identityexcavationstation

[identityexcavationstation]

Just gals bein’ pals :)

(should I actually try posting art on this blog like a regular f**king human being? feedback is encouraged pls n thx)

[identityexcavationstation]

The High Fidelity Remake is Good and my Identity is Irreversibly Linked to Music Consumption

Hi! So, I’m kinda insane about playlists.

This year I’ve made a lot of them. They’ve been short and snappy on index cards, scanned and pasted in a book and uploaded to the internet. (I’ve really fallen in love with index card playlists and they’re my thing now and I think everyone should do them always and forever.) They were easy to churn out as a retrospective exercise because the music I listened to as a teenager really defined my high school experience. Also, I have most of my favorite songs from that period in a very dramatic playlist I started in 2014 so it was really a game of copy-and-paste. 

Making these smol boys in batches has been a really peculiar experience because for years now, I’ve only made one playlist at a time. In my second semester of college, I’d officially burned myself out listening to only CHVRCHES for three months and began venturing elsewhere. (Don’t get me wrong, CHVRCHES absolutely bangs, but you can only listen to “Never Ending Circles” so many times before getting seasick.) All of the random songs I was listening to made me feel kinda hazy and purple, like I’d done all of this before. So I made a playlist full of them and called it “Deja Vu.”

I added to it all semester, and then suddenly it was summer and I didn’t feel purple and hazy anymore⁠—everything was blue and crisp on the way to South Haven as my friend blasted “Settle Down” by Kimbra in her beat-up Honda. So I started a new playlist and named it the first word that popped into my head: “Roots.”

Using Deja Vu as a rubric, I developed some ground rules for the playlists I would go on to create. They are pretty nonsensical but also exceedingly firm because if I don’t make rules for every area of my life I feel like I’m falling into a deep and limitless void. Health! Anyway, the rules are:

The playlist’s title has to be a short noun (seven letters maximum).

This has since transformed into a noun that is also a verb.

To generate a title, I ask myself what short word I would use to describe the phase of life I’m currently in. The answer comes quickly and reflexively, and I choose the very first word I think of.

One song per artist, no repeats!

Exceptions are made for artists who are featured on a track.

There have been times when I’ve obsessively listened to a whole album or an artist’s entire discography, so I have to choose just one song that represents the very best of that album or artist.

Tracks are added chronologically, based on when I first hear them and/or start listening to them compulsively.

The playlist has to contain an amount of tracks that is divisible by five.

If a song in a playlist is deleted from Spotify, I have to find a replacement asap that is accurate to what I was listening to when that playlist was being created.

and, most importantly, 

I can’t make a new playlist until I feel I’m finished with the current one.

These playlists represent seasons of my life, cycles in which I change and evolve and stagnate and fuck up and try again. The only rule I have for beginning a new playlist is that I feel done with the current one—those songs are a little stale and don’t represent me anymore. These “seasons” don’t have any set length, and I can never predict when I’ll feel like a new being who needs new songs to define her. So far, my life has looked like this:

Deja Vu - 176 days (12.03.16 - 05.28.17) Most common lyrics: now, love, time, need, take

snow that covers ivy that covers bricks, towers made from dining hall dishes, smiling at the bus stop without knowing, sheet masks in the dorm bathroom at 2am, pink string lights and pink crocheted blankets and pink shag carpeting, cheap beer behind tarps and walking everyone home

Roots - 111 days (05.28.17 - 09.16.17)  Most common lyrics: love, one, give, wanna, know

t-shirt tan lines, mozzarella and tomato and basil and singed spaghetti, sunset walks around abandoned high schools, green leaves outlined in watercolor, the smell of mildew and old paper in banker’s boxes, sweat-soaked french braids, the knife twist of eye contact, tarot readings under lamplight

Walls - 110 days (09.16.17 - 01.04.18)   Most common lyrics: wanna, know, baby, take, feel

crying in the gender-neutral restroom, pretty boys holding guitars or rolling rock, photos in the forest, blue carpeting and lofted bedframes, pitch-black bonfires, sitting in the dining hall to just watch the people pass, snow on eyelashes in large wet clumps, laughing at lies

Bite - 78 days (01.04.18 - 03.23.18)    Most common lyrics: know, love, stay, come, need

impatience at the airport, texting on the laundry room floor, nervous night drives, five grilled cheese sandwiches, acne like freckles, ceiling photos taken in secret, watercolor lines and paper houses, broken glass on the sidewalk, ink-stained forearms, notebook paper comics, writing small on basement walls

Windows - 131 days (03.23.18 - 08.01.18)   Most common lyrics: love, now, know, baby, fall

books piled up by the bed, rum and coke and orange juice and vodka and cheap white wine, rainy day night walks, streetlights turning the leaves orange, echoes from the party upstairs, solo trips to the grocery store, always leaving the blinds open, aperol and chai lattes and smørrebrød, never coming home

Grip - 136 days (08.01.18 - 12.15.18)    Most common lyrics: know, boy, lost, girl, night

read receipts, the creaking of an empty house, sand and bricks and traffic cones, sitting on the curb and shaking, applause at dinner, bubble tea, bike rides in torn jeans, mr brightside blasting at 10am, doodles during lectures, embroidery at the kitchen table, blue bus panic attacks, half an apple for lunch

Wait - 117 days (12.15.18 - 04.11.19)  Most common lyrics: heart, want, one, back, know

crying in the lobby, measuring oats by the quarter cup, drunken voice memos, shoes on power lines, another bowl of granola, reading all the lyrics, photos taken with the flash on, sleeping on strange couches, shoeboxes full of photographs, wire catching the sunlight, fifteen minutes of windchill

Wave - 108 days (04.11.19 - 07.28.19)  Most common lyrics: wanna, know, now, love, come

dancing on the porch, reading on the roof, tipsy trips to the corner store, silent heavy parlor air, chocolate cake with peanut butter frosting, barred windows and string lights and exit signs, highlighting the important parts, nails tapping on wooden tables, wet wind before the storm, biking straight into the smoke

Home - 178 days (07.28.19 - 01.22.20)   Most common lyrics: down, know, now, wanna, think

steep downhill walks, fingertips covered in graphite and lead, blank faces on green walls, forest walkways, hands gripping thighs too tightly, light leaks in darkrooms, the handwriting of strangers, chains trapped between teeth, white words left unread, twirling at the tennis court, yellow becoming blue

Hand - 63 days (01.22.20 - 03.25.20)   Most common lyrics: know, time, love, die, back

masking tape messages, laughing four shots in, BiC .07mm HB mechanical pencils slipped into coat cuffs, cheeks blushed with red ink, green floodlights and kissed knuckles, windows fogged from the inside, falling asleep with earbuds in, finger guns and everything in boxes, wedging open locked doors

_______________________________________________________________________

It’s interesting to look back at these playlists altogether, see them as self-contained units, little stories I tell about myself, about the people I used to be. Adding a song to one of these playlists was like making a vow, entering a relationship with a collection of sounds. It’s like I was saying “this song is now a part of me.” I constructed this little world for myself in the space between my ears, and it, in turn, created me.

