You tell me in too little words that our time is limited
Your eyes staring straight ahead while stroking my arm
To what end will I time out
Till you lose me while talking about the now
In limited dim lit doom who am I to assume
That you would want to whether waning weather with me
Am I so semi permanent
Is it so easy to slip away
Still I find myself slipping to sleep
Slumped against some warmth
Waiting while wanting
Wilting when knowing
Hey, what do you think of this raincoat?
It looks really good! Does it keep the water out?
Yeah, I made it out of a plastic bag. Clever, right? Saves the environment too.
Biological Sciences Building, 11:00PM, 11/9/2023
sometimes we forget that people can be wistful. or creative. or proud. the conscience is plagued with disaster and sprinkled with the remnants of a dream. taking matters into our own hands. are our hands stained with oil, like a chef during rush hour? blood, like an actor during rehearsal? charcoal, like a miner or an artist or a disgruntled christmas elf? what are we to ourselves? what am i to you? i bellow into the wind and it bellows back a hail of frigid sleet. i wrap the plastic bag tighter around my shoulders and turn away.
It could be worse…
I open tomorrow.
See, it is worse!
Spencer’s, 6:00PM, 11/18/2023
walt whitman writes in leaves of grass that we should “do anything, but let it produce joy.” in the back of my mind the words bounce around my head and cloud my vision. time passes but it passes slowly, obliquely, like taking a picture of a spherical reflection and watching the sides of your mouth uncurl a frown (you press your cheek into mine against the chicago bean; i tremble).
the same hands that lock the iron grating will pry the jaws open the very next day. love is the addition — the summation — of everyday beauties; should we approach the negatives — the subtractions — with equal care? equal appreciation? there can be nothing good without something bad. what use is a sunny smile without the absence of a cloudy sorrow?
It doesn’t matter if you’re late or in a hurry. You never cross in front of a bus. Our brakes could fail or a car could pass and we still need you here tomorrow.
Fuller Road at Mitchell Field, 3:00PM, 11/20/2023
valiant optimism will always get you far, but not far enough. we are reduced to nothing more than ants, to figures, to statistics thrown on a powerpoint at the next faculty safety meeting. it’s the way we can quantify ourselves. and what good would that be? you wave to a driver at the cctc and the man next to you brushes past, oblivious. he is the chicken crossing the road, the one that got away. the road watches and crackles under our feet. perfection lost is persistence gained; vows, like eggs, are easily broken.
I have never been good at abstraction. Honestly speaking, I have never wanted to be. I have always looked down upon, and still continue to dismiss, the loose, illegible, mind-bending, and non-figurative nature of work that is not bound to recognized life in the most obvious ways. I am a figurative artist. I work with life, capture the beauty and pain within my heritage and culture, and push myself constantly to get closer and closer to realism in each of my pieces.
Watching many of my peers work with such clarity while creating something so abstract is a true wonder to me. I struggle to understand and recognize the beauty in much of the work that I see from my fellow classmates, but I know that there is great value in their creations. One of the things that I am the most grateful for in my life are my hands, and creating with them is my truest passion. By taking a sculpture course this semester, I thought that I would be exposed to various different mediums and then left to my own devices to create work as I pleased. I did not expect the challenges that I have faced.
My first two projects, The Tarp and The Chair, were simple. They were very safe and I knew that I would end up creating something attractive once I decided what to make. I kick myself now that I allowed myself to explore the exact same subject, a peacock, in both projects. I was very comfortable with the materials and resources, but struggled heavily with the thought of transcending beyond a recognizable form. I think this paralyzed me into staying within the confines of what I know.
I push myself to my limits. I am known as the girl taking the 18 credits, working the job, being the president and leader of multiple organizations, running a business, volunteering at clinics, doing extreme sports, and finding time for art. I push myself in every aspect of my life. My art is the place where I have always pushed and challenged myself in the magnitude and complexity of my compositions, but never in the content. My work is aesthetic and attractive, but it is predictable, par for the course, fitting. I have created a narrative and name for myself and done a good job of fitting it.
The Verb Project pushed me to make something unrecognizable (my verb was “to crease”). I could have easily done another peacock, but I wanted to push myself in a different way this time. I truly enjoyed this piece and this time I feel that though the material was safe, the end product was something outside of my self-constructed box. I wanted to create something simple, not too complicated, but something different. Throughout this semester I have really learned about my weaknesses and limitations. Being forced to create past these limitations has been a challenge to say the least but a welcomed portal. I look forward to incorporating this freeing air that I have captured into my future work.
Until next week,
Riya
Instagram: @riya_aggarwal.art
Website: https://theindianartist.weebly.com/
I explored my identity through this collage piece. My immigration experience makes me feel duo identity and at the same time I feel the loss of identity, which I used the chaotic patterns and Chinese and NYC buildings to express the sense of lost and chaotic. The little figure at the bottom represents me, trying to look for who he was, but was stopped by the red light. The piled up buildings, air pods, and flowers symbolizes my experience and the two circles above represent the two different suns that I see on two different lands. I used patterns such as eyes, fishes, flowers, and wolves to represent my state of mind: I feel watched, I need food, I enjoy nature, and I have my ambition. This is a work that I play around to find what makes me becomes the person who I am today.
My team finally finished the Visual Motion Capture project this week, but we changed the name to Fear Follower!! Let me introduce this project in detail:
The Fear Follower is an interactive experience integrating visual motion capture with robotics, dynamic visual projections, and immersive sound design. A visual projection of a large eyeball maintains an unwavering gaze on the user, tracking their every move around the room. Simultaneously, a robotic hand wheels itself toward the user, creating a dynamic and responsive connection between the installation and the individual. The culmination of these elements generates a strange ambiance that evokes a palpable sense of tension for the user. This synthesis of visual and auditory components is designed to immerse participants in a multi-sensory journey, pushing the boundaries of conventional interactive installations and redefining the relationship between users and their interactive environments.
This week I worked on finishing the hand-washing sequence. This took particularly long to animate just because of the number of moving parts I needed to update in each frame. Though animating the moving water was a bit of challenge for me, I’m really happy with how it turned out. I also drew the next background with I’ll be using for the remainder of the scene. This is the first establishing shot of the scenes after the intro. This is where we are reintroduced to the main character, color palette, and style. I needed to consider how to create a look that I’d be able to replicate for the rest of my animation.
And, here is the remainder of the animated scene from last week!
