Plaster Representation of Plastic Surgery. Cliche?

I am in mental turmoil about cliched topics. I do not know when a topic become cliched. When does one decide that a topic is too cliched?

I am very interested in exploring modern culture's aspirations towards beauty in terms of physical looks. My personal belief is that the human body is absolutely beautiful. I mean, we start, literally, with a sperm and an egg, which create a zygote, and then very quickly, the zygote splits more and more, and then the stem cells begin to specialize, and you get a unique human, with a beating heart and a brain and a kidney and two eyes and toe nails. The best part is that even with so many similarities, no two humans are exactly the same- no mass production here to ruin the mystery of each product. That process itself, I believe, is proof enough of a God's existence! So to me, it is very upsetting when people are not able to recognize the beauty of their uniqueness and their existence. We have become a culture which aims to mass produce barbie humans through the processes of subtle make-up, plastic surgery and weight-loss diets and surgeries.

With my newly learned plaster mold-making skills, I want to explore this topic of plastic surgery. My plan currently is to make molds that look like very large syringes (made from an air pump for a fitness ball), and then breaking them randomly, and putting them together randomly to create a giant collage of broken syringe pieces. I am thinking about painting the molds to make them look like a syringe, and then writing with red, "broken" everywhere on the collage. I am currently also debating about whether I should write, "Are You" in large letters on the collage.

My main conundrum is whether this topic is too cliched in our society to be discussed any longer. I wonder if everyone kind of acknowledges that we have become such a culture with these expectations of beauty from ourselves. I wonder whether we find it drab when someone brings this discussion up yet once again. I am so afraid of my art being labeled as "just another piece about plastic surgery." I mean right? How can I shock my audience with my piece? Will this be enough? I suppose we will have to see. I am hoping to finish tomorrow.

Two wax molds I made are shown below, just to give guys a general idea of how the "syringes" would look. Woah! Talk about variety in molds.

The picture below is of my final project. I would have liked to spend more time on it. However, the words on there are supposed to read "Are You Broken" and the word "broken" is on several other areas of the piece.

I'm Going to Spend Five Hours Making A Dysfunctional Light Bulb

My bulb may be dysfunctional, but it is still hands-down, the best looking light bulb I've ever seen.

I started with putting a layer of petroleum jelly on an actual light bulb, and then I basically spent about two hours making a wax mold by putting melted paraffin wax with a brush onto the bulb. This is actually a pain staking process. First of all, the wax is hot, and there is a chance you will get hot wax on your hands, on your face and in your hair, many times. Also, there is apparently a perfect balance of how to put the wax on the object. You have to put a layer of wax, wait for it to cool down enough to where the wax is not liquid or subsequent wax will not stay on the object and all the wax will become a bit of a gooey mess. It also cannot be too cooled otherwise the mold is likely to break off. So for artists with minimal tolerance, this project can really test your patience. I would literally sometimes get so frustrated that the wax took so long to cool, that I would take this melted wax bulb structure and walk outside the classroom like an idiot, playing hot potato, or rather hot bulb, by myself.

Basically this entire process takes so much patience that I bet some artists refuse to molds in their career. After you are done making your wax mold, you have to wait for it to be super cool down, and then you have to carve the structure to release the bulb. And then you have to put it back together- which by-the-way is a real pain, especially if you did not have the patience to let your mold cool enough, and now the mold is deforming in your hands as you try to put it together slowly with melted wax.

You need to make sure to cut a hole so you can pour your plaster of paris liquid through the hole. The problem with plaster of paris is that you have to have patience once again. You need to have patience when mixing the plaster powder with the water, where you have to sprinkle the powder in the water, slowly. However, you have to be mindful of time because after seven minutes, and sometimes, if the plaster hates you, maybe five minutes, the plaster starts to cure and harden. The problem with curing is not that it slowly becomes harder and harder. What I experienced, and of course I had the privilege to experience this, was that the mixture is fine until a certain point, where all of a sudden, it becomes like three times as viscous. I remember being super confused because I was pouring my mixture in my mold, and the structure was a third of the way filled when all of a sudden, my mixture decided to cure, and it would not pass through the hole at the top of my mold.

Either way, in the end, I made an awesome plaster of paris bulb, with lots of errors. So of course, the used the errors to my advantage by transforming the errors to make them look like vines and leaves. I will have to upload that picture later. That's all I have for now.

 The picture above is my wax mold

This picture is when I cut off half my wax mold to remove my plaster. Can you spot all the beautiful errors? 

