more ideas...

Turns out the 9+ hour van ride from Philly back to Brunswick was prime time for thinking about my project. We were inundated with peoples' thoughts and and advice about art and with lots art itself all weekend so that definitely helped to get some ideas flowing.

Right now I've narrowed my focus (at least for now) to the idea of touch. This is a really broad idea but has got me thinking about lots of different artistic ways of addressing this. Art is not normally something you touch, but often you want to, and I like the ideas that tension brings up. I want to play around with this in both sense of texture/tangibility of pieces and subject matter in paintings, photographs, collages? etc. So, still broad, but I have tons of idea rather than zero, so that's progress.

This focus morphed itself over the past week into shooting photos of mannequins' hands. The mannequins attracted me because of the way they sort of act as stand-ins for people. I noticed that it's really the hands and arms (or lack thereof) that tend to make the mannequins look least human/alive because of the resulting unnatural looking gestures. So I sort of addressed my previous goals but also figured out new things I want to explore, which is essentially what the purpose of my original, sort of arbitrary goals were. So that's where I am. The next set of goals will go up in a second but first...some people, and some mannequins.

Mannequins: