My intention was to produce a “magazine” that both commented on the content of a typical Cosmpolitan, as well as experimented with different forms of creativity, in terms of execution and ideas and images presented. One of the most exciting aspects of the process was getting my friends and family involved in the process. They were instrumental in providing a photo shoot that was not involved in selling designer clothes, but which came out of their own creative interests (my youngest brother arranged it for his birthday), as well as providing “alternative” texts on sexuality, including lists on what is “sexy” (decidedly unsexy things by Cosmo standards) and a surprisingly graphic lesbian erotic story (I don’t even think that Cosmo has ever acknowledged that a relationship has existed outside of their heteronormative standards). Personally, I loved taking out my anger towards the narrowness and stupidity of Cosmo on this project, in terms of consumption, its obsession with men and looking “hot,” and having no information outside these topics.

I think the project was pretty successful. My biggest frustration has been the actual execution in terms of materials. The magazine certainly is not professional looking. Most of the ink, both stenciled and letterpressed ink, leaked through the pages. Almost completely handmade, with digital and polaroid photos, hand-written, stenciled, letterpress and typewritten text, I had to piece together the entire thing by doing a lot of cutting and pasting (literally). I am dubious in terms of how well the magazine will hold up, as the thickness (about five times thicker than a real magazine, given the materials (I stayed true to the page count)) prevented me from being able to bind it in a more professional way. I think the content, however, provides for a much more interesting read, and a decidedly different representation, of the usual world Cosmopolitan provides you with.

Looking at a map of the neighborhood, I identified what large and/or natural features were most important to creating the space: the lake (Monona was built on a natural peninsula surrounded by Lake Monona), the green spaces (the neighborhood has lovely rolling topography, woodlands, and wetlands, some of which were preserved in a somewhat “natural” state within parks), and the streets (the grid upon which everything else was placed). This created the framework upon which I could start to call out areas of special importance to me. While I was familiar with every part of much of the small city, there were places that I would visit repeatedly because of certain qualities they had or certain feelings they gave me.

In the end I have four screen prints, a series, each with a different title: Trees of Significance, Places of Discovery, Places of Imagination, and Places of Reflection. Each print has the same background showing the lake, green spaces, and roads, but each one has a different final layer consisting of a number of dotted lines circling the areas indicated in the titles.

While I enjoyed this final project and loved working with my concept, I am not satisfied with the final product. Working with seven different screens was very challenging for a beginning screen printer like myself. I certainly learned a lot about the process! In that way in was successful but if I could do it again, I would have been more careful with color choice, making sure to keep the first layers lighter and the final layers darker. I would have put the titles onto a screen (I thought I was going to letterpress the titles on later, but then decided - after it was too late - that that might look too different from the screen printing). I also would have been more careful about printing a lot more pages so that I would have a lot to work with, and I would have found a better way to register the papers to ensure a correct line-up.

Personal mapping, as a concept, intrigues me. Maps seem to be a very objective practice, but are in fact very subjective. The map-maker chooses what is shown and how it is shown in a way that communicates a specific idea to the viewer. My maps are very personal on one hand but appear (especially at first glance) to show an objective view of a certain area. The bottom layers are fairly objective, showing what is indeed actually there. The top layer is purely subjective, but even so it does not give the viewer any info about what is actually in that space. It merely identifies it as of special importance to the map-maker. In this way it gives up a limited amount of information to the viewer, in a way keeping the viewer at a distance. Thus I am interested in not only how personal maps are interpreted by the map-maker (me) but also how an outsider (anyone but me) might see them. To me they are a reminder, and an invitation to reflection, but to others they may be nothing more than an interesting-looking graphic.

The landscape of my childhood was the beginning of my understanding of space. The passion this landscape instilled in me led me, in part, to my current pursuit of landscape architecture. I feel like I could take this project and push it to other levels in the future, perhaps getting down to a more immediate scale to look at each of these spaces and explore what made it so special to me, and how I might represent that.

-Adrienne

In some ways I do feel that the books are successful; they turned out mostly the way I was hoping. I don't necessarily think it's obvious that these books are about identity, or that they convey my discomfort on both topics. I do hope that they maybe act as a window into myself, which obviously I think they do. I really enjoyed the process of thinking this project through, thinking about how I would convey these ideas/themes through a narrative, using the letterpress, setting up camera shots, and making all of the adjustments. I think book making is something I would like to explore further in the future.
*Emily

Click here to view composition.

As I mentioned in a previous class, being a writer is something that I connect strongly to in my self-identity: it is how I have worked as a professional and as a student, it is how I keep track of my day, it is how I leave a trail of my experiences and it is also my therapy. Communication in general is a very central aspect of my life, perhaps more than others (though every person needs it!), as it is what I am currently studying in my masters program. That being said, I wanted to play with the idea of myself as a writer in all its forms, but specifically on a more personal level, rather than a professional or scholarly level.

To do that, I incorporated various notes, handwritten with pen and typed on the same typewriter in the photo. Many may not make sense to the viewer: particularly the typed notes are often excerpts from journal entries and random quotes. The layering of the notes also prevents the viewer from being able to read each piece in its entirety. In the layering of the notes and the fragmented messages, I wanted to represent first, different layers of utilizing writing as a form of self-expression and identity, and second, the idea that as a writer, you struggle with how you are represented—there is only so much of yourself that you can bring into a piece, and there is no way of controlling how the viewer/reader is responding and reacting to your work (although some try).

