Having realized that I have to get a move on to meet my goal of putting out 24 cards before Spring Break, I've been working to release quite a few cards the last couple of weeks. So far, numbers 8 and 9 were found immediately. Number 10, the rarest of rare (image transferred onto gold tone metallic board creating a near hologram effect) is hidden in plain sight. However, it will require someone awfully brave to snatch it. Clearly, you can see from the photos that it is hanging in the Cannon Gallery, a suggestion by artist Robert Tomlinson, who is currently showing his work in the space. I think this touches on something that I was hoping would happen eventually with these: how far are we willing to go to collect those things that are precious to us? There's a little bit of a mind-job going on here. We're told that we're not supposed to touch art hanging in a gallery space, let alone take it without paying for it; but this piece is there to be taken. How do we wrap our heads around the idea that we're allowed and even encouraged to, essentially, steal something from a place that we have deemed sacred for all intents and purposes? This piece has crossed over from being part of a scavenger hunt to being something much more conceptual in itself in the greater theme of the Boba Fett work. That subtext of proper etiquette versus consumption and greed is really interesting to me. Indulgence is fine once in a while. Guilty pleasures are natural. But where do we cross the line, figuratively speaking, and begin to over-indulge? When does our greed supersede protocol? And when is that allowed? The flip-side of that debate is that the collection work is meant to reference, not only the role of the collector, but also childhood. How many of us collected basketball or baseball cards, Barbies, Transformers, or My Little Ponies growing up? It's not really much different than collecting art, and honestly my earliest exposure to graphic design was found in basketball cards. When Skybox came out in the early 90s and they were doing something completely different with their cards, they became highly collectible and trend-setting. The child in us is generally taught look but don't touch, touch but don't take, take but only with permission. Will someone be willing to overcome that conditioning to obtain something society says is valuable, knowing that they'll be caught on camera? | |
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Allow me to share my thoughts as I journey through my BFA year at Western Oregon University. Archives
April 2016
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