Making the Mask

Work, Work, Work

I really enjoyed the process of making my mask after I switched over from a thick gauge wire (I was trying to use up my roommate's leftovers) to a thinner one. This project was not as tedious as the previous two (soap carving and paper stacking), which made for a very nice change in pace. Bending wire, wrapping it with tape, and eventually covering the whole form in a papier mâché-like concoction was very meditative and allowed me to reflect on the parts of my identity I was revealing with this mask. Initially I was a bit hesitant to do something related to depression and anxiety, as they are issues I try to keep to myself. "I'm fine, I'm fine," I say all the time, "just a little tired." I cover up the reality of my struggles to retain my privacy and avoid uncomfortable situations, but I also don't want the "outside world" to think there's something wrong with me - and therein lies the problem, doesn't it? The stigma attached to these conditions needs to be reassessed. I am not a monster, I just get a little sad sometimes. A little worried. Because I generally internalize my pain, making a mask about my condition was freeing but nonetheless frightening. I can't tell you how fast my heart was beating when I had to present my final solution to the class. Even then, I beat around the bush, giving into my fear. I did not say I was documenting my depression, rather that I get "heavy with sadness" throughout the day and how my picture progression documents this. Still, though, I think making this mask was a step in the right direction of being more open with others.

Preliminary Sketches

         

I explored many different ideas in my sketchbook. I was sort of obsessing over centipedes and millipedes that day because of a discussion we had in my postcolonial literature class that morning. I was convinced I wanted to do something that was lopsided and crawled down my back. I also wanted the piece to be interactive, so I came up with the idea that the centipede-like arms would close around me as my photographic "day" progressed.       

W.I.P. Pictures

I built my mask to lean heavily to one side, and created small bumps on the top of the head to signify those painful, ugly thoughts and emotions that surface throughout the day.

The nucleus of it all!

I tried on the mask to make sure everything fit well and was comfortable enough to wear while taking pictures. I also wanted to make sure that the back piece came down low enough/was proportionate with my body.

I then applied the glue and paper, creating a thin, skin-like covering over the whole mask. I was a bit worried that the paper would crack with the movement of the legs; in practice, it did a little bit, but I was actually quite surprised by the resilience of the papier mâché. 

A Final Explanation

Although my final pieces are in another post, I just wanted to take a moment to explain my choices and photographic series. As mentioned above, I created a mask that was top-heavy and had moving parts to indicate both my struggle to stay balanced and how the passage of time affects my balance. I tend to find myself getting heavier and heavier as the day goes on, which manifests not only mentally and emotionally, but also physically. I am sluggish, annoyed, tired. All I want to do is sleep. I chose to do a series of photographs to show this change over time. The mask is always with me, yes, but the little arms, receptors of negativity and sadness throughout the day, eventually close around me and pin me to my bed. I also wanted to show the smallness of my life, how during the semester I often find myself repeating the same unhealthy patterns over and over again. School. Work. Sleep. School. Work. Sleep. Sleep. Sleep. The voyeuristic-like angles I used to photograph myself also speak to my belief that through glances, we see much more than we ever could by looking intently, closely. People change under scrutiny. We amend ourselves to be acceptable. But when we look for just a moment or watch secretly from afar, sometimes we see what's really there - the sadness in that girl's eyes or the worry in another person's knitted brow that disappear as soon as their friends approach.  

I decided to not end on the bed picture because I wanted to show that I still have some hope; I still have moments of intense clarity and beauty. The "dust" specs that gather and gather in my photographs until they completely clutter the final scene are nowhere to be found in the final picture. I am also outside, as opposed to the previous enclosed spaces. I can breathe out here. And while I'm still walking toward darkness, I'm illuminated, if only for a moment.   

   "I'm fine, just a little tired"

Identity Crisis

Who Am I, Really?

This is the question people spend their whole lives trying to figure out, and sometimes I wonder if it is the right question to be asking. The episode entitled "Switcheroo" from NPR's series This American Life explores notions of identity and how in saying who we are, we are effectively saying who we are not. At the beginning of the episode, Ira gives an anecdote about the time he and his friend, Etgar, went to a Cindy Sherman exhibit at the MOMA and a lady approached them, claiming she was the artist herself. Because her exhibit was all about morphing into a multitude of identities, neither Ira nor Etgar could figure out if this lady was truly Sherman or not. Weeks after the incident, Ira finally decided to call Sherman and ask her whether or not she had approached him (or had even been) in the gallery that day. According to Sherman, the woman claiming to be her at the exhibit was decidedly not her, not a part of the exhibit, and not related to her in any way. What a strange and surreal encounter! I laughed so hard when Ira said, "If there is some Upper East Side 55, 60-year-old lady who just walks up to people in the Museum of Modern Art and claims to be Cindy Sherman, I love that lady. I love the balls on that lady. That is somebody embracing life." Embracing life indeed!

