For my communal self-portrait in wire, I wanted to focus around my identity and community with “aspiring travellers who haven’t travelled far,” a group that seems nonexistent, but larger in number than one may think. Being at a school with a high international rate, at one of the largest cities in the world, it makes you feel naive/inexperienced with the world. My travels remain few and far within North America, breaching outside of the US when visiting Canada and the Carribean, but nothing too prominent, like many of my peers.
To capture this naive, child-like feeling one has when they interact with world travellers, I picture myself looking through the binoculars, searching for those dream destinations and experiences I want to live through. The binoculars are made life-size, particularly in proportion to my face (and the average person). I specifically made adjustable lens holders so one could interact and change their destination/places they are at/see. I tried to arrange the elements in a way so that one felt inclined to interact or play with different lenses at different places.
When creating the binoculars, I knew I wanted to use a thicker gauge so one could actually hold the binoculars, so I opted for a 16 gauge aluminium wire (from Home Depot). When working with the wire, structurally I knew that the device and lenses needed to be a thicker material, but it was hard to bend, so I knew the finer details I wanted to include would need to be a thinner gauge. Thus, to make the various details on my lenses, such as the triangular detail on the Chrysler building or the architectural details on the Eiffel Tower, and to connect the larger wire segments, I used a 28 gauge copper wire.
The three places I chose; London, New York, and Paris, were and are all places my heart is fascinated to explore and my lenses are dying to capture. The particular components of those cities are all iconic to their nature, but particularly curious to me- whether its how loud Big Ben rings or how the Eiffel Tower lights up the city at night.
