Space In-Between Self & Others: Metamorphosis

We are currently working on a project in which we must transform ourselves into an Art and Design faculty member through a series of five images. Any medium can be used, as long as the final project illustrates a metamorphosis from one person to the other.

I chose to morph myself into Nick Tobier. Nick is a performance artist who teaches my Art and Design Perspectives: Society class this semester. I really enjoy having Nick as a professor, and I am very fascinated by his “Situational” art.

I struggled a bit thinking of ways to produce the metamorphosis from me to Nick. I began by doing some research on Nick’s background and his artwork. This is a great video of Nick speaking about himself and his work on A&D’s Play Gallery:



On a less serious but equally entertaining note, this is Nick responding to comments made about him on MTV’s “Professors Strike Back” series:



Taking the information I gathered about this artist and professor, I decided that it would be interesting to compare and contrast mine and Nick’s personalities and types of artwork. Nick is a fairly outgoing guy, as he tends to perform his projects in public; I, on the other hand, am considerably more reserved and prefer to do my art in private. Also, while he tends to work in time-based media and performance art, I am more prone to create 2D artwork. So, my initial idea was to create the image of myself using a 2D medium, and then slowly incorporate video or performance into the 2D image until it became an entirely video-based representation of Nick. However, as I have virtually no experience with video art, and I was crunched for time as usual, I decided against this idea.

Then, taking a cue from Nick’s Penny Stamps lecture, in which he talked a lot about his childhood and how he has changed over time, I thought it would be interesting to contrast images of him as a child growing into an adult with me as a child growing into a college student. I wanted to somehow juxtapose these images of us at different ages on top of each other so you would be able to see 2 metamorphoses at once: one between the two different people, and another between our increasing ages.

But alas, as often ends up happening, time got away from me and I found myself having to simplify my idea. I decided to stray away from doing a simple transformation in 5 images, and instead chose to depict two rows of images of our faces, using one of my preferred mediums, watercolor, to create the faces and allow the watercolor to drip down into the face below.

In class on Wednesday we had a critique of our progress on the pieces so far. The people that commented said that they would like to see the faces bigger, and Endi spoke about the implications of the “dripping” paint in different contexts. Regarding the size issue, I prefer to use watercolor on a smaller scale, because the nature of the medium is so delicate. As Endi noted, this choice of media might also reflect the character of my professor, as Nick is a kind-hearted and considerate person both in his life and his artwork.

Enough. I will post images of my progress and the final piece when it is completed. Which will be soon.