I looked up some of Sherman's work while listening to the podcast and immediately saw why it'd be tough to identify the real artist were she to be wandering around her exhibition. Her pieces are all about covering up the Self and making it into the Other. I relate to her work on a profound level because as someone who has always loved dressing up in costumes and "be myself" by not being myself, I know how powerful exploitation of one's identity is in revealing the many, many layers that make up who we are. While she might not outwardly appear a beauty queen, aging goth, or film noir star, those elements - however small, however broken - are inside of her somewhere. As cultural values, subversive practices, or the past, they're inside of all of us. 

I love this show and NPR in general, and am so glad this episode was assigned as preparation for our masked identity project. It brought me back to my dance days when my dad would come to pick up my sister and I on Monday nights, and we'd bet on whether it'd be WHOG classic rock or NPR that night. It also inspired me to really delve deeply into the creation of my mask and really make it mean something significant to myself and my identity. Like the random lady in the gallery, I want to embrace life and take every opportunity to show the world who I am (and am not), however scary that may be.       

Stack 'Em Up

Paper Stacking

When we started this project, Miss Laura told us we'd probably hate her by the end of it. While I did have many moments of frustration (especially when I realized my apple was quite misshapen), I never once got mad at Laura. Instead, I'm glad she exposed us to another challenging yet innovative way to create art. I'm not one for origami or other paper folding things, but stacking paper proved to be quite fun, and I got to learn how to use several different tools in the wood shop! I especially enjoyed making my inventive form, which was inspired by the incredible dancer and my favorite SYTYCD winner, Melanie Moore.

Initial Sketches

The power of the human body

W.I.P. Pictures

  

This is the lovely apple I used as my reference fruit for the project. I went to Publix to specially pick out a worthy apple of my creative endeavor; I thought I had picked out a very nice one until I realized how many bumps and lumps it had (and how difficult it would be to replicate that through stacking). Nevertheless, this apple made for a great model and thankfully did not start rotting until the very end of the project. 

  

Cutting out initial shapes. 

I created roughly three different stacks, which I then glued together to form the apple body.

I tried hacking away at the different layers to achieve my apple's true shape (the top layer had gotten too big and I needed to slim it down), but this proved extremely difficult and ultimately inefficient. This is when I realized that even though its sounds and machines intimidated me, I had to go to the wood shop to sand this baby down.

As I mentioned above, I used Melanie Moore as the inspiration for my invented stacked form. I wanted the piece to represent her simultaneous strength and fragility, power and femininity. (These things are, of course, not mutually exclusive.) I therefore decided to balance the thickly stacked, leg-like column on a single pin, alluding to the strong ballerina on pointe. 

  

I compromised with Miss Laura and was able to use some pink netting on my invented piece. The delicacy of the fabric continued my motif of strength/fragility. 

Final Solution: Observational

The process was undeniably difficult, but I am actually quite happy with my finished observational piece. I spent many, many hours cutting, stacking, and sanding paper to get my sculpture to look as good as it could. While I know it still has some proportional and structural issues, I am glad it turned out looking pretty darn similar to the fruit I chose.

Peek-a-boo!

Final Solution: Inventive

Having the freedom to do whatever we wanted for our inventive form was a bit scary but definitely liberating. I bounced back and forth between a few ideas before finally deciding to do a dance-inspired piece. One of the reasons I chose to hone in on dance was because it used to be a huge part of my life, and since I didn't use a dance memory for my memento, this was the perfect opportunity to bring it back and creatively utilize that part of myself. I am extremely pleased with how my sculpture turned out. As I mentioned earlier, I wanted to show the careful balance between power and grace all dancers tread. One reason dancers are so magical to watch is because they make it look so easy. After studying many pictures of Melanie Moore (what we would call "King Shots" in the competition world), I decided to create an arabesque shape balancing on a single point. I used quite a bit of hot glue to make sure the pin was able to hold up the legs. I also played with scale in making the squares smaller and smaller as they approached the tip of the back leg "foot," as well as negative space in my draping of the pink mesh. The wood base alludes to the dance floor, and the white paint the purity of dancing. The act itself is freeing, a return to "essence," and this is what I wanted to show with this piece.