I really mean it when I say that the first word that floats to the front of my mind becomes the title of whatever playlist I’m making. I never question what the word means, and its meaning always ends up describing that season of my life. 

“Roots” became a period of reconnecting with essential pieces of myself I thought I had abandoned. 

During “Grip,” I was holding on so tightly to things that had left me ages ago, and I think I knew that, even if I was unable to admit it to myself. 

“Wait” revealed itself in two ways: it was a time in which 1.) I felt stagnant and restless, unable to be patient, and 2.) I was forced to grasp with a physical and emotional weight that had been bearing down on me. 

The mind is a magical thing—it processes what we refuse to recognize. 

Speaking of which, these playlist covers have been driving me up the wall for ages. They’re like nails on a freaking chalkboard for my synesthesia. Is “Bite” a heavily blue playlist? Sure. But is “Home” purple? Is “Grip” pink??? I think the fuck not! 

(I could do a whole goddamn blog post on synesthesia, and I might.)

Now that I know how to switch out playlist cover art (can you believe it’s taken me this long to figure out how to do that?), I have decided to issue myself a challenge/project/way to procrastinate actual work I have to do. 

I’d like to make a piece of cover art for all of the above playlists. And because I am, to reiterate, insane, I’m setting up some Rules For Creation:

All works must be the same size, on the same type of paper using similar materials (tbd but probably graphite, colored pencil, watercolor, fineliners, and/or collage).

The preliminary sketch for each cover must be created while listening to the playlist.

Each piece can (must?) incorporate the five most common lyrics as listed above because goddammit I did not spend four hours compiling lyrics in a web-based word cloud generator for nothing.

If I’m not having fun, I won’t make myself do it because this is literally just for laffs. 

Anyway, I’m looking forward to creating some fun weird art! I know nobody is gonna read this and nobody is gonna comment but if, by some miracle, you feel like it, comment a playlist you’ve made that you’re really proud of! Or comment if you have some weird playlist rules! Or cyberbully me! Anything’s fair game. 

TL;DR playlists are fun and I’m a maniac :)

[identityexcavationstation]

Where Are They Now? (aka What I’m Doing, Why My Blog Still Exists, and How My Book is Fairing in the Marketplace of Ideas™️)

Hello. Not sure how to start this post, considering I don’t even need to make it—college is over. O-V-E-R over. This morning I got an email from the alumni association. Pretty soon, I’ll get my diploma in the mail. Pretty soon, my university email account will be deactivated and this blog will be the only thing left of my time at the University of Michigan and I’ll fade into obscurity. Thank god. 

I mean, I guess there’ll always be this, my IP, for as long as Stamps keeps the website up. I’ve gotten rave reviews so far: 

Thanks, Dan.

That’s more like it.

Am I super proud of what I’ve created? Yes absolutely. Am I happy other people are able and willing to read a book I read? Yes absolutely. Am I scared so shitless about the possibility of someone in the book reading it that I’m tempted to burn my InDesign file and beg Stamps to take my page down? Yes absolutely.

But this blog post isn’t about flexing the earth-shattering victory that is my IP (which, again, you can find here), or going into a shame spiral about five people possibly being confronted with the Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known. It’s about... 

Well, fuck. What is it about? What am I doing? 

Although I’m not actually sure how to answer that, I’ll attempt it in two parts: 1.) What I’m Doing In General, and 2.) What I’m Doing On This Blog. Here goes nothing. 

What Brooks Has Been Up To Since Late March

Okay, so the short answer would be “having a series of mental breakdowns punctuated by long walks that give me popliteal tendinopathy” but that wouldn’t be any fun! It would make me feel like I haven’t been ~productive~ during the pandemic and god knows that’s a criminal offense under late capitalism so instead here’s a bulletpoint list of some things I’ve done:

- wrote a 4200+ word thesis paper (please read it I’m so proud) - drew a little - embroidered a little  - knitted a LOT (dude I can knit socks now....... socks) - downloaded TikTok (a decision I regret, to the surprise of no one) - redownloaded Tinder (another decision I regret) - listened to this audiobook and this one and this one (now I’m on this one) - got a job? in this economy??? - cried a bunch - fell in love with Matt H Watson (Jacob C Bergen don’t @ me) - video called with the Stumps Skool of Rat fam (Jacob C Bergen @ me) - watched this music video five times just to laugh at G Easy’s rat teeth - walked and walked and walked and walked - took graduation photos wearing my high school cap + gown in my backyard with my phone’s camera propped up on a chair on self-timer mode - graduated ig

Am I willing to accept the reality that I am just another college graduate stuck in my childhood bedroom in my semi-shitty hometown? No I am not. Do I crave the escape from crippling monotony and self-loathing only a whirlwind online romance can provide? My DMs are open, ladies. 

Why Brooks Is Still Writing On This Stupid Blog No One Follows

Yeah, shouldn’t I have written stuff during IP, when it mattered? What’s my deal, man? Well it (my deal) is has to do with the following:

I need to document my life to convince myself that I have a future self and that being alive is worth the effort haha who needs a therapist not meeee

!!! BUT !!!

writing in my journal bums me tf out because I haven’t written in it consistently since March and now it just sits on my bedside table, staring at me and stinking of failure

my drive to draw is (and always has been) sporadic at best so any type of “quarantine sketchbook” is absolutely off the table

my finsta is a sad-ass sinkhole where memes go to die

SO ......

If you’re one of the six lucky individuals who listened to me when I begged you to follow this blog, I am so sorry for what’s about to happen to it. I’d like to think my spiral into total introspective insanity will be at least mildly entertaining. What is my psychosis if not mildly entertaining, right? 

