During the course of this weeks assignment we were tasked with creating a timeline. Only using eight photos. And the 12 x 18″ canvas, this for me prove to be challenging but it also push me to follow the specifications of the assignment. As a response I drew from the reading by Marilyn Mitchell for inspiration. When looking at the reading it talks about how to take analytics and statistics and make them into a visual format may that be through a time like or a drawing. visualization was a large theme throughout the reading. It mainly talks about how people visualize data and how this can be seen as a progression through time. With that being said normally as humans we read things in chronological order and also we tend to read from left to right this is inspired me too take those concepts and ideas and apply that to my own work for this project. A large emphasis was put in class about not using text and font so I was very careful in making it stylized enough that it conveyed a message without meeting text to support it.
In my progression in life I found myself competing in gymnastics for the past six years. I was a gold medal Champion in parallel bars for four years out of that 6. Because of that I chose to make that my point of reference. I comb through years of photos to find eight snapshots of me performing my routines throughout the year. On the apparatus called the parallel bars these photos when look closely showed the progression of me aging as I perform my routine over the years from the age of 10 to the age of 16. Another theme I wanted to cover in my project was the progression from me being an athlete to becoming an artist. I decided to follow this idea with a very minimalistic approach of Taking segments out of my body and then replacing it with doodles. By the end of the progression it has seen that I now have six missing parts of my body. And in the beginning I started with one and by the end of the piece I have six and as each year progressed I lose more and more of myself. These cover a plethora of topics that can be loosely interpreted such as as I grew older I began to lose my sense of self as seen by the fragmentation but also my journey to becoming an artist. You can see the juxtaposition between my former life as a gymnast and my progression becoming a drawing.
This is how I took inspiration from the reading because I decided to go in chronological order from left to right using the parallel bars as a sort of grid for the eye to follow. This made it very minimalistic and readable. The viewer could follow the core progression from left to right and just by taking a closer look it’s easy to see that I age as the photos progress. My challenges and struggles throughout the piece where that since are you such a small paper as assigned my photos ended up becoming smarter than I would have liked. Another good critique I got from the class was the scaling of my figures were off as I grew up sometimes the photos and head were smaller than the ones previous this was a very important thing that I noticed and I would like to improve on for future assignments.
In the end I overall enjoy the assignment and found it gripping and captivating nonetheless it was challenging to follow the specifications but in the end I’m happy with my results I didn’t want to overload my project I wanted to keep it minimalistic and simple which in the end I feel like I accomplished. Below you can see photos of some of the projects and the finish results.
