Bio:
Berek Bigos is a student at Parsons School of Design (class of 2022). Currently, Berek is pursuing a major in Design and Technology with the hopes of minoring in Comics and Graphic Narrative. Upon graduating, Berek hopes to pursue a career in narrative development for the video games industry. Outside of school he enjoys studying film, reading various forms of literature, and maintaining a healthy lifestyle.
Reflection:
Throughout my first year at Parsons, I have accomplished many different artistic feats that I wouldn’t have thought possible merely one year ago. As I look back on my work now and conclude my first year, I’m able to notice various themes that reoccur throughout my art. One theme in particular that I find myself coming back to is that of self-discovery and revisiting one’s past. From what I, as an artist, have come to realize through these themes is that using certain elements of my past to inspire my art has helped me develop into the person I am now. Another commonality I discovered with my art is that I tend to use my passion for pop culture as inspiration for many of my pieces.
One of the greatest skills that I believe I learned came early on in my very first studio course. When I first began taking this course, I only saw myself as a digital artist who only focused on film, digital design, and creative writing as my artistic outlets. But following this course, I learned that exploring one’s artistic comfort zone can lead to more interesting and unexpected results than one may think.
When it comes to the connection that I see between academics and studio making, I see each one as not existing without the other. From my personal experience, the classes that I have taken at Parsons have provided me with inspiration for my studio projects. Even if I wasn’t immediately inspired by something I learned during a class, more often than not the material learned would act as a doorway to something else that would inspire my work in studio.
When I look back at what made certain projects more exciting than others, I am quickly taken back to the projects that I was able to incorporate my passions and personal interests into. For example, being able to write papers about comic books or the superhero film genre will be some of the few projects that I will look back at with happiness. Not only did these projects provide me the outlet to share my knowledge about my passions to my classmates, but it also allowed me to learn more about them through rigorous research.
Project Reflection 1:
This project in particular is one of my personal favorites from my first year. The goal of this sculpture was to symbolically portray a classmate through the use of sculpting. When I first went about creating this sculpture, I knew that I wanted to keep the piece open-ended in terms of its meaning. With that in mind, I chose to use wooden figures and painted them in a such a way that it was unclear who (or what) they were supposed to be a representation of. Given the opportunity to plan this project differently, I would like to have created the figures myself so they would be more unique and personal.
In order to create this project, I had to learn more about one of classmates. The classmate which I was chosen to base the sculpture on was from Morocco. She wanted me to base the sculpture on her experience as a woman living in a country that openly discriminates women. Furthermore, she wanted me to portray her struggle being a feminist in Morocco and the difficulties of living in a discriminatory society. Knowing this, when creating the sculpture, I decided to portray my partners feminist beliefs by painting a wooden hand pink and having it “punch” through the Moroccan coat of arms. Furthermore, the two figures holding up the coat of arms are meant to represent my partners conflicting relationship with her home country.
Project Reflection 2:
With this piece, I was assigned to create a hand out of wire that would hold an item that represents a passion of mine. When creating this piece, I knew that I wanted the hand to be holding a video game controller (because my major is in Design and Technology), but because of its weight I had to remove the parts inside so the wires could firmly hold it. The hand itself was created by replicating drawings and even using my own hand as a model for the shape and size of the hand itself. But, if I had the chance to recreate this project, I would do so using the proper tools and different type of wire that wasn’t so difficult to work with.
Although these two pieces were my first two projects that I completed at Parsons, they represent a side of me that I didn’t know existed. Each one of these pieces are examples of me leaving my comfort zone as an artist and exploring different avenues of artistic creation. Personally, I believe that these two pieces are amongst my most successful because they are what proved to me that exploring yourself through different art forms leads to successful results.
Looking forward at my future as an artist, I envision myself delving deeper into my passions and not being afraid of doing so. One of the main questions I would like to answer in the coming years is what defines me as an artist and how can I discover that through the art that I create. In the process of figuring out this answer, I hope to not only have learned more about myself as a person and as an artist, but about the art community that I choose to emerse myself into.