Anyway, hang on—it’s gonna be a bumpy one.

[identityexcavationstation]

Week 2 in the Hole: No Really Like I’m Actually Done

I haven’t spoken to any of my professors this week. Oops. Or the IP thesis guy (although that was kind of a bummer... BlueJeans is confusing). It must be because I’ve been so busy working from home. You know, that thing I can totally do? That thing that totally isn’t impossible because I paid for art school to use art-school-caliber facilities and now I’m in a house in southwest Michigan and don’t even own a desk? Yeah totally. 

Here’s what I’ve been up to this week:

- working on my thesis (and doing a bad job!) - working at the Virtual Peer Writing Center (and doing a good job!) - making a flowchart about retirement plans so that a startup might maybe someday hire me if the economy ever picks up again - eating buttered toast - thinking about downloading TikTok 

Now, I know what you’re thinking: Wow, Brooks! You’re doing so much! Congrats! But when are you setting time aside to CuLtIvAtE yOuR aRt PrAcTiCe? 

Well here’s the thing... I think I’m done? 

Not, like, with art in general, and not forever. But when I say I busted my ass during my last week in the studios, I mean it. I literally did not sleep. I went from having half a book to one entire book in a span of thirteen hours. I created seven new prints during the last three hours the printmaking studio was open. (I’m still trying to figure out how to document them, as my only resources to do so are the light from my window and my phone camera. I’ll keep you posted.) Not to be a lazy millennial/gen-z kid, but I honestly have no idea what else I can do, especially with the resources I currently have at my disposal (which are None). Can I eat my avocado toast and take a nap now? Is that okay?

You’d think I’d feel comfortable saying I was done, considering that’s the actual title of my last blog post, but I still have to meet with my IP professors. What am I supposed to say? That knitting a bunch of fingerless gloves is integral to my work with manufactured identity in female adolescence? 

I don’t know, maybe it’s just me. Maybe I feel like I haven’t earned my diploma if I’ve completely finished with my work a whole month before “““graduation.””” I guess I’ll find out when I talk to Jim and Stephanie at the beginning of April. Although, if they tell me I need to find a way to keep working on my project, I might lose it. 

Because I can’t.

Like, literally, I don’t have an exposure unit or a printing press or a risograph printer. I don’t even have printmaking ink. 

I’ve done so much. Somebody tell me it’s okay to be done. 

[identityexcavationstation]

Week 1 in the Hole: I’m Done and I Hate it

Well, here we are. I took a very long break from this blog, partially because it was no longer an IP requirement, but also because I was working, like actually constantly working on my project. What a wacky concept! I was looking forward to the day I’d be done, really done, and could pop back on the blog and make some cheeky comment about how when I’m actually working I don’t have to write and process work is a crock and wow mom look what I made. And I guess I can do that now... I guess. 

It’s been almost two weeks and I still feel like I’ve been punched in the gut. I wake up every day and there’s no wind left in me (don’t worry, I don’t have COVID-19...yet). The recent series of events have put my timeline on hyperdrive and I convinced myself that as soon as I finished my book, finished my prints, finished everything I had planned to make two months ago, I would feel that little piece of closure I was missing and I could release myself into the post-grad void; I would feel free. 

But now, with the Stamps studios closed indefinitely, I’m trapped in the in-between space of having everything done but nothing printed or constructed and no one to see anything I’ve made. There is no safe place for my book to land, even if (when?) it does get printed on the riso and bound. I created an object cut out of all the feelings I didn’t want to define me anymore, an object I could share with others and hide under my bed, a block of experiences I’d never have to think about again. But it’s completed and I’m still thinking about it all the time. It lives in my computer. I can’t avoid my computer for long. 

I don’t know whether to feel proud of myself for making what I envisioned back in January, or to feel like this whole thing is just some cosmic confirmation that my work never really had an audience, that nobody would have cared anyway. But I know that, ultimately, these things I created in IP are for me. Audience or no audience, I used my time to make something that speaks to me, that was carved out of what I care about, that has meaning and makes sense and is full of undeniable personal truths. I’ve learned so much. I really have grown. 

Depending on the way IP will be presented in the future, I might work to replicate my anticipated riso color layers in my online pdf, but for now, here are some black and white spreads:

I remember the feeling of dread, discomfort, impending doom I experienced following my high school graduation. I knew I was going to college in the fall; I knew I had a future. Still, even with the closure and catharsis of the graduation ceremony, I felt as though I were staring into a deep, cavernous void. I felt like I was going to die. Now, without that closure, I feel like I’m being hurled into that void, a place where there’s no meaning to my life, where my actions have no purpose. 

The future is here and it scares me. I am really, really scared. 

[identityexcavationstation]

Week 5: Guess it’s Never Really Over

I was planning on talking about book design and layout in this blog post, but surprise! I had an idea! Very rare occurrence but it’s been rattling around in my brain for a few days now and I gotta get it down so that I can actually focus on layout. You know, the thing I actually need to be doing. That thing.

On Tuesday I was in my printmaking studio, spacing out while being talked at about screen-printed posters about syphilis (you know how it is), and I had a Revelation™️. I’ve been talking about environment-building within my studio and how I want to collage my walls to reflect the hodge-podge and chaotic energy of a teenage bedroom, but I’ve been hesitant to make any moves regarding planning because creating monotype cutouts big enough to collage on my walls? Actually collaging each one with wheat paste? Sounds slightly like my own personal hell. But as I considered the versatility of screen-printed images and how they could be layered over other types of prints, cyanotype was like surprise, bitch!

Using the blue, I won’t have to worry about color balance or everything looking cohesive. I can pin up prints instead of having to install and deinstall wheat-pasted bullshit that’ll be ruined as soon as the show is over. Why hadn’t I thought of this before? There’s a big honking fabric cyanotype hanging right by my desk that uses a collection of objects and images to tell a story, which is exactly what I want to do on my walls.

So here’s the vision: 

- I create a bunch of big honking cyanotypes on big honking paper using tracing paper, sharpied Mylar, photo negatives, and actual objects to extend the narrative in my book. 

- I then cut up the big honking cyanotypes into smaller compositions, which I recombine and then print on top of (using trace monotype, screen printing, and block printing in different colors).

