The Issue: Every day while I was sitting at the front desk welcoming visitors, I began to notice a trend. Many people stayed in the gallery for an incredibly short amount of time, such as 10 minutes. This did not make sense to me, because there were four gallery spaces and around that many large artistic installations. When I talked to the leadership of the Atlanta Contemporary about this, they verified that people not spending very much time in the gallery is a problem. When I began to watch tours and listen to people respond to the artwork, I overwhelmingly began to understand that many people, especially adults, think that they “just don’t get” contemporary artwork. They don’t understand that personal interpretation is an essential part of enjoying modern art. People don’t know how to have a positive experience with this type of art, and do not understand how a negative experience with art is just as valuable as a positive one. These thoughts came to a boiling point when I saw a tour given to children from a summer camp. The 6-year-olds had absolutely no issue talking about the art and exploring it. I feel that part of the reason people don’t like contemporary art is that we have been taught it is not for everyone, instead of being learning that there are certain ways everyone can appreciate it.

The Idea: To remedy the fact that adults feel uncomfortable and unable to have interactions with contemporary art, I decided to invent some kind of guide that used questions in an interactive and fun way to help people think more deeply about the art at the Atlanta Contemporary. I wanted to create a box that people could draw random questions out of and settled on the matchbox as both a size and conceptually appropriate format. I wanted this box to be able to be used by a pair, a group, or just an individual. They should stand in front of the work of art, draw out a question, and use it to guide their thoughts to a deeper level about the art.

The Process and Product: Using the Atlanta Contemporary font, colors, and logo, I designed the exterior and the interior of a matchbox in photoshop, then made several prototypes out of different materials. I usually make 2D art, so 3D things are always a challenge, but luckily I had some practice boxmaking during my time in Mexico taking a typography course.

The final prototype here includes the matches and is basically usable! Some difficulty using the material impeded the product from being as clean as I wanted, but I think that this idea could be a huge asset to the experience of those visiting the Atlanta Contemporary. This box helps the viewer understand that what they bring to the table in terms of their identity and prior thought is essential to be a viewer of contemporary art.

Designing this piece independently reminded me that I have a sustained interest in design as well as Art Education, as well as a curiosity about how those things intersect.

My Working Question- How can I make compelling art that shows the process of my eating disorder and recovery in a way that feels authentic and innovative?

My hours, which I may not have recorded fully

The only artist I was able to find who works explicitly with eating disorders as her subject matter (also does happenings!) – Maria Raquel Cochez

Here is the culmination of my works this semester. Click on the videos to watch them!

I am grateful that I had the time and space this semester to delve deeply into my art and artistic process. It felt so good to uncover the themes that seem inherent to my work and examine them. I finally embraced the fact that I make art about my eating disorder and recovery, it seems like it steeps into all of my art and was present even before I realized it consciously. I also have noticed that BDSM visual themes find their way into my art as well. Maybe that is because BDSM and EDs have much in common in terms of hunger, wanting, restraint, bondage, and punishment. This is a relationship I hope to explore further in my future art.

Here is a humorous video exploring food BDSM

When we were encouraged to research what was interesting to us, I began to dig into the intersections of Eating Disorder and art. I wanted to find art about EDs that was for more than purely symbolic representational or for therapeutic value. I read “Sublime Hunger, a Consideration of Eating Disorders Beyond Beauty” and my mind was blown. I started thinking about how EDs are so much bigger than just appearances and concern about weight. Eating disorders are addictions, they are ritualistic, they are comforting and stabilizing, they are powerful. I want to make art that concerns all the things about EDs that one cannot so easily see. I am also interested in this topic because it is very difficult to find artists that are explicitly working with ED’s as their subject matter. I think they need to be spoken about in more contexts so they can be more deeply understood and have the stigma around them broken down.

With this knowledge, I was able to create the video Water Talk, which depicts me both drinking water and walking into a pool fully clothed. This video showed my descent into the ED behaviors while my other works this semester show my struggles with recovery.

