The Artist as a Storyteller!

Installation view of Mai-Thu Perret's "Little Planetary Harmony," 2006, at the Renaissance Society Chicago

I'm going to drop all pretenses that people actually read these, and just write the essay I want to write. Because that's a thing I do, write essays for fun. It's like a sudoku puzzle but instead of a grid you have the landscape of art history, and instead of numbers you have types of art that I like... okay that analogy doesn't work well but we'll move on.

Maps

The biggest idea that I latched onto while I was at college was investigating how I felt about my distance from my childhood home.  It's not the most innovating idea ever but it's something that I think about a lot, and was able to spark passion into new art projects.  Living in the world we do now, I also knew that my view was a subjective one.  To get a more rounded view on the subject you'd have to ask a lot of people, so that's what I did.

A Studio's Interior as an Artist's Home

I did two projects for my senior year.  Each project contained multiple pieces but it was more about the whole than the individual pieces.  A common idea in Installation Art.  I did a lot of reading that lead me up to this point.  At first I just wanted to have an environment with paintings and text, but then as i read more this idea evolved.  Books by Marshal McLuhan and Claire Bishop gave me a larger frame of reference on what was possible.  Honestly I probably had too many ideas for my senior year, but i felt like my last year within the safety of an institution wasn't the time to play it safe.  So I chased after some really crazy big ideas.