- I arrange these smaller pages in layers on my walls and tack them up instead of gluing.

- I might add yarn or some other 3D elements. I might add other prints.

- I will work intuitively and trust that everything will come together as long as the individual elements are in place (scary but exciting!)

Here are some photos of Catherine Jansen’s work for inspiration! (No beds in my gallery space, but I do wanna create the sense of intimacy and voyeurism like I believe her works represent.)

Blue Room, 1972

Sewing Space, 1981

Now that I’ve got a really, really clear sense of what my book will be surrounded by, it’s go time! No more fucking around, for real! I have the whole day free tomorrow (Friday, February 7) to work! It’s gonna be great. 

[identityexcavationstation]

Week 4: Working Hard or Hardly Working? (We know the answer.)

Oh what’s that? Avoiding my blog due to the compounding Shame of getting nothing done all week? Couldn’t possibly be me! Here I am, kids...your local failure. On Friday I ran into a friend who told me he was enjoying my IP blog, so of course it stands to reason that I wouldn’t post on it for three more days. Sorry, Seth. Please keep reading my posts. 

Last week was such a stupendous bust. In retrospect, I’m not even sure how it’s possible to get so little done. There were several small factors in my relatively uneventful personal life that gave me brain worms (you know, the kind that punch gaping holes into your gray matter and make it so you can barely function) but that’s literally the worst excuse I’ve ever heard. Making a definitive timeline of my IP work for my exhibition plan really put my lack of effort into perspective—the perspective being that what I’m doing (or failing to do) is bad and I should stop it. 

On Thursday I actually did get something done: I scanned some stuff I’d like to include in my book. A very small achievement, but an achievement nonetheless. (I walk a fine line between congratulating myself for breathing and bullying myself for getting a low A. Very cool.) Here’s some of the scans, just to give you an idea of the kind of ephemera I’m hoping to incorporate into my storytelling: 

All of the photos shown are from high school or earlier, and although the drawing I’ve included was created last month, I want to insinuate that it (and drawings like it) are time-specific to the book (i.e. were created when the main character was in high school). I’m also planning on preserving the anonymity of my characters with sticky notes/doodles/scribbles over the faces. I plan on experimenting with that very soon. 

Besides just scanning things (wow! impressive! so laborious! the craft!), I also completed an album art commission this week! (I’d ask you to guess how long I’ve been procrastinating on that, but you wouldn’t like the answer.) I hit a real wall as I was working on Friday, and then, all of a sudden, the magic of graphic paper swooped in to save me. I scanned some on the off-chance that I’d use it in my IP ideation this week, and found it to be a great source of texture and inspiration for my album cover! Plus, once I discovered I could use the paint bucket in Photoshop to directly change the color of the squares? On god it was OVER. It was a very good time. Here’s one of the later drafts: 

How fun is that? Answer: very fun. I was hoping to work with graph paper and notebook paper a lot in my book, and this experiment confirmed that it’s happening. The above piece (and many of the spreads I’ve been daydreaming about for my IP book) are heavily influenced by some of the work in Instagram Legend flesh.png’s art zines. (I’ll probably include some scans of those in this coming week’s blog post, in which I hope to finally cover the first stages of my book design process.) They combine scans of drawings, tape, sticky notes, and other schoolwork-adjacent textures to create a delicious mish-mash of flattened imagery. 

This post was more or less a quick brain dump to clear out my head for the coming month of INTENSE CREATION. Thanks for coming along for the ride. Check back in on Thursday for more Content™ (I promise I’ll post on time from here on out...there’s so much to say and make and share!). 

[identityexcavationstation]

Week 3: Collaging Connection

Hey fellow gamerz! Guess who’s returned to printmaking! That’s right, after a yearlong hiatus, I’m back with the ink-smudged content you’ve all been clamoring for. I’m not exactly sure why I dropped printmaking so fast and so completely after the 2018 winter semester. Maybe it was because Intro to Lithography was physically, emotionally, and spiritually exhausting. Maybe it was because I wanted one year of my life to be completely free of ink stains covering all of the clothes I own. Or maybe I just needed to take a break to remember why I like printmaking so much, to truly appreciate a good Saturday studio session: just me and my mylar, choking on the smell of oil-based ink and mineral spirits. 

Last weekend, I took a whole afternoon to make monoprints and I loved every second of it. Was the ink too loose? Sure. Did I, at one point, forget how to draw an S, consequentially printing a piece in which every S is backwards as if I’m some sort of toddler who just learned how to print the alphabet? Yup. Did I leave the studio covered in black and red ink, looking like I had just committed a gruesome murder in a coal mine? Absolutely. But I made some pretty cool prints; check ‘em out!

The source images here were outtakes from a film photo project I did last year, which focused on inhabiting the memory of my teenage self, recreating a fictional persona and doing things she (I) once did. I recreated the outfit, hairstyle, and makeup look I wore during my senior photoshoot because when I think of the person I was trying to be in high school, she looks like a poor replica of a Modcloth model. I danced, posed, and pouted for the camera at the Baits tennis courts because, as an emo teen, I would walk to the tennis courts in my neighborhood and lie down by the nets, spin around, dance like no one was watching (and, luckily, no one was). 

The translation of these images from photo to monoprint fascinates me. The prints, in their messiness and blemishes and inconsistencies, bring to mind so many connections I never would have made otherwise. The white ghost prints against the black ink reminds me of chalk on a chalkboard; the cracks in the tennis court, when drawn in red ink, look like little rivers of blood. The lighter area in Image 4 and the darker area in Image 2 are the same shape, but one resembles smoke while the other resembles shadow. 

I messed around with these images a little more on Tuesday, playing with scale and stencils. Here’s an image of all of the work I’ve made, together as a collection: 

Yesterday, as I was tacking all of this up, one of my classmates commented that her favorite piece was the newsprint cutout that I’d used as a stencil for the yellow layer of my bigger monotype (shown top right), and I couldn’t help but agree. Even though it wasn’t meant to be a piece at all, its oversized-paper-doll-like nature sticks out as dynamic and expressive, both flattened and very much alive. The decontextualization of the image is what really strikes me: when removed from the physical setting of the tennis court, the figure seems to be leaning back onto thin air, reaching out for something to cushion its fall. The fact that this figure is cut off at the torso is both startling and engaging; it looks like it’s emerging from behind a wall or beneath a body of water. 

