Senior Capstone

Mediocre At Best™ is my senior capstone project that explores the idea of identity. This was influenced by my own questioning of self, and the struggle I had between being who I want to be and who I am. I was interested in exploring how we choose to categorize ourselves, and what it means to the individual to identify as an artist. This brought up the question of how art and design interact and become one, or if they even can. What does it mean to be an artist? What does it mean to be a designer? This project as a whole encompasses my experience with studying design during a global pandemic, creative burnout, and the great unknown that is post-grad life. This project was displayed alongside the capstone projects of the BFA cohort in a gallery show titled ‘Breaking Point’.

Mediocre At Best™

The focus of this project was to visually express the abstract emotions that I had been feeling; The idea of feeling like a glitch- existing, but not really being there. I used long exposure photography to take a self-portrait that I later edited in After Effects to add some slight glitching and scrolling text in the background. This project as a whole existed between ideas around mental health and the toll of creative block as well as the theme of identity by depicting two versions of the same person.

For this project I wanted to create something that the viewer could interact with and participate in. The idea of the puzzle came about as I was thinking of ways to represent a journey. I’m providing the viewer with all the right pieces already connected, so you know that it can be solved. There’s a certain type of frustration that puzzles can give. They require patience, strategy, trial and error, etc. The puzzle serves as a reflection of the paths we take in life. After taking the time to solve the puzzle, most likely while frustrated, the viewer is then confronted with a question: “Are you having fun yet?”. Everyone in this instance is faced with the same problem, but how ‘hard’ the pieces are scrambled and the way they move them are all different.

Untitled™

Good Design™

For this project I designed a typographic mural that I then painted directly onto the gallery wall. The idea was to do something ephemeral and painting directly onto the gallery walls, only to be painted over 3 days later when the show came down, was the best way to do it. The type on the wall reads ‘make good design’ and ‘what’s good anyways?’. A combination of simple phrases that shaped my experience of studying design. After speaking with my peers, many of them spoke about having to cater their work to please a professor, and the lack of fulfillment they felt in doing so.

To document the creation of each piece, I designed a process book full of thoughts and images from conception to completion.