My art is driven by the need to create more cohesive designs for people. I come from India and hence most of my work incorporates some ethnic element in them. My artistic style incorporates Indian patterns, color themes, detailing. I like to understand how the world interacts with each other and I let that guide me to make my work. I am a Communication Design major and I want to influence the way society perceives the world, and use my design to overcome limitations. At the same time I like to paint and create work that focusses on me as a person and I’m looking to take Fine Arts as my minor.
Initially my work was predominantly 2D and limited to simple mediums like color pencil or water colors. However, over the course of the first year, I learnt to experiment and work with many other kinds of mediums and machines. Learning how to use the woodshed (for Space and Materiality) and the laser cutter heavily influenced my work. This gave me the opportunity to bring my ideas and concepts into life and create 3 dimensional work. I learnt to create work with wire but at the same time tried to keep painting constant in both the semesters. The first year allowed me to experiment and try out all kinds of fields, and this let me create such a varied collection of work, incorporating my own style. In studio I got to research artists whose work was immensely different from mine and this definitely helped me widen my horizons. It made me combine conceptual and functional elements into my art, but at the same time, keeping social and cultural aspects of the society in mind. Researching about artists and social contexts related to them was very helpful as it helped me understand how people perceive and respond to changes, and how I can use my design to influence that. The critiques in class were a very important part of the process as they let me get different views on my work, which was helpful as my field demands that most of the designs are created for the consumer.
One of the highlights of my first year was one of my very first projects for Time. I created a short stop motion video that pretty much encompasses the way I feel about creating art. The project was supposed to be a visual narrative in which we used pictures to create a story. My video, named Reverie is a about a girl (played by my friend) who is at studying at home, but her mind is not in the activity. The mundane nature of the activity is accentuated by the ticking of the clock, to show how time has slowed down. Her mind drifts off in the form of an origami bird that flies around in different places. The soft music adds to the surreal effect. I used different filters to depict the different places that the bird flew to. This was a reflection of how I felt in high school, studying maths and physics, and how art helped provide a release for me. The video took a lot of time because I had to edit each picture individually, by adding filters and photoshopping the origami bird into them. This was the first time I used Adobe Premiere and my first stop motion video. It was also my first experience of experimentation as when I went out to take the pictures, I had no idea what I was looking for. This idea wasn’t my first iteration, however, I ended up with an aesthetically and conceptually pleasing piece. So this project was a great learning experience for me.
My second highlight of the year was one of my Drawing and Imaging projects. Drawing and Imaging was my favorite class of the year as I was pushed to widen my drawing styles and color choices, and this led me to create work that I never thought I could. This project was one of the largest projects I created and it was a group project. It was a mural that was 5′ X 8′. The objective of this project was to go to Grand Central Station and observe the signs and semiotics around you. Using this research and information, we then had to create a mural that reflected these signs. In my opinion, this project was a great combination of communication design, as it dealt with how people interact with each other and how signs and advertisements affects them, and fine arts, while dealing with the aesthetics. It was also a great opportunity to collaborate with 3 other people from very different majors. Each person was assigned equal work, that is one of the three windows and the background, so each person contributed equally to the piece. However, in the end, all of us ended up contributed to each others parts. The three different window depicted three different kinds of signs such as the train display board, the characteristics clocks of the station and the beautiful spiral staircase, which was set against a rendition of the zodiac ceiling of the station It was a great experience seeing how everyone responded collectively to any change that occurred in the piece and how it came to become a combination of all our styles.
The flexible nature of the first year really helped me experiment and learn a lot of new techniques and styles. I’m very fascinated by 3D printing, and though I did not get the chance to explore that in this year, I would definitely like to learn that in my coming semesters. I got used to incorporating several kinds of materials in my work that I had previously disliked using. For example, using wire in Space and Materiality encouraged me to use wire in my other projects too. I hope to keep exploring varied materials and study about different artists to get positive influence on my work.