Who Am I: An Attempt at Capturing Self Through Physical Objects

Who am I? How can you ask me that? There is no answer!

Or perhaps there is one, and it is that I do not know, and I probably never will, at least in the scope of this life. I have no idea who I am, or what I am supposed to be doing on this earth. I do not even know if who I think I am is really who I am, and if who I am is really what I show myself to be. We are all kind of thrown into this earth, and people around us often tell us what is the truth about this life, and they put upon us expectations, and generally, we ourselves also make also make up rules and expectations for ourselves, and we follow them. But the truth is, whether you would like to believe it or not, we, none of us, have a  clue about ourselves and about life. But we follow what makes sense, what appeals to our logic and our senses, and we act like what we think we should act like, and in the end, we "all, float on, okay, (modest mouse)." And I think I'm okay with that.

But more to the point: How does one go about trying to make a self-portrait? How do you portray yourself, especially with inanimate objects. I mean, that not only takes some level of creativity and craziness, but also some level of courage, to be able to be open to others about who you think you are, and what you represent. See the key is that if you make a self portrait, for it to be good, you have to be honest about yourself, no nonsense b.s. about what you want others to think about you, who you want to be, how pretty you want it to look. You have to look deep within your heart, with courage, and be "real," with yourself, and then you need to make it and show it with confidence and even some pride.

Well, I am not sure if I captured it myself well in my self-portrait, but here is what it looks like.

Some cool facts:

• We made a toilet-paper doll in Special Needs several years ago, and it was absolutely my favorite activity. so the bottom of my sculpture is made of toilet paper rolled- which by-the-way, took me hours to do!
• I used laces from an old outfit of mine. 
• The orange button things were sent by my by awesome cousin to me from pakistan. 
• I made one good friend when several people left Afghanistan around 2000 and came to Pakistan, and many of them ended up living inside our religious center because they had no place to go. She taught me how to make that upside-down origami flower that makes up the top half of the dress on human looking sculpture thing. That is basically the only origami thing I have really ever known how to make. 

I tried to use items that were significant to me about my past, and gave the sculpture a human looking form, which represents kind of who I am today. I take a lot of pride in my culture, and I love my friends, including my special needs students.

I tried to make the head form clay of different colors, and I made it much smaller than a head should be on a body that size. I tried to show how molded and perhaps how confused my mind is, especially through the googly eyes. I was trying to show a contrast between the outside representation of something- the "cover of the book" analogy basically, and the content inside (the mind). The class did not exactly follow my logic there, and I guess I don't blame them. I do not think the point is very easily grasped through the physical rendering of my idea. On the bright side, I think my piece looks really pretty, and I like pretty art. :) 

Note: My P. Chem textbook is not part of the self-portrait. Although, I can probably make a case for why it fits in with it.



Below are other self-portraits from other members of the class. Clearly, there is no one way to represent self. I was pretty impressed!

Ciao for now. :) 

The Process of Preserving Evanescent Life

I think there is a taboo on criticizing art, particularly when the critic is a novice artist, who is not even considered an artist by anyone.

However, I think that everyone is an artist, you just need to have the courage to call yourself one. So here I am, an artist, sharing my thoughts on making still lives. 

The assignment was to create a replica of grapefruit and a banana organized on cloth. The basic questions that really became important at the beginning were: What the heck is the point? I mean, a banana is a banana is a banana. What is so special about making a copy of this banana or this grapefruit, when I can just buy it? Second, if I work extremely hard on making my still life, would it not look like everyone else's? Therefore, what is the point of the artist? It seems like the students making this still life are like out-dated 3D printers- basically the type of 3-D printers that really are incapable of making the copy look anything like the original. 

But as I continued with the still life, I learned a couple of philosophical things: 

• What I observed: What we visually see is often very different from how things actually are. I would look at the fruit and cloth structure from one angle, and I would try my best to re-create it with clay, and when I got done with one part of my art, I would stand up to compare the pieces, and actually, what I created was very different from what the structure looked like. This was not because I am a terrible artist who could not mold the clay properly, but rather because I made what I saw, and what I saw was different from what the object actually looked like. It was not until I got up from my seat, observed the piece from other angles that I could realize my mistakes. I would then attempt to fix them, and repeat the observation again, and then repeat the whole process maybe 20 more times. This was the case with all the students. Often times, the problem was that I could see that my still life did not look like the structure, but I had no idea about what was wrong- I could not tell. 
• What I learned: There is beautiful symbolism in this process, which revealed that angle and perspective matter, in so many aspects of life. What we think is accurate, whether it is about how a structure physically looks, or about how the world works, is not always what is accurate, and is not always the best perspective. We must realize the importance of taking a step back, recognizing mistakes, looking at multiple perspectives, realizing our errors and learning the courage to accept our flaws and the courage to remold our minds and our art pieces to be more accurate and more all-encompassing. 

