Alison 2.18.08

For this next project we had to combine two aspects: the thing that we liked best from our subjective drawings, and something about body and architecture from a movie. I decided to take the idea of capturing the passage of time, from my graffiti wall project, and I choose to focus on The Italian Job and how there are a lot of shots that focus only on the hands to communicate an important event.

My idea for this next project is to take these two ideas and create two large-scale watercolor paintings. The subject matter would be based off of shadows of my hands forming the ALS (American Sign Language) signs for two words: choices and abilities. I have taken pictures of my hands in attempts to capture these movements and having them recognizable and abstracted at the same time. I would not paint them in the realistic colors of the photographs, but color schemes that I feel support and emphasis the words.

Sign language is a universal language that is not based on any one language and therefore I felt that it would work well to use it so that it is not limited to any one groups of people. Because of studying in Florence and being thrust into a country where I don’t understand a large portion of what is being said, I’ve come to greatly appreciate the ability to use hand gestures to get my point across.

The two words that I chose have been chosen from my favorite quote: “It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities,” by Dumbledore in Harry Potter and Chamber of Secrets. I was trying to figure out a way to incorporate the quote into the piece because I feel that without it, it is not clear enough why these two words were chosen. I was struggling as to how to incorporate it because if I were to just write it somewhere in the piece itself, I felt it would become cheesy. Therefore I’ve come with an idea of adding sound to the piece as a means of incorporating it. Going along with this idea of universality, I’m going to have the sound piece being the quote spoken over and over, in different languages, English, Italian, Spanish, French, ect.

Until next week, arrivederci!!