I started this semester’s research thinking that I should create more photoshop self-portraits (which I do enjoy making and I want to work on more in the future). However, I was very glad when Professor Ruby suggested that I push myself by experimenting. From this discussion I set up three experiences: Dinnertime Happening, Blue eating, and Donut Game. The results of the Dinnertime Happening were very exciting, I felt that Maya and I both being blindfolded and her struggling to feed me was a very good representation of my body reconnecting to my brain and the difficulty of it in recovery. It felt exciting to know that I could make art about recovery, not just the worst depths of my ED. That gave me hope. Blue eating felt a bit weak but possibly could be a place of more exploration (what does it mean to eat like a child, play with my food, coerce myself into eating)? The Donut Game was incredibly silly. It was based off a game that I and Gracie (the other player) had experienced as children. I added the hand ties to our version because I knew I would cheat otherwise and it made it adult difficulty. This experiment specifically sparked questions about similarities between EDs and BDSM as it was visually very BDSM. There were elements of restriction and pleasure in this piece that are inherent to both. Does the restriction cause pleasure? I would like to recreate this experiment again with some different foods and people.

I felt as though I should include the video “Leave You,” as it contains themes of containment, loss, interpersonal struggle and bondage. It would be very easy to assign my ED big ideas to this video.

Next, I came up with the idea for “Stomach Punch.” It came from me thinking about how by having an ED for so long I basically might have punched a hole in my gut. EDs do irreparable damage to one’s body and I will be dealing with the physical consequences of mine for a very long time. I did the initial painting in two hours because I did not want to become too precious with it and not want to punch it. When I punched the representation of my stomach and it felt satisfying in a sick way. Then I felt guilty for doing it, and I was filled with some regret. Eventually, during the process of sewing, I was able to overcome this feeling. The process of sewing took so much longer and was much more difficult than the instant relief of the punch, but in the end, I was glad I repaired the painting. The scar is still there, but it also adds something to the piece. This action was a pure metaphor for my ED.

A longtime goal for my art is to move away from self-port portraiture. I want to do this to make my work more universal and less self-centered, which is why I was glad when Maya asked me to paint a large nude of her. Because she wants to give this portrait to her boyfriend I thought it would be humorous to model her pose after Venus of Urbino by Titian. I also included fruit and flowers in the picture because she really likes to eat fruit. I think the image has some type of symbolic meaning about recovery but I haven’t figured that out yet, maybe I will when I finish the painting. I like the challenge of painting and spending the time with it.

I do not feel bound to any medium specifically and am happy I got to play with a variety of mediums this semester. This work felt incredibly productive and powerful and I cannot wait to continue in my senior seminar next year. 

I realized after giving my presentation to my peers I am not making art about eating disorders, but art about the process of recovering from an eating disorder! It is very hopeful for me to recognize that.

I have been able to discover so much about premiere pro this semester which has been quite exciting. On some level, there are similarities between photoshop and premiere, which helped my initial approach to the software. After playing a bit with more simple concepts such as creating a video that looped or a video that only consisted of sound, I moved onto more conceptually stimulating projects.

Water talk was part of the beginning of my investigation of how I can authentically but also curiously represent my eating disorder and recovery. When brainstorming for the video I had a couple of false leads of ideas, but this idea suddenly emerged with much clarity. It is an artistic documentation of toxic behaviors that I used during the descent into my eating disorder. I was more interested in the visual aspect of this piece and wrote the spoken word aspect in about 2 minutes to match what I saw in my head. I am sure I was at least slightly inspired by the video Blue Jeans by Lana Del Rey, and the book The Awakening. The reason I wore a robe was to make the whole thing seem dreamy and surreal.

Filming this video was a little stressful because the environment was very volatile, the streetlight kept going out and turning back on so we had to rush to film. But Mayra did a great job and definitely captured the visual I was looking for. While editing this video I learned a lot of skills including how to operate the opacity and play with the colors of footage. I played a lot with the timing of the images to give myself the feel I was going for.

I think the most important part of this film is the end where I explode out of the water, hinting to recovery.

I wrote the song Leave You in February of 2017. Since May of 2018 Moses and I have collaborated to produce the song and make it even better than what I heard in my head originally. I told him what I wanted and he knows my music taste in depth, so he was able to create a beat I loved. He did an incredible job of producing the song. I decided that it deserved a video.

I constantly watch music videos and I love SIA’s Chandelier and Elastic Heart Videos, both for the modern dancing and the way it is contrasted with the grungy spaces the dancers are in. I guess those videos helped inform my vision, which was originally a dichotomy of heaven and hell, with Maya dancing in “hell” and some people sitting around a table on the stage representing heaven. I eventually deviated from that theme with the discovery of the plexiglass boxes that were able to fit a person inside of them.

