Measuring Histories Project

     For this project, I wanted to measure something about my life over the course of the short time that I have been back at college. To do this, and as a jumping off point of the project, I took note of and drew a quick one minute sketch of everything that I ate while here, right after I ate it. I saw this as a way to create a sort of self portrait, in the sense of "you are what you eat." I found this to be really insightful, as I got to see what I would resort to eating now that I was back at college during the pandemic. I planned to fill up a full page with sketches in the week that I was documenting this, but only filled up half a page, as I did not end up eating as much as I had originally intended. However, this seemed to add to the experience, as I am not done eating with the conclusion of this project, but could continue documenting these things for the rest of my life if I wanted to create a life-long self portrait. 

    From here, I realized that I have, in the past, documented things that I have eaten before simply by photographing them. I would often do this if it looked especially appetizing and memorable, was a novelty item, or was something that I had created and was proud of. This created an interesting dynamic in that I had two profiles of food items that I had eaten, being the list of sketches from after coming back to college, and the list of pictures from before coming back to college. The pictures are more refined and aesthetic, as cooking back then was a luxury pastime and less of an actual necessity. 

    What caught my attention about this was that I realized just how many pies I have made throughout my life. Making pies has developed into a hobby that I practice to relax, interestingly enough, and I have always considered it an art form as much as it is a dessert item. Making the perfect crust, cooking for the right length of time, and picking the ingredients are all aspects of an art medium in themselves. As such, without planning for this, I realized that I have in the past documented all of the pies that I have made in my art portfolio. I think that every artist has some sort of art portfolio that they use to document all of their past creations, and with the revelation that my cooking experiences were merely and extension of this, I wanted to put every art piece that I have ever documented into one single picture, as I have done before with food items, as a final realization of this project. 

    Here we have a much more tightly packed picture. I had 111 pictures of things I had eaten, but 768 pictures of art pieces that I had made. Although cropped to fit, they are all shown here. All of the pies that I have made are shown here as well, and I realized after making this that it is indeed yet another form of a self portrait, something showing everything that I have created. What is especially interesting about this last piece is that its very creation is a paradox, and can only exist conceptually. In creating and documenting this collection of every art piece I have ever made, I have created yet another art piece. In order for this to be an exhaustive list, I would need to include this piece in itself with the other art pieces. Doing so, however, would change the image, creating a new art piece, which would then need to be added to the overall image yet again, and so on forever. And so this is simply the physical manifestation of an impossible art piece, embodying the idea of "every art piece I have ever made and documented to date." 

    Documenting these collections of images into one image creates a mural of memories and histories in itself, and seeing all of these parts of myself combined in this way is a deeper look into a snapshot of what my life has encapsulated so far.