Though there are a couple journal entries I referenced from the past year, the majority of the collaged pieces were done over the same time period during which I was working on this piece, furthering the idea that this piece, like written work, is a capsule into a specific time in my life.

Overall, I am pleased with how the piece turned out. I think that the inclusion of acrylic and ink for color add to the piece and make it more visually interesting, though I do feel as though the aesthetic looks a little like I was trying to make a clothing ad for young people five years ago. I do like, however, how the colors blend into each other—I think this adds to the concept of different layers and aspects of oneself coming together.

—Holly

I chose to explore the development of identity. This is a subject that we do a lot of work and training around in my job with diversity programs at the U. I’m curious about what factors influence people in developing their identity, particularly outside of their family and people around them. I chose to use myself and to think about the things that have influenced me, mostly external factors of my immediate life. In my initial planning, I began thinking what factors would have caused others to develop differently than myself, and then even more so, what factors would have influenced myself and two siblings to have developed completely different identities even though we grew up in the same family.

In the end, I have only represented myself, as I had no way of knowing what could have affected my siblings without asking them. I found that even representing my own identity was a challenge. What I found as I collected images and started putting them together was that I had both perceived and real identity represented, as well as images that represented things I no longer affiliated with my identity but I know had a large impact in the way I developed, for example, Christian religion. I chose to use magazine collage as the medium for representing my identity. I chose it particularly because I love the visual quality, the gloss and the color. I limited myself only to magazines for the most part to challenge myself to find ways to represent pieces that I may not have an exact image for, and because I wanted the surface to be consistent.

Finally, I decided to organize the pieces into a figure, as a way of tying it back/relating it, to the screen printed figure of me cutting and placing pieces on the body. I also chose to offset a magenta ink on the figure of myself to echo the magenta in the head of the collaged figure. To create the figure, I used a picture of Anne Hathaway to line up the pieces in an attempt to make it a bit more proportional, although this does project the image of my body as one displayed by the media, which I guess is fair.

I’m hoping that these two figures connect to the viewer as being one in the same, but I’m really not sure if it completely does. I also added small colored circles around the figures as a way of trying to tie them together as well as to try to create a sense of energy and movement. It’s also hard to say how the images will relate to the viewer and how they will choose to interpret them.

Emily

The series of poses I chose are patched together into one long image that moves along a horizontal background. It has a beginning and end, much like a story. The poses themselves do not tell a chronological story (though they could potentially be creatively interpreted as one by the reader/viewer), but the figures express a lightness and feeling of freedom.

I chose to represent my portrait as a very small fold-out book. I liked the idea of the viewer looking at the figure moving through the landscape either one page at a time (to focus attention on the form the figure takes in that frame) or as a whole (in which the series of figures implies a timeline or series of dance steps or story). It just occurred to me that this is reminiscent of the different scales at which landscape architects work: anywhere from small scale to regional scale. I enjoy this freedom and challenge.

I am not fully satisfied with the quality of the final product; since I did not have access to a high quality camera (which meant I was not able to control the shutter speed), the quality of the images was not as controlled. The photos taken on cloudy days had poor color quality but showed excellent blurriness. The photos taken on sunny days were brighter but caught the figure in mid-air. These phenomena could be explored further with more time, thus I am viewing this project as a jumping-off point (no pun intended) for a more in-depth project later on when I have the time and resources needed to create the quality I am looking for in these images.

My hope is that the self-portrait shows my own enjoyment of movement and my interest in the body’s interaction with or through space.

-Adrienne

Viewers of the composition mouse over the collaged grid of images to reveal a larger part of each image. To view the entire source image, viewers must click on a particular image. An additional click restores the image to its original place in the collage. This iteration of the composition is still a prototype, and does not yet include these instructions for the viewer.

The first three images provide evidence of being deliberate attempts at portraiture. The fourth image, me as a father, is a snap shot of my daughter, Lily, and me. The fact that this is a snap shot is due in large part to her strong preference for freedom of action.

Although my becoming a brother and a son occurred simultaneously, I have chosen to represent my early years with a portrait with my older brother and younger sister. This decision was mostly pragmatic, because if I wanted to feature all three siblings, my choice of time period was limited to the few months my sister was alive. In turn, I chose to represent my role as a son with my high school senior photo. I thought this was appropriate based on how it fit chronologically with my passage into adulthood. The third photo is of my wife, Laurel, and me on our wedding day. Undeniably, this was another moment of passage. Finally, I chose a recent image of Lily and me to represent my current role as father. This was the most difficult selection, as Lily is our second daughter. My wife and I lost our first daughter, Julia, to complications surrounding her cancer treatment almost three years ago.

On a cosmic level, I believe the chronological aspect of these images portray the very impersonal process of aging. In that way, a dominant theme of the composition could be interpreted as impermanence. On cultural level, the images also represent several key archetypal roles. In that way, they can be said to show one man's passage from childhood to adulthood. Finally, on a personal level, the images show four moments of my life, some I remember like they were yesterday, some I don't remember at all. In that way, they function as one more weak thread in the vast historical quilt, a garment never made up of the things themselves, but only incomplete whispers and shadows of things that once were.