Mapping the Brink

Monday, May 23rd, 2011 @ 3:31 pm

brink, coheed and cambria, emotional, photoshop, song, trace, vector

This was my most intensely personal project all year. I began the year following assignment guidelines, making sure to give my best within the rules and try out new things, experiment and be a good, solid art student. In a way I was re-integrating myself into life, and certainly life around other people, and a lot of my time was spent simply getting to know my world and my surroundings, and the people I came into direct contact with.

Christmas break gave me a nice break from that world, and time again to process and have space from things. I spent time doing web work, and cooking. A lot.

Second semester I dove more into projects, thinking hard about the concepts behind them and making every part of my work represent or portray whatever the point of the piece was. This project was my final for Drawing 2, and was my long overdue confrontation of the last few years, what they’ve meant to me, how they have changed and shaped me, and how I’m going to proceed with life despite the hurt and cold they represent in my mind.

I mapped the song On the Brink by Coheed & Cambria. Starting with the waveform of the song, I mirror that with my emotional response to the song, be it the lyrics or the music or both, forming squiggly spikes poking upwards, making a bed for the symbols that form the meat of the piece. The majority of the symbols respond to the lyrics using imagery from the past two years that is significant to me, all in traced silhouette forms, meant as icons of what the lyrics and music are saying, what they’re meaning, and as a reminder to me.

Using the song as an intermediary, I am portraying and interpreting the last few years of my life in a synthesized and archival way, to record and display and finally just put down, so that I can move on with the things I’m coming into now, in this new phase of my life.

Assignment Proposal (PDF), Artist Statement (PDF), Final Piece (JPG).
Coheed & Cambria, Song (Video), Lyrics.