Drawing Challenges

    This project saw an exploration of various themes, but grouped all of its parts under one larger theme. For each project, I explored the concept of identity, but not always in the sense we normally attribute to the term. I explored the concept of identity first with things that we give credit to at face value, changing what meanings are meant to be given to objects, but then progressed as I made more pieces to explore what it meant to have an identity as an every day object, and what we think of objects to mean or represent. 

    First, I drew on playing cards for a while, changing each suit into something else. Having 13 playing cards in a suit could be symbolic, and is part of the identity of a suit of cards. However, 13 playing cards can be applied in different ways. If two letters are inscribed on each card, the entire alphabet can be encoded into a single suit of cards. Additional meaning can be gleamed from the cards themselves, changing one medieval themed game into another, as I turned each card into a chess piece. The king and queen have obvious counterparts, with the jack being a knight, the ace being a bishop, the 10 being a rook, and the rest being pawns. As this idea evolved, I went on to explore other applications that were less tied to the cards, and more seeing the suits as a group. All of the hearts were changed into traditional fantasy monsters, with the king being a dragon, the queen being a ghost, and so forth. All of the spades were changed into Avengers, with the king being Thor, the queen being Captain America, and on through the rest of the cards. Both jokers were turned into Batman, which only makes sense because they are joker cards, as part of their identity.

    I then went on to explore shadows as an identity, where even if I stand in just the right place so that my shadow is obscured by blinds in a window, it is still recognizable as me, and still my shadow. It has an identity of being my shadow, while at the same time being absorbed into the rest of the negative space making up the other shadows. From here, I went on to explore other themes through identity. Placing a collection of household appliance bills in a frying pan, I created a wholly different commentary on the nature of what we eat and absorb every day, and how we are paying these companies to power our societal conventions so that we can keep up our livelihoods. These bills are almost like a middle man between us and the comforts of home we consume. I then wanted to explore science, changing a garden hose into a circuit, using the water as an electrical charge. To resemble the electric field produced, I drew electric field lines in the water, and to represent the humorous phenomenon in science of current being calculated in the direction opposite to where the electrons actually travel, I drew dots (resembling electrons) and arrows traveling in the opposite direction that we would expect the water to travel in the hose. The same idea is can be represented through something with a wholly different identity. Finally, as a bit of an absurdest take of identity, I wrote "toothpaste" on a napkin in salad dressing with a fork, next to my toothbrush. We have all of these chemicals in our house, and it seems horribly wrong to replace something like toothpaste with something like salad dressing, based on the identities of the two objects. 

    Having explored identity in all of these ways, I found two artists that had pieces similarly showing concepts that rely on identity. First was Dan Perjovschi,whose drawing, Virus Diary, makes perfect sense to everyone who would view it. It is a commentary on the social distancing nature of society today. However, this concept can only be understood this year, and in years to follow. Had this picture existed in a previous year, no one would have gotten it. The current time period has us all in a mind set to recognize what this is depicting, and that is part of its identity.

    Secondly, there was a, acrylic painting by Maurizio Cattelan, Untitled, which depicts a hand holding a stick like a gun. This is much more obviously related to the pieces I created, directly playing with how an object can look and be explored in various ways, and be given the identity of another object. 

Drawing Challenge pieces exploring identity: