Michelle Israel 2.24.08

Okay!! New week, new assignment. When Julia asked us to think about what we are "composed" of, I immediately thought of gelato, mainly because I eat so much of it here. At first, I toyed with the idea of making a stomach to house all of the gelato that I've eaten so far. But when I really thought about it, I realized that I wanted to be more creative, more unique. While I was thinking, I was eating some crackers, and as usual, lost some cracker crumbs in my insanely crazy hair. And that's when I had my "a ha moment:" I am "composed" of my hair. My hair, being the thick, curly, disgusting mess that it is, eats, absorbs, and traps people and things on a daily basis. I've lost pens, pencils, my glasses, crumbs, etc. in my hair so many times that I've lost count, and therefore, I want to create a crazy installation of curly hair to act as a structure to house my collection. For my collection, I want to collect all of the things that have actually gotten eaten by my hair (I think it would be fun to actually document/use all of the things that I lose in my hair from now until the due date). I realized in my last critique that I put too much pressure on myself to make "good art" that I forget what it actually means to just go with an idea and play with it. So for this next project, I'm going to try not to tighten up and just play around with creating a massive, curly hair structure with crazy objects stuck in it. I'm going to try to take the lesson that I learned from our "art play-date" and apply them to this project. When Julia suggested that we make a connection from this project to the last project, I thought about what I liked the most from my last project. Turns out, I didn't really like anything about it at all. In fact, I actually hated the fact that it had a solemn, eerie tone. So my inspiration is the exact opposite of the mysterious moods that my last 2 projects created. Hopefully it will turn out crazy and insane, because that's what my hair is.

Until next week!

Michelle