After seeing Nick and Endi demo printmaking collage techniques in class yesterday, I am so excited to experiment with some large-scale collage projects that develop and explore this visual narrative, this vernacular I’m creating around my teenage years. Just like I’m attempting to do in my book for IP, I can’t wait to see what happens when I place these symbols together, rearrange them into a silent sentence: if my audience saw a tennis net, a 24 oz. can of Arnold Palmer, a worn-out pair of Doc Martens, a page torn from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, what would that mean? 

I’m also thinking of these pieces within the context of my IP exhibition as I complete my exhibition plan for next Tuesday. Should I make a massive chine-collé triptych that corresponds with my narrative, a piece for each wall of my studio space? What about covering my walls with paper cutouts and wheat-pasting them on—a transitional, time-specific piece for the transitional period of growth I aim to depict and explore? What does it say about my hand-held IP that in my printmaking work I want to work big and expansive, fill my studio walls the way a teen girl pastes magazine cutouts on the walls of her bedroom? 

These are the questions I aim to answer, or at least explore further, in my exhibition plan. In the time between now and April, I hope to work tirelessly to create a visual language in printmaking, a world in which my yearbook can shine. 

[identityexcavationstation]

Week 2: Keeping Ourselves to Ourselves

I’ve been doodling a lot lately. This seems to happen the same way every year: one day in January I wake up knowing how to draw. And because I only do things I’m already good at and always stay in my comfort zone, I start drawing a lot. While I’m resigned to the fact that, eventually, my drawing powers will wane and I will again become a simple civilian who can’t scribble out a figure to save her life, I’m thriving right now. Yesterday, I drew two hands. TWO! And they actually looked like hands. Ah the wonder and mystery of youth. 

Look at these suckers! Nails and everything! God I’m talented. 

These recent doodling days have brought to the surface a lot of questions about my process and the (big) difference between my public-facing work and the art I do just for myself. I post on Instagram very rarely—once a month, maybe—because I want to share only the best stuff, the work I feel a.) done with, b.) proud of, and c.) ready to share. (Turns out that’s not a lot of work.) But I create a lot more stuff than I ever share with the internet, my friends, or my mom. While I do get stuck in my head quite a lot (if you’re an avid reader of this blog, you know this... as if there are any avid readers of this blog lmao), I also constantly need to be making and moving to prove to myself that my presence on Earth is justified. 

One of the ways this manifests is in my journaling practice. I began seriously journaling (where “seriously” means every day, mercilessly, with no breaks) the first day of 2017 and have done so ever since, save the six-month period this year when I was in a really bad place and didn’t want to remember anything I did. That moves into the bigger question of why I do it: you’d think it would be to reflect on my day or whatever, but I’m constantly reflecting on everything I do all the time and it’s frankly so exhausting that it would be easier to not have to sit down and think even more about what I do and why. Put simply, here’s why I journal: 

(I need you to pretend those pictures of the Simpson baby are pictures of me when I’m thirty. Just go with it.)

I am my own audience. I always have been. It’s such a no-brainer for me that I often forget there are other people who may one day be seeing and experiencing the things I’m creating. (Last semester, when I was working on my Minor in Writing Capstone project, I had a transcendent, revelatory moment in which I thought, “Huh, I should probably determine my audience for these essays.” The deadline was two weeks away. That’s how deep this thing goes.) When I think about who’s gonna read my journals, it’s my future self. That’s what drives me to be candid and expressive in my writing every night: Future Me needs to know who I am and what I did.

These doodle pages I do in my sketchbook or on handouts or on fifteen Post-It notes at 2am function very much the same way, although the process is much more intuitive. I listen to what I want to make in the moment without judging or questioning why. This is so hard for me to do when I know other people will be seeing my work, but on my own, it becomes this magical headspace I can’t easily replicate on demand. Here are a few examples:

One of the coolest things that happens here is that words just float to the forefront of my mind and I write them down. Song lyrics, questions, fragments... none of it really makes sense to me at the time, but when I go back and look days or weeks later, those words (paired with images) retroactively provide a crystal clear reflection of my emotional state. That first image up there, the one with the hands? I drew a hand and then my brain said, suddenly and without explanation, “The hands are the lips of the arms.” Like, what the actual hell? I still have no idea what that means, but it was begging to be written down, if only for the laughs. And I bet when I come back to it in a few weeks, I’ll know exactly what I was talking about. 

I think part of the reason I value this work, why I do it at all, comes from the immense regret I feel for not documenting my teenage years. It’s not just because I’m trying to reconstruct them in retrospect for this project and that’s hard... I think I really missed out on an opportunity to explore my feelings and create a space inside myself devoid of ridicule. I didn’t write poetry and I barely drew because I was too afraid of making something cringy or ugly or emo or “bad.” I thought of all my life, my entire identity, as public-facing—completely vulnerable to scrutiny, in need of constant defense.  

That’s one of the most challenging (and exciting!) parts of my project: I’m trying to publicize my own private life in a way that still feels private, personal, borderline voyeuristic. It’s true that my book will be inspired by the form and function of the yearbook, a highly public and social object. But I’m attempting to juxtapose the preconception of the yearbook as a document created specifically for public consumption with all of this personal stuff—“stuff” being both narrative/conceptual and visual/physical. In short, I’m creating public-facing documentation of personal identity and experience using private ephemera, things that my protagonist (i.e. me) thinks no one will ever see.  

The most complex and worrisome part of all of this is the layers of inauthentic manufacturing I’m doing when it comes to visual documentation. (Part of my point is that adolescent identity is highly manufactured and constantly policed by society and the inner self, so I guess it’s fitting and meta and all that, but it sure as hell isn’t comfy!) I’m trying to recreate private creative documentation processes, like the ones I use in my journals and sketchbooks, with the full knowledge that this work will be seen, consumed, and critiqued by strangers. I have to think about how to make people care about both my personal experience as a teenage girl and the broader subject of identity in female adolescence. On top of that, I’m burdened with the rights, feelings, and privacy of the other “characters” in my story, the people I knew and loved and lost when I was fifteen. Deep down, I know that my memory and perception of others’ adolescent identity is just a funhouse mirror reflection. But how much of their teenage selves would these individuals be willing to share with the whole world, if given the choice? 