 Everything - the world, you - all balancing on a single toe

The Smallness of a Life

Concealing/Revealing

While coming up with ideas for this project, I became deeply invested in the notion that a mask, by concealing, can paradoxically reveal certain parts of ourselves. In our desire to get to the "true" essence of a thing, we generally say "peel away the layers" when maybe we really should continue to coat, add, build up. Identity is, after all, formed by the tricky and ridiculously delicate process of deciding what to keep in and what to leave out, what to share and what to keep secret. 

I used this mask as a way to express parts of myself I usually keep hidden; in order to do so, however, I had to obscure my face and part of my body. This makes me wonder: Can we ever really know the whole thing, or everything only in fragment? Physically, the mask impedes one's ability to know my face, my expressions, the features that make me Laura. Nevertheless, it gives form to the interior structure of Laura, the parts that remain obscured by my body and its politics and complicity in facade. It's undeniable: in order to function somewhat normally in society, we have to uphold certain fronts or "un-truths." I do it all the time. We're told to "be yourself," but if that self is ugly and sad and deviant, how quickly the tune changes. Creating this mask gave me the chance to explore how to represent and make tangible those painful secrets that rest quietly inside my body and build throughout the day; how to express those feelings I often feel are inexpressible; and how to depict my struggles with depression and anxiety in such a way that perhaps others can relate. 

We all ache for connection, especially when our worlds seem very, very small. 

Final Picture Series

"I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others - the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad."

Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer

Understanding Place, Creating Space

One More Thing...

I neglected to post this during the Gregor's Room project, however I think that even though it's late, it's still important enough to mention. One of the major goals of Gregor's Room was to interpret literature using text as a guide for the "visual." The Metamorphosis has no actual pictures, but it doesn't need them: its words create the undeniably vivid imagery that has made it into such a well-known piece of literature. Capturing the essence of one medium in another is no easy task; however, it is in this difficulty that the potential for greatness exists.

In an unofficial music video for Lotus Plaza's "Strangers," found footage mostly consisting of clips from "No York City" by Rick Liss is used to construct a piece harmonious with the texture of the song. Although I really love the song, I frequently revisited this video while working on my version of Gregor's Room because it inspired me to create a space equally vibrant and texturally accurate. It seems as if the film and the song were made for one another, even though one came way after the other, and I wanted to achieve the same sort of euphony with my "set design." 

"Strangers" Music Video    

The Results Are In!

The Soap Carving Process

As I mentioned in my previous post about this project, carving soap challenged me greatly because it involved thinking about "mark making" in a very new way. I ended up titling my piece "Animal Testing" not only because my created piece played with materials actually tested on animals then "tested" on my sculpted animal (phew, that's a mouthful), but also because it tested this animal right here. I was frustrated, exhausted, and anxious I'd take off too much and ruin the entire piece during the majority of my carving. I am glad this project tested me, however, because it proved that even though the end result might not be amazing, I can make it through just about any project. The results are in: I can carve soap.(Perhaps not very well, but hey, with practice, who knows - I might create the next David, this time out of soap!)   

Process Pictures

The key is to start by blocking out the general shape of the animal form. We were cautioned not to get too specific too soon. Everything should stay quite chunky in the beginning (even though my tiger never quite lost that "baby fat"). 

For my second carving, I realized I needed to right away cut off a chunk of the soap and then begin my carving. The orientation of the soap was not conducive to the form of the tiger, as I found out in my first carving. The piece I cut off actually served as the material for my tails.  

Making the tail was definitely one of the most challenging parts of the carving process. It was difficult just figuring out how to create the shape!

Final Piece: "From-Life" Carving

Tiger & Tiger

One of the biggest issues I have with my final piece is its chunkiness. I am fairly happy with my proportions (except the head) and general form, but my wariness when it came to cutting down the legs made for a thick cat. I did a tiger in honor of my cat, Tiger, though perhaps I should've done a very stumpy bear, something more on my level.

   
Final Piece: "Created" Transformation Piece

"Animal Testing"

The concept behind my created piece arose from the ethical and pragmatic dilemma surrounding animal testing. In an earlier post I explained the process of subtraction and addition that led to this final piece, however I did not fully describe the "method" behind my madness. (And I'm pretty sure it was madness, as the fumes from the hot toothpaste, soap, and lip gloss burrowed deeply into my brain.) The experimental process through which I put my tiger mirrored the larger, often grossly transformative nature of animal testing. By making my created piece so radically different from its original from-life sculpture, I emphasized the ways in which inhumane testing (and treatment, in general) "thingifies," or commodifies, actual living beings. The end result is both clinical and messy, structured and random, something and nothing.

      

What Does Tiger Think?

I think she likes it!