FINAL RESULT:
DREAMS
A dream
a wish
I smile at myself
dark as can be
to show I am strong
to the stars I recall
and when I look up
your screaming demons come at night
to haunt you
to stay with you at night
The dark night will not stay
only the monsters can keep you awake.
In class we were assigned to do an environmental portrait of one of our classmates. My partner was Maddie. I did not really know Maddie at first apart from a couple of times we had talked in class.
For the environmental portrait we decided to go to each other’s houses. Here, we assessed and went over Maddies life and lifestyle. We talked about her habits, her family, her beliefs, friends… She describes herself as a dark person, she likes dark things. In her life she has suffered many things that might have sparked that darkness in her. She is a Wiccan so she believes that everything happens for a reason, even dreams. This is why I chose to use her dream book as an object to portray her. Here, she says, are her most inner thoughts and dreams. She dreams a lot and can almost always remember what she dreams, so that is why she writes it down.
For this project I selected the first words of the dreams that she has had in Paris and have done a dark poem that is arranged as the top view of her apartment. I found my main source of inspiration was a reference Maddie gave me: Edgar Allan Poe. He is a poet and writer who writes in a very romantic and dark tone. His poems really helped me assemble my poem. A difficulty I had while doing the project was to get the words to have a meaning, since they are from different texts. I gathered them together in what I believe is a poem that does have meaning and that represents Maddie in a way.
In my video the poem starts at the beginning of her house: the door, where we started our visit and goes around the house until it ends in the same place as where we started. I did a video to show motions and I recorded my voice saying to poem so that not only people could read it but also listen to it and try to imagine what dark dream comes to their mind.
These pictures represent the most important information I gathered at Maddie’s house. The first one, shows Maddie´s beliefs, she believes in the zodiac signs and how they define ones life. In the picture, different ways of representing them are shown. On the second picture isa rough map drawing of Maddie’s house. Although the most important piece is the last one: Maddie´s dream book where I drew all of my inspiration from.
Also, we interviewed ourselves for about an hour and a half and we recorded it as part of our research. Here, we found very interesting things about each other and we used many in our project.
ART RESEARCH:
This art research is about artistic collaboration. The two artists that collaborated together were Damien First and Alexander McQueen. It may seem that they come from different backgrounds and areas of expertise yet they do have a lot in common and they collaborative work did come out to be very enriching.
In this page I explained what Damien Hirst is famous for. He is mostly famous for his collection: “The physical impossibilities of death in the mind of someone living”. What he did in this art series was put dead animals, many times opened up, in formol. He is also very famous for the most expensive piece of art ever bought and therefore sold: a diamond skull. But, what struck me the most was his great love for butterflies. He has many many callenndoscopes and in the right side page I made my own with butterflies.
In this page I present what Alexander McQueen, the Fashion Designer, wanted Damien Hirsts help for. They collaborated together because Alexander McQueen wanted to celebrated 10 years of the famous “skull scarf” and who better to do that than the man who sold the most expensive skull.
The collaboration put together all of their expertise. They used dead animal-like patters, as well as callenndoscopic shapes, and fashion. It ended up being very powerful and received very good feedback.