Everything is so much simpler when the only audience I answer to is me. 

[identityexcavationstation]

Week 1 (again... it’s a new semester, folks): Back to Yearbooks, Baby!

So I talked a little bit about my thoughts vis a vis December Review in my last post and I discussed my plans to move forward (check out my Week ? post for the deets). Honestly, I’ve been so scared to think that my entire first semester of IP was a total waste of time that I haven’t even looked at my written feedback from my review yet. I know that once I feel more confident in what I’m making now, the icky feelings will dissipate and I can look at the feedback I’ve been given. For now, it’s just too much and thinking about it fills me with an overwhelming sense of shame and embarrassment. Love that for me. 

I do have things to write about, though! Last week I started writing some of the “alter ego” narrative I’m planning on using in my book. I have a lot more to write, but what I have so far feels coherent and interesting and I think I’m developing a good narrative voice for it. I’m planning on finishing that up by next week and developing a really solid outline for the whole book so I can get to the meat of the story: the visual material!

In that vein, I’ve decided that I’d like to base the dimensions/layout/grid structure of my graphic novel on that of a yearbook. I worked with yearbooks a ton at the beginning of last semester and I’ve missed that over the past couple of months, so I’m so excited to be studying them again! I could wax poetic on the connection between yearbooks and performative adolescent identity, but I’m pretty sure I’m the only person interested in all of that at this point, so I’ll just summarize it by quoting my descriptive outline (which I had a lot of fun writing, btw!):

If our identities are a performance, always in flux, then the time-specific documentation of that performance is our only tangible way of constructing a past version of ourselves to present to others.

Think scrapbooks, journals, sketchbooks, yearbooks (and yearbook signatures): a curated echo of our past “performance.”

Yearbooks are an amalgam of intense experiences shared by hundreds or thousands of teenagers, boiled down into a singular, cheery recap each year. Just like a social media profile, this often feels “off,” a false representation of true human experience. 

While my book won’t contain the same content as a yearbook, I aim to co-opt yearbook aesthetics like massive grids of photographs, lists, and “spotlight” pages to make the connection. On Tuesday I was able to go back to my old high school and peruse their yearbook archive, and I found some great inspiration (as well as some really ugly design... the early aughts was truly a hellscape). Here’s a sampling of some of my favorite layouts and images:

I took a particular liking to the yearbook layouts of the 1970s. Here are some examples from the 1974 Accolade:

And some from the 1975 Accolade, entitled I’d Pick More Daisies:

(Check out how the photo grid shrinks as the yearbook comes to a close... how cool is that?)

The way these two yearbooks, some of the first in the archive to print in partial color, employ consistent minimalist design and punches of color has really influenced how I’m envisioning my book, especially since I want to print it on the riso and experiment with different hues!

So while this next week will be spent primarily in a literary headspace, I’ll be thinking about how my story, as I’ve outlined it, fits into the broader aesthetic context of the yearbook. I’m jazzed!

[identityexcavationstation]

Week ?: Yeah yeah I know

I haven’t posted in months! Could that possibly be correlated with my depressive episode at the end of the semester when I had four final projects due and felt like nothing I made mattered and I was going to die before December was over? Hmmmmm perhaps. I doubt anyone is reading this or ever will so in 2020 we (and by “we” I mean “me”) are going to actually use this blog with the small caveat of going absolutely buckwild and writing exactly what’s going on in our (my) head verbatim! Good!

December Review wasn’t that bad. I actually feel like I kinda killed: I said everything I wanted to say with minimal “so um yeah”s, which is really all I can ask of myself. My panel gave me a lot of great, thought-provoking feedback. (Notice that I didn’t say “affirming feedback” because I did not feel affirmed at the end of that meeting...I haven’t even looked at the written feedback yet because I don’t want to re-feel all that embarrassment just yet.) The main thoughts their feedback provoked were these: 

Wow, I hate everything I’ve made and everything I’ve been doing for the past three months. My work doesn’t mean anything to anyone and it doesn’t mean anything to me. I’m exhausted and can’t stand to think about the proposed trajectory of this project because it disgusts me. 

I need to scrap everything I’ve made this semester and start from scratch.

Naturally, this last revelation scared me shitless. I think I might have had a little panic attack on the bus (a prime location for overthinking and silent catastrophizing). But once the mind smog cleared and I actually had to think about what shape my project should take, now that I wasn’t shackled to cyanotype and environment-building and whatever-the-fuck-else, the answer seemed so obvious, so natural, that I almost laughed out loud. What projects in this whole godforsaken semester left me actually feeling proud of my work, like it mattered and I mattered and this whole degree wasn’t just one big waste of my time and energy and money? The answer was comically simple:

It was when I was making books.

More specifically, books about things I actually cared about (this excludes most of the work I did for my Print Publications class by default, tragically). This really only happened twice this semester: I made a teeny tiny accordion book for my first Narrative Forms project, and an eight-page saddle stitch book about the Cooper Black typeface for Print Publications. I guess I can also count the “book sketches” I did early on in IP, but they didn’t really convey a narrative, which seems to be an integral part of my satisfaction with the other projects—they were books that told a story in a way that was beautiful, time-based, and interactive. 

Looking back, I did much more ambitious work, much more beautiful work, much more quote-unquote “““creative””” work during the semester, but it always comes back to books: they’re the vehicle through which my research and learning travels to find me, the art form I look at on Behance and daydream about and long to touch. They’re my thing; they’re what I’m good at. When my peers think of me and what I make and what I “do,” it’s always “Brooks makes books” (hold for laughs). 

So why was I running away from that? Why didn’t I even consider telling my story through the most obvious narrative avenue? I honestly think I was scared. Constructing my experiences into a coherent narrative that made sense, without holes or massive space for interpretation, would make it real and would force me to think about experiences I’d tried so hard to trivialize or forget. It would require me to give those experiences legitimacy, to admit that those things had happened and they actually mattered to me and shaped me and changed me. It would require me to admit that others’ actions had a lasting effect on me, that they still do. It would require me to admit that there are some things in my life I couldn’t control.

But writing this narrative down and sharing it in a beautiful book for others to read and experience and relate to could allow me to fully control that narrative, maybe for the first time. No longer would it just be a jumble of embarrassing, pointless failures swirling in my head, surfacing periodically without warning and making me crumble. Through writing, my adolescent experiences could enter a conversation about gender, sexuality, and culture, a broader context that makes meaning out of meaninglessness. Through writing, I could make my life make sense. 

