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Archiving Prague. Spreads from the book.
I decided that a book would be a better format to present my collection because it allows the focus to be more on the details of the architecture and the individual facial expressions. I chose the windows and the people I found most expressive and added a few related poems, [Storm Windows, Brilliant Windows, High Windows, Window View of the World, and A Spring Poem].
So the main issues here that I wanted to expound upon after our first go at this project: CRAFT, primarily, since the drawings that I did were basically no more than a sketch of ideas; ENVIRONMENT of the tea set, what the cups were placed upon, how they sit in relation to one another; and MATERIAL, especially that of the 'chain' in question.
I wasn't sure, either, that my original choice of words that were to be stitched/woven through the cups and back into the tea tray were exactly spot on; Denise and I talked about focusing on the production in a small area of the tea set while still addressing the artifact as a whole, and this meant to really nail down a particular phrase that would speak to several different social customs I was thinking of while doing this project. So here, the chosen word is 'Dish.' I narrowed it down to this after a long list of other candidates: gab, psst, buzz, clothesline, wire, and a whole bunch of others synonomous with 'gossip.' DISH here was chosen because of it's reference not only to (drumroll please) the kitchen, and of course, dish the noun, but also because of it's relation to 1950s and 60s vernacular, a time I was hoping to reference in regards to the role of the female, domesticity, and idle chatter. Which of course is still relevant, clearer to me now as I'm back in Charlotte, land of the soccer mom.
Hold that thought while I load these images; Laura has been nice enough to re-send me my original .psds from her snazzy laptop when my files from CD didn't open...
A few changes (again!) to the poster that haunted my semester. I'm
kidding. I bulked up some of the drawings in the background to work
more toward creating a more fantastical (is that a word?) illustrated
environment on the page.
As part of my archive project, which was the documentation of various bathrooms around Prague and Eastern Europe, I decided to turn these mundane shots into postcards. These vary a little from the postcards shown at final review; there, I had 4 images from every place on the front of the postcards and a commentary on the back. We spoke a little about the actual composition of the shots; if I were to go back and shoot each bathroom in an almost portrait-like manner, treating each as a very particular setting to be photographically revered, I would. Treating something as boring as a bus station bathroom like material for a coffee table book speaks to that funny little line between the mundane and the so-boring-it's-interesting concept that originally interested me in CZ WCs.
Above are some examples of how these shots may turn into some material for the Boring Postcards collection. I love the gray on gray book cover. Hey I wonder why they would use Helvetica for a book about boring things. Doesn't make sense, does it.
One thing we talked about was setting this type in a less predictable way, as it is here. My typeface already sort of says, "I'm a cartoon artist," so this may be a little overkill. Still , I thought the composition spoke to the formal qualities of the typeface (flowy, hand drawn, and meant to be set without a baseline.)
My Skoda collection took a strange twist right at the end. Throughout the semester I used Skodas in animation experiments, eventually my experiments lead to a fluid waving body which reminded me of a deep sea creature. The sea creature like movement allowed me to shape my abstract ideas into a (semi) familiar form. This was a relief because the purely abstract animations were proving to be a bit boring. The idea then became to create a Skoda ocean of creatures interacting with one another. I was only able to develop four creatures, if this idea had surfaced earlier I would have made a multitude of creatures for the show. I plan to continue the idea using autos from outside the Czech Republic and perhaps random household objects. We’ll see what happens. I wish I could say the fish-cars were a metaphor for Skoda being the life-force of Prague or commentary on the commercialization of the natural world but it was truthfully a random result of experimentation. Accidentally creepy.
drawing of format and dimensions of the book
This is the final visual archive book for my graveyard collection. I chose to keep the images as the central focus of the book, and use them to show the unique characteristics of graveyards in the Czech Republic. The text is obituaries from people that are buried in these graveyards. i wanted these texts to be related but not specific to the images that i included in the book. I still have to print and bind it, but here are some spreads to show my progress.
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