way or another. My identity is a network. And its almost a shared identity. Its like putting our shared experiences and skills into a pool; we tap in and out of that pool constantly. Thus, our identity is ever-evolving.

I chose to create diptychs of each of my friends .The images I chose either I have taken myself, or I have been involved in someway or another. If I wasn’t present for the initial production of the image, another individual in the network was, and through osmosis, that creation is then a part of me and my identity, as each individual’s identity effects the group. One side of the diptych is a photograph of the friend, the other is something that structurally, thematically, and symbolically represents that person. Its all integrative-just as the network we’ve created is. Each person is linked. Each individual’s story instantly becomes a part of the group’s.

Identity Project FINAL - BK

This piece is called Morning Glory by Becca Kang. I went with a deconstructive approach using Photoshop. I had trouble with this project due to background choices but I finally got it down to a specific concept I wanted to portray.
The morning glory flower is the Korean national flower. On my trips to Korea, I remember seeing at least one every time I have gone. It holds no serious connection to me as a person but I wanted to create a metaphor for a morning glory to my experiences with my relatives. Family is very important to me as well as in Korean culture. There's a level of respect and honor that's immediately expected if you are family and especially by age. Although I haven't spent much time with any of my family outside of my immediate family, I still love and respect them solely because they are my family. To me, blood is thicker than water. And it always was so sad for me, to know that I would never really be close to my numerous cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents in Korea - mainly because of distance, partially because of language. Because of the distance and infrequent visits, I hold the memories I've had with each relative dear. Just like the morning glory which blossoms in the morning and simply dies by the afternoon, my memories of my family are short-lived and fleeting. But each memory is much more appreciated and each detail is remembered. Ironically, it makes them more precious.
To indicate the "memory" state of my piece, I painted a watercolor morning glory based on a picture I took on my last trip to Korea. Then, I scanned the image into the computer and cropped pieces of the flower and reconstructed them back together to create a more jagged, deconstructive flower. I added layers and layers of the flower upon each other, playing with filters and opacity. I chose to present them this way in order to show the somewhat unstable state of my memories. Then I wrote the places in which my family members live, some in Korea and some in America -- but I wrote them all in Korean. I created a opaque background of these characters and related them to the relatives that live there. In order to give respect to my relatives, I didn't call them by personal names but by the Korean name for "grandmother, aunt, uncle, etc". These names reflect a level of respect. I, then, highlighted the city names and repeated them around the composition randomly. However, I wrote "Korea" and "America" in Korean and centered them to create the tension and tie between these two places in which my family resides. On the right hand corner, I created a poem that reflects the short-lived, glorious moments of the morning glory as well as the memories I have. I wanted it to fade into the background and be somewhat hard to read so that the viewer would have to look closely.
These small moments in my life make me who I am. Although more significant things have happened to me before and have changed me, I feel as though I'll always be someone who appreciates the small things and moments. I'll always be someone who takes care of her family and strives to be closer with each member. This is a longing I've always had and it defines me.

'Music is Roots' - Dan Kozerski

This piece of design was created by myself, Dan Kozerski, over the past few weeks, to be presented on March 1^st, 2012. Music is Roots is the title of the piece and its components for creation were pencil drawing, and digital illustration. Follow me as I walk you through the creation process.

When I went through the initial stages of planning and questioning that we did in class, I realized that while I do have strong ties to my family, my ethnicity and the history of my family name doesn’t quite define me, as person, in my everyday life. I wanted to be one hundred percent honest in what really makes me who I am, so I decided to base my project around music – more specifically hip-hop music. I write, record, perform, and promote my own hip-hop music, and it’s truly my biggest passion. I spend hours everyday thinking about it/working on it. It was the obvious direction.

My creation process began with me searching for inspiration on tumblr. I follow some very cool designers and it’s often a great place to find inspiration. That being said, I came across some designs images that incorporated roots and I thought that would be an awesome way to incorporate music with myself. For the beginning I really had this idea of symmetry in mind, and that’s how my idea began to develop.

            From there I began doing some simple sketches. I thought of how iconic a head can be, so I began drawing roots coming straight from a faceless individual. I planned on making the head look like the artists that have musically influenced me the most, which are Kanye West and Lupe Fiasco - more specifically Kanye’s album The College Dropout and Lupe’s album Lupe Fiasco’s Food and Liquor. I can honestly say that both of those albums have changed my life.

Moving away from my simple sketches I did much higher quality drawings and scanned them into the computer, as well as took photos of myself and from the Internet, all to redraw, digitally, in illustrator.

For the first critique I was very close to my piece, so it was hard to hear that a lot of people thought my drawings of roots looked to much like tentacles; however, I feel as if I successfully over came this, trying different techniques, in my revision process. In the end, I think that listening to their advice made my piece much better overall.

The final piece that is before you depicts the words “Music is Roots is Dan Kozerski,” which represents the literally growth of roots. Roots very much follow the idea of one thing leading to another. For me, music is in my roots and roots make me who I am. In the middle are two divided pieces showcasing the importance of the two albums I spoke about before. The top heads represent the artist, and the bottom heads represent me. The leaves within their heads represent the growth of the mind from the musical piece, which is located within an entanglement of roots between the heads. Very simple, abstract versions of the album artwork denote the artists’ record.

This piece is very close to me, and I had a lot of fun creating it. I think it would be cool to maybe expand on this idea to incorporate different genres. I could see it becoming a very large series. That being said, I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Identity Project Final PL