Portfolio 3
This series examines how the act of layering changes an image, both in its formal qualities and in its possible interpretations. Each piece combines images and textures created through multiple methods, including cyanotype, digital collage, monotype, and video. Organic lines fill in spaces and overlap to create new shapes and textures, contrasting in some pieces with the hard edges of shapes or borders between video windows.
Same River Twice explores the idea of change through time, transparency, and layering. Two figures with blank expressions appear to engage in the act of looking, while at the same time forming a screen for the projection of the animation. Through this overlapping projection, the prints themselves appear to move and change. The animation itself moves rapidly, making it difficult to fixate on one image; yet it repeats itself regularly, allowing the viewer to detect patterns and anticipate the return of certain forms.
Portfolio 2
In this project I explore the variety that can arise from combining and recombining a restricted set of simple elements. By severely limiting my use of shape, color, and composition, I want to explore how rules and restrictions can both create redundancy and give rise to endless novel forms.
My work begins with a set of visual parameters, which I think of almost as inputs into an equation. Both my animation and my prints start with a circular shape in either black, red, green or blue that sits at the center of the page or screen. Novelty arises through changes in the shape’s texture, the addition of a colored background, the combination of shapes in the layers of a print, or their temporal juxtaposition as cells in an animation. Each image ultimately derives its uniqueness from the contrast of colors and textures, both within and between images.
Though the shapes I use don’t directly represent anything, the differences in color and texture allow for different interpretations to arise. For example, the colors blue and red can tell a different stories when they form an image’s figure and ground, or when they are places on top of each other to form the layers of a shape, or when they are viewed one after the other rather than simultaneously; they could be planets, microscope slides, a beating heart, or some form of semaphore.
In this work, which is inspired by minimalism and by scientific imagery, I hope to evoke a sense that something is being learned or understood, while at the same time something remains obscure.
Portfolio 1
Digital spaces can carry the appearance of perfection and certainty. The digital is characterized by clear binaries, smooth lines, and steadily operating algorithms. Human experience in contrast is not always easily classified or quantified; it derives in large part from a complex interaction of emotions and physicality. My work explores the border between the digital and the human, where the clearly defined meets the rough and uncertain.
This body of work features a study of simplified digital forms, using materials and processes that reveal a human touch. I start with digital drawings of people with minimal facial features inspired by logos, icons, and emoji. I then translate these drawings into monotypes and screen prints, using brushwork and freehand drawing to disrupt the perfection of the digital mark. In this way I hope to create images that rest on the line between digital and analog, between human and automaton.
Through the monotype printing process, these faces change over time in a way that a digital image never can, taking on visual indications of time, accident, and decay. Some of the images have been animated into a looping gif, creating one unstable image that appears to shift and breathe. The use of gif animation also brings each print’s hand-painted textures back into the digital space.
In my screen prints, I enlarge and abstract some of the same basic elements present in each monotype, creating even more radically simplified shapes that have only a loose relationship to the facial features they reference. While the hard edges and flat colors of each print reference the idea of digital perfection, each print also has a unique ink background that sets it apart from the others.
JiyoungParkClassroom 