I have shot a music video before in high school and so I knew the basic idea of how to do it- choreograph the moves then take different shots of close up and far away. That approach got the job done, but I regret that I did not use two cameras filming at the same time to make it easier on myself. In a way though, the challenge of the dances in different shots being not exactly lined up was good, because I got much better at syncing up cuts so that they look more natural. During the editing process, I also discovered new tools and their shortcuts and I became much more comfortable with the program overall. This semester I have gone from never opening Premiere to feeling relatively competent with it. I still want to know how to cut video like in photoshop to layer it, that should be my next project.

I am relatively satisfied with this product, I felt like I could keep editing it forever and I just had to stop eventually. I know it’s far from perfect but I hope that it is an exciting way to communicate my song to others.

Here is what I have done so far:

• Dinnertime Happening (link)
• Water Talk video (link)
• Donut Game. I handed all of the control over to Maya and Julia, who set up the game. Gracie and I competed blindfolded and hands tied in a slightly more difficult version of this traditional children’s game which we had both played when we were younger. It was out of my comfort zone to give all of the artist control to someone else in an artistic concept that I engineered. I don’t usually buy that many sweets at once, and Gracie said that she liked the game when she was little because she got to eat more donuts that she is normally allowed to. It’s interesting that BDSM themes appeared in this piece, and that donuts have such an element of denial, pain and struggle attached to them for many.
• Blue Foods- This was a brief sketch I did to make myself more interested in the food I had to eat. Ruby suggested more iterations of this, with more colors.

• Watched the Amy Winehouse Documentary- She was a Jewish singer with bulimia and a drug addiction. It got me thinking about how we know so many intimate details of singers lives but don’t necessarily know the same about artists.

What I am working on/planning to do:

• Stomach punch painting and happening
• Maya Nude painting
• “Leave You” music video
• Bob for apples? Or another food.
• Maya and Julia want to play the donut game.
• Possibly paint with my mouth and food.
• And I also wanted to use the darkroom, not sure if I have time for that.

I have been feeling so forceful and full of creative energy which is very exciting. I think it’s because I have not been able to really make conceptual art in a supportive environment since high school and it feels very familiar, yet thrilling in its newness. It feels good to let myself make things without exactly knowing why then figuring the “why” out later. There is always a reason that I am driven to create. I am not sure if I have done exactly 12 hours of this but it feels like a lot and like I am pushing myself. 

Talking to Ruby has been an essential part of this brainstorming process. She suggested that I create this word-map that shows how expansive my conceptualization is of eating disorders so that I can see all of the space that exists for me to make art inside of.

I have made two works recently that I think are both very successful beginnings of this investigation of how I can authentically but also curiously represent my eating disorder and recovery. The first project is my video Water Talk. I was more interested in the visuals and wrote the spoken word aspect in about 2 minutes because those words are a part of me they were easy to regurgitate. I think the most important part of this film is the end where I explode out of the water, hinting to recovery. Even more interesting is the idea of sexuality, and I wonder how does sexuality interact with ideas of eating disorders? They are obviously related but I want to mine deeper about how.

After much discussion with Ruby, I sat and thought deeply about how to challenge myself and be experiential. I thought about how trusting others in my art is something I have almost never done. I also do not usually explicitly include food in my work. Combining these elements, I had Maya feed me while we were both blindfolded to create my Dinnertime Happening. An important thing Maya brought up during our discussion after the happening is that I am not making art about spiraling deeper, I am making work about me trying to claw myself out of this hole and recover. The happening had a sense of play and mothering which was really positive for both of us.

The happening was messy and kind of gross which made it more interesting to me.

Going forward I want to create more happenings, as well as creating visceral and tactile pieces. I want to play and punch things and be wild in my art so that I can find out about how I make art and why I do. I think I need to look a little deeper inside of myself to see what is going on, but not let that prevent me from going with my gut. I am very excited.

I have been thinking about it literally all the time, and I have tried to record it with this chart but need to be mroe on top of it. I know I have done more than this.