So that’s where I’m at—I’m writing, illustrating, and constructing a book in three months. Foolish? Probably. Exciting? Definitely. This is the first time I’ve felt like what I’m doing makes sense, makes me happy, is going to matter. I want to get this out of my head and into the world. If I don’t, I’ll die. 

I finally have the time. I finally have the drive. Now all I need to do is get it done. And I will and I will and I will. 

[identityexcavationstation]

Week 11: It’s All Coming Together...in My Head

Sorry for posting so late this week—I’ve found myself trapped in the familiar pattern of rolling ideas over and over in my head like Play-Doh until they’re “done” enough for me to write down and work on. Sometimes, it feels like I have to wait for inspiration to strike, for my disparate ideas to converge in one big burst, for me to begin making actual physical things. It’s annoying and time-consuming, but at this point, I can’t iterate my way into a breakthrough.

Luckily for me, my sitting around and thinking has paid off! I now have a pretty solid idea of everything I want to make for my final IP project, including what I’d like to get done for my December review. Below are some ideas for objects I want to create eventually, using cyanotype, paper, and fabric:

My hope is for all of these different objects to come together in my studio space to create a full portrait of my teenage identity. For my December review, I would like to present a series of cyanotype tarot cards that come together to form a spread, complete with written anecdotes from my adolescence on the back of each card. Additionally, I’d like to present some sketches or a mock-up of the file folder that contains Lottie’s story, which I’ve been organizing and brainstorming below:

I’ve decided to present Lottie’s story in a three-ring binder instead of a handmade five-subject accordion folder, as it will allow my audience to go through the narrative more linearly while still maintaining the functionality and aesthetics I want. I doubt I’ll have the actual binder narrative done by the end of the semester, but I hope to have all of the documents I want to use for each plot point sectioned out to show my panel how the story arc will play out. This is how my planning looks right now:

The blue sticky note explains the plot point from Lottie’s story, the green sticky notes expand on relevant events from my actual adolescence, and the pink sticky note lists ideas of documents I can use to exemplify those events. I’d like to gather and scan all of the documents from each plot point, and mock up one of them in full if time permits. 

Even though I feel like most of my ideas are fleshed out nicely in my mind, there are a few things that are still up in the air. 

The shape my studio space will take during the exhibition is still very much in flux. I’m going to need a table to display my tarot spread, a hook or coatrack to hang my jacket on, and possibly a bookshelf to store the various binders and books I’ll create. But I’m not sure about the walls. I’ve been throwing around the idea of making large fabric cyanotype wall hangings, but I’m not sure whether they should include photos, documents, or words. I’ve been brainstorming a larger, overarching narrative structure to contextualize my project (shown below), but I’m not sure whether that should be displayed in big letters on my walls, in some sort of book, or just hidden in my artist statement. 

Still, lots of good things going on! I feel especially secure in my concept after revising my annotated bibliography, which reminded me of how much research I’ve been doing and how much I have to say on the topic of manufactured identity in female adolescence. All of this preliminary planning, coupled with the time I’ll be devoting to my tarot piece in Narrative Forms, has left me feeling prepared for the coming weeks and excited to get making. 

[identityexcavationstation]

Week 10: Form and Function

I’ve been thinking a lot about what I’d like to present during the end-of-term critique in December. I have my concept and my medium, but my project’s actual form has alluded me thus far. I love making books, but I also love creating large-scale fiber works. I want the viewer to have an intimate, tactile experience with my piece, but I also want it to occupy and overwhelm a space. How can I create work that accomplishes all of these things while making the form cohesive to my concept? My wheels have been spinning endlessly without much progress.

At least I know what story I’m trying to tell now, so this week was spent primarily beginning to structure my narrative into distinct units (process photo below):

During this mind-mapping process, I’ve questioned how to structure the narrative into sections without it confusing the viewer or feeling disjointed. I wrestled with the choice between one linear story presented in a book and a collection of separate documents that encourage physical audience interaction but would not be viewed as a linear narrative. It was a hard decision and pushed me to think about why I even had to choose. Couldn’t I present the viewer with both objects and a book, which could play off each other and allow the audience a customized viewing experience?

In considering ways of presenting loose documents/objects in specified sections, I was reminded of the expanding file folders I used when I was in high school. They were portable and self-contained and had tabs for different subjects, a format that would work well for the information in the above mind map. I would cyanotype and construct the folder myself from a sturdy material like bristol and place my objects within it for viewers to discover. This feels like a great solution because it is both functional and cohesive with my concept of adolescence in retrospect.

But I know that it’s a lot to ask the audience to try and understand my concept and narrative from these objects alone, so I’d also like to create a book or portfolio of sorts that can function as a prologue or afterword (or both?) to the file. Seeing as I’m attempting to explore adolescent female identity in retrospect specifically, I think it would be interesting to have a companion to the documents/objects from my adolescence that functions as a retrospective commentary. I don’t expect the book to be pure text, but I’d like it to have more text, or perhaps places where I annotate the documents from my adolescence. I have a habit of going back through old journals/sketchbooks/scrapbooks and writing reactions and comments to my past self, and I’d like to incorporate that practice into my IP work!

Now that I have a much better idea of how my project will look, I feel much less stuck and can finally get to making real things for my end-of-term critique! I still have so many questions about my project, but I have to hope the answers will come to me eventually.  

[identityexcavationstation]

Week 9: What is Research, Anyway?

After receiving my midterm feedback and being informed that I was not showing signs of research progress (surprise!), I got to thinking about what counts as “research.” There’s material research, of course—making, of which I’ve done a fair amount this semester and plan on continuing at an accelerated pace as I realize my project concept more deeply. But I’ve also been conducting primary and secondary research beyond Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia. 

In my Minor in Writing senior thesis course, I am working on a writing project that also explores the adolescent false self in retrospect. However, I am doing so by interviewing women about their high school experiences and attempting to connect the person they are today with some of the traits they developed in adolescence. I have interviewed seven women and am in the process of compiling four of these interviews into expanded case studies that comment on the fluidity of the teenage identity and how emotional trauma in high school can reshape the self in adulthood. Through this process, I have been doing lots of research surrounding gender dysphoria, fat stigma, teens and social media, how fashion relates to identity, and much more. 