• What I observed: In the early stages of the process, and even as the day progressed, the still life created by each artist looked very different. Some students focused more on the specific details of the piece, starting at one area and working towards other areas, building the large piece by piece. Some students focused on the large aspects of the structure, making the overall structure first, and then working on the smaller specifics. Some students worked really hard to make the banana look perfect, while some worked hard on making the holes in the grapefruit look realistic, while others focused on making the curves of the cloth look realistic. 
• What I learned: We are all part of one species, and we look very similar, and generally have two eyes, one nose, two arms, very similar DNA, and yet, how we observe and how we interact with the world, what is most important to us, what our passion is and how we choose to prioritize our time according to what is expected of us is so varying- and therein lies the magic of human society- not the individuals capacity to shape this world and alter it, but rather in the collective effort of bringing our own perspectives and talents and passions, and together bringing this world into the future.

• What I observed: I wonder about when each student decided they were done. Was it when the time ran out? Why did some decide to come back later to work on the project more? Was it because they were ashamed of the outcome? Because they expected more from themselves? They want a higher grade? They love the smell of moist clay (that is probably why I spent like nine extra hours on my project)? It was a great way to procrastinate from other assignments? They really wanted to create an exact replica (I attempted, but definitely did not reach that goal)? What I noticed was that when we were reaching the time where the deadline was approaching, the students chose different ways to "finish" the assignment. I think everyone realized that the final project did not really look like the actual structure, but some tried to put finishing touches by making the structure look very smooth, even if the actual structure did not look like the copy. Some tried to poke quick holes into the grapefruit, hoping that the hole would make the still life look better, some kind of just simplified the cloth in their minds, and focused on the main curves, even if the proportions did not match. 
• What I learned: I am not so sure about the "philosophical" meaning of this, but I know that for me, this part was the hardest. How do I tell myself to stop working on something when I know that my still life did not look like the structure. I COULD NOT DO IT. And that was very frustrating to me. I remember coming and working on the piece for like six hours straight, and being frustrated because I could not get my still life to look like the structure. But I think at this point of just how beautiful nature can be. Each curve in the cloth, each dumb hole in the grapefruit, each "flaw" in the banana, were just natural beautiful occurrences, which make each banana special, and provided this structure with a special uniqueness that no other structure would probably ever have- I mean what is the probability of having a naturally grown banana look exactly like this one, and then have a grapefruit look exactly like this one, and then have the cloth folded this specific way with each curve and bent and dent? To quote Mauritius by Teresa Rebeck, "It's the errors that make 'em valuable." 

Well either way, I did not finish my piece before nature, with its evanescent quality, decayed, and I could not preserve it. 

The pictures of the process are below, along with my final, yet, unfinished product.

So now with some still life experience "under my belt," (honestly, what does that phrase even supposed to mean?) I think I woud finish by saying that I really loved making my still life, and I think I learned plenty, and I must say that I love my final product, even with its multitude of flaws. It means something to me because even though it is an attempt at replication, it came from me and from my efforts.

However, I still am not sure about whether to label my piece as art. It means something to me, and it attempts to preserve one combination of objects in a particular way- but can it mean something to someone else? I think that at most, it can bring me fond memories and can be fun to look at (and that might be a stretch), but can it move someone? Can it inspire someone? Does it represent me? I really am not sure. Unless I put something from my mind, onto this piece, unless I want to express something from within and show that in this still life, I am not sure this piece is of much value, at least in the contemporary culture of art, where the mind of the artist is valued much more than the specific quality of the piece.
I think good art has to be something that can move you. That doesn't mean that it has to mean something in particular, or that it has to be something beautiful or even something crappy or horrid looking. It just means that when you, the observer, observe this piece, that there is a romance between the art and the observer- a special and unique moment, where the artist and the observer speak through this medium. That is art. And I am just not sure that my piece has that potential, particularly because it is not anything from within me, just my observation and replication. And well, you can call the process of observation and replication of nature beautiful if you want, and you have a right to think that, I just am not sure this process is beautiful enough to be included into the wonderful label of art. Just an amateur artist's opinion.