Here are some other things I have been ruminating on

• Can an eating disorder be separated conceptually from its context (being a woman/ living in america/ the news)?
  • If no how can that be shown in art?
• What about typical/ therapeutic eating disorder art turns me off? Why is it so repetitive?
  • What is it about representing recovery is different from representing the spiral?
• Why is eating disorder art so hard to find? Is it actually more common than I think but just less explicit?

My hair has been a huge part of my life and image since I dyed it blue in 2015. At the time, this transformation was an affirmation of my queer identity. As a 15-year-old, I wanted to stand out from the rest my peers who I found to be conventional and mostly boring at my North Carolinian high school. It was just me and my artistic, unusual, gay friends who had the audacity to look different from everyone else. At the time I relished the feeling of being unique, as identifying myself as an individual separate from my relatively White and monotonous environment.

For three years hair continued to give me some privileges I enjoyed. Aesthetically, it really was beautiful. It suited me well and was quite attractive. It helped me provide an entry point in getting to know people. They saw my hair as a sign of comfort and calm and intrigue and felt the urge, very naturally, to begin a conversation with me about it. It made me stand out in crowds and photos, it made people remember my name. But growing underneath these positives was a colony of negatives, and the hair became a crutch, stunting many aspects of my growth.  Now, as I have become more confident in my individuality, I feel like I do not need the blue to affirm my sense of self. I am trying to find this on the inside, not the outside.

Hair is so easy to change. I can always redye it if I decide that the blue did something more for me that I cannot now see. But in this moment I can only feel the negatives, which outweigh the positives by their depth and gravity. Recently, I haven’t been able to tell if I have kept the blue because I actually like it, or if I just feel compelled to continue because I have maintained this facade for so long.  

This removal of blue is not unplanned. This manifesto is a eulogy, this is a breakup text, this is my preparation for a transition. This is what I have to say to everyone who will ask me “why?”

WHY I CHANGED MY HAIR.

These are the negatives of the blue hair that have been rolling around in my mind like stones. They include:

1. For every positive interaction that I have had because a stranger was interested in talking to me about my hair, there are 10 people who talk to me who I wish would just leave me alone. “You have blue hair!” “Do you have to bleach it to get it like that?” “What type of dye do you use?” “My daughter had hair like that.” “I could never pull that color off.”  “What is your real hair color?” ”Blue is my favorite color.” I have been harassed by the same bothersome questions and comments thousands of times, in the form of anything from childlike wonder to a pickup line, from genuine admiration to ignorant demands. People have often yelled out their car windows about liking my hair, terrifying me. The repetition of it was exhausting.
2. Being stared at, a spectacle, is very unpleasant. Being in this woman body makes my life dangerous already, and when I go to Walmart or a gas station alone at night I feel like the hair is a beacon calling out to strangers that I want attention. Imagine knowing if someone is looking at you, they have something to say and will try to talk to you. Maybe I just want to buy some cold medicine. Maybe I have important things to do and don’t want to be interrupted. Maybe I just want to be alone.
3. I do admit I have used the hair to my own advantage. I marketed myself as something less than human in hopes that I could get people to buy into me. My image was just blue and had nothing to do with the person inside of me. My entire online presence, whether in dating or blogging, revolved around my hair. I wonder if that’s the only thing that generates my followers. I wonder why I care.
4. Imagine that your personality disappears and is replaced with a color. To most people who see me, I am not funny or caring or smart, I am just blue. Other people know me but only know some vague idea of me, my colorful ghost. Now I want to be a real person, more than a useless icon. A false goddess people worshiped, I don’t know what for.
5. I think white guilt has driven me in a number of ways to prove I am “not like every other white person” even though of course I am. Sometimes I felt myself using the blue to try to shove away my oppressive identity. I want to humble myself with this color change and continue to reflect on my privilege.
6. 4 bottles of dye = 24 dollars. Bleach and developer = 30 dollars. I repeated spending every other month. 325 a year, 975 for 3 years. And when I originally got it done I went to salons, so 200 dollars an appointment, 2 appointments. Total spending thus far = at least 1,500. Not including time opportunity costs.
7. I harassed my friends until they agreed to spend 5 hours doing my hair, every other month.
8. I ruined pillows and towels in hotels and other places I stayed all across the country. I stained bathtubs and sinks. There was a trace of me wherever I went.
9. I picked myself apart visually when my roots grew back, I become frustrated when my hair grew, trying to forget the inevitable process.
10. I couldn’t wear any color clothes or makeup that was not black, grey, blue or something similar. Some of my experimentation was stunted.
11. I want to give the part of myself who wants to be invisible sometimes some compassion. I think everyone has times they want to disappear, and I can’t.
12. Everyone I have met since coming to color has only one image of me, based in a superficial aspect of my appearance. I want people to know what I really look like.
13. I worry that if I do continue to build myself around the blue, then I leave college and for some reason have to change it, my sense of self will be very fragile and easily destroyed. I want to shoot first.
14. There isn’t anything wrong with my natural hair color. It is ok to want to fit in sometimes. I could be kind of normal for a little while, leave something to be desired. People would actually have to know me to think they knew me.
15. I have looked the same since 2015. Pictures of me for 3 years show someone frozen in time. I need to grow.

Here is a brief summary of the experience of cutting my hair and dying it brown. I think that the cut itself made the change more palatable for people, as it seemed like another big change that didn’t simply have to do with the color. I feel much better and more like myself with this hair, so I am very glad I had to cut it. I even deleted Instagram from my phone and I  feel great about that. An interesting note was I didn’t need this card for strangers, only people who somewhat know me.

I am glad I made the cards because although I only handed out around 20 of them, they served their purpose of saving me from having to explain my choices over and over. Here are some of the reactions I received

• I  showed the prototype card to a male acquaintance who mocked it. He was the only one who said something derogatory.
• The rest of the reactions were mostly positive and included people not knowing how to respond, and some gave me the card back.
• Some people thought the card was funny
• The best reaction was from one of my bosses who is in the same generation as my parents I think. She laughed and hugged me and asked to keep it which suprised me.

Who knows if people who received the card actually read the whole manifesto. I am just glad I had soemthig to do when people asked me “why.”

Joel Peter Witkin’s work Courbet in Rejlander’s Pool (1985) is a square, black and white photograph. Surrounded by velvet darkness is the white nude woman who is facing away from the viewer. The only attributes with which we can identify her are her neatly coiled hair, the bracelet on her right wrist, and 3 lines which zig-zag down the left side of her back. She is relatively curvy with arms that slightly sag and creases where her hips meet her waist. The space she is in is unclear, we can see water coming up to the top of her legs, but that doesn’t help the viewer solve the mystery of where she is. The space is defined by the 3 pieces of flower drapery; which her right elbow rests on and which also obscure some of her hips and backside. She also seems to be leaning against a black wall with her right hand resting in front of her face, possibly like she is looking for something. Right above the woman’s head is a line that creates an arch, separating the bottom of the composition from the black empty space at the top of the composition.

Although there is some highlight on the fabric, the woman is the brightest part of the piece by far. Her body rests leaning to the right and her leg can be faintly seen extending to the bottom left of the piece, creating a diagonal composition. While her body moves the eye up and down from the bottom left to the upper right, the lines on her back move in the opposite way and create a sense of balance within the composition. These black lines which seem like a tattoo or a scar are parallel and intersect with each other. The lines mirror her left shoulder blade and follow her spine.

Although the photo is black and white there are some sepia tones around the edges. There is wear on the photo, so much of the space that is black appears scratched, scrubbed or otherwise distressed. Only the woman is rendered clearly with no distortion to the image on her body. The hand of the artist being so visible give the photo a painterly quality, especially because the subject of a nude woman with drapery is so classical. As a viewer, one would expect photos to describe reality so this piece confuses and creates a sense of fantasy more commonly accepted in paintings.

• Black square photo
  • Appears really old because of how worn and distressed it is / sepia
• Woman
  • She is facing the back
  • Curvy (arm sag, hips crease at the waist)
  • She has coiled hair, a bracelet and 3 lines on the left side of her back
  • Her body is the whitest thing in the composition , creating a diagonal w her leg and arm
  • She is also the only thing without scratches, she almost glows
  • The lines go in an opposite way of her body and create balance
  • Lines appear to be a tattoo
• The space
  • Confusing, there is water coming up to the top of her legs
  • She’s leaning forward against a black wall
  • There are three pieces of flower drapery around her , slightly obscuring her also providing depth
  • Over her head is an arch
  • Its a mystery!