While I do not plan to use the text in my IP, conducting these interviews has given me a broader understanding of the female teenage experience, and I am so grateful to these women for trusting me with their stories. 

As for my IP, I have spent a lot of time recently excavating my teenage identity. I have collected blog posts, school papers, journal entries, drawings, playlists, and psychological records from my high school years in an attempt to form a coherent narrative for my book(s). I have been reading narratives about teen girls that I enjoyed when I was a teen girl, like Chopsticks by Jessica Anthony, Page for Paige by Laura Lee Gulledge, and Skim by Mariko Tamaki. Reading these not only bring back memories from my adolescence, but also help instruct me as I attempt to write my own narrative. Additionally, I’ve been doing extended research on alternative cyanotype processes, and have drawn inspiration from cyanotype artists like Izzy Rose Grange, Craig Keenan, Hannah Rain Finegold, Erika Lujano, and the artists of the DetMF collective.

I’m doing a lot of thinking, synthesizing, and inspiration-seeking behind the scenes and in my head. My goal this week is to become more articulate about all this work in my process and to begin crafting my final narrative using all of these experiences as my outline. Slowly but surely making progress, even if it’s not always visible. 

[identityexcavationstation]

Week 8: Midterm Critique

I was a little stressed that I didn’t have enough material going into the midterm critique, but I think it went pretty well overall! Here are some photos of what I displayed:

During my crit, I talked about wanting to expand on my original concept by not just exploring the construction of the false identity in female adolescence, but the confirmation and/or negation of that identity by both peers and adults. Fueled by a recent deep dive into my high school Tumblr posts, I want to explore how we "try out" these new identities both in person and online. 

I got some good feedback: people were responsive to the fabric pamphlet and commented on the juxtaposition between old and new aesthetics (cursive vs. blog posts, etc.). It was also suggested that I explore different stories or different selves in multiple books, and solidify the narrative more. 

Now that I’ve got a better idea of what I’m trying to communicate, it’s time to start really laying out what should be in the book(s), what kind of story I’m trying to tell. I’m debating whether the story I present should be linear since I want to frame it as a study of adolescence in retrospect. Should I annotate or otherwise respond to my journal entries and Tumblr posts in the book, or leave them be? I’d also like to add more images, and I’m toying with the idea of making the book(s) primarily out of fabric.

This is gonna require some deep thinking and planning beyond the less structured iteration I’ve been doing, but I’m up to it! Feeling energized about this!

[identityexcavationstation]

Week 7: A Little Stuck

I’m gonna be honest: even though we only had one class this week, I feel totally burnt out. I feel kinda directionless, like I don’t know where to take my project from here. This is what I know:

- I want to make a book

- I want my project to focus on female adolescence in retrospect

- I want to experiment with fabric and cyanotype

- I feel intensely uncomfortable creating fictional narratives

I want to explore different perspectives withing female adolescence, but I feel like I can’t adequately represent them because they’re not necessarily things that I lived through. This conceptual block is what’s keeping me from making anything substantial for my midterm critique, and I’m getting really frustrated. 

So I’ve decided to instead use my own teenage narrative to explore bookmaking, fiber arts, and cyanotype. I already have a lot of the materials, and can get started pretty much right away. I’m hoping this book will paint an engaging portrait of the character (me) and after I get feedback, I’ll feel comfortable creating fictional narratives that incorporate my experiences as well.   

I’m linking some inspiration for this addition to my project below:

Andrea Hauer’s Blue Homescape series

Bodies of Water zine by Night Diver Press

Fantomatique by Ghost Collective

Lost in Leeds zine by Will Cooper

Florence Yee’s Selected Hauntings installation

Galya Dautova and Karina Yazylyan’s Chelsea Hotel zine

You Are Not Welcome Here zine by Teagan White

zine 000 by Karolina Król

Right now, I’m envisioning the midterm critique deliverables to be the books I have created thus far, along with this new book, a 6″ x 9″ multimedia book that includes cyanotyped paper, bristol, cotton, and Aida fabric, along with tracing paper transparencies and possible embroidery. I want to combine objects and documents from my adolescence to create a coherent, if not entirely linear, narrative. 

I felt so lost today in the studio but just writing about my ideas has me feeling a lot better. I’m excited to get started!

[identityexcavationstation]

Week 6: Plans for Midterm Critique (?)

So here’s what I’ve got so far: eight books I created with the cyanotypes I made during the studio marathon.

They contain paper cyanotypes, vellum transparencies, and yearbook signatures I hand-traced on tracing paper. They were a lot of fun to make, but I’m looking forward to pushing myself further for the upcoming midterm crit!

On Tuesday I got to meet with my new group (Jacob and Miles) and we had a really productive discussion about each one of our projects thus far. The reaction to my work was partially expected: I was told that my books functioned more aesthetically than narratively, which didn’t surprise me because part of my process was trying to shut my brain off and just make based on what looked good or felt right. To push my work further, it was suggested that I should lean into the narrative aspect of my concept more, even (or especially?) if it means fictionalizing the materials I’ve been collecting: yearbook signatures, journal entries, legal documents, photos, etc. Writing fiction has always made me nervous because I worry about not “telling the truth,” but I think there’s a way I can incorporate my own experience in the story or stories I write. 

Because I want to explore identity in female adolescence from more than one angle, I’d ideally like to make a few books, each one with a different character’s story, or one book with intertwined narratives. I want to tell the stories through documents, like I’ve been exploring thus far with the books I’ve made. What I want to do reminds me a bit of the graphic novel Chopsticks by Jessica Anthony, although I will probably stay away from photographic depictions of my characters so that the audience can develop their own idea of what the characters look like. 

Along with all of those conceptual considerations, I’d like to work more with fabric. I’ve found that it takes the cyanotype better, and will allow me to more easily manipulate it through embroidery, sewing, starching, etc. I’d still like to make books, but if they can include lots of fabric that would be ideal.

At this point, I’m still at a loss as to the state of the deliverables for the midterm crit. I’m not sure I’ll be able to have a full book done by then. However, I would like to experiment with cyanotype on Aida fabric and cotton some more, and both develop my characters and create a coherent narrative so I know what I’m making my books about. I’m looking forward to talking about this more with my group and creating new things!