2017 Idea Book by Gabriella Santiago-Vancak

2017 IDEA BOOK

Gabriella Santiago-Vancak

IDEA BOOK FIRST YEAR MFA ILP MARYLAND INSTITUTE COLLEGE OF ART

GABRIELLA SANTIAGO-VANCAK

FALL

PAPERCUTTING/PAPER ENGINEERING LETTERPRESS SEWING/FABRIC TYPOGRAPHY SKETCHBOOK PROJECT PUBLISHING PROJECT IMAGE HARVEST

SPRING

SILLY CITY ANIMATION HAND LETTERING PATTERN SELF-DIRECTED PROJECT

BONUS

EXPANDED DESIGN CREATING THE GIF GRAPHIC NARRATIVES

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FALL

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Hi! I’m Gabriella! This is me when I started grad school in the ILP MFA program.

And this is my desk.

I’m a mess!

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PAPER CUTTING/ PAPER ENGINEERING

At first, I was sure that I was going to dislike this project or that I would be bad at it. I was impressed by the visiting artists who talked about their paper cutting and paper engineering work but didn’t really know how this technique would mesh with my work. I had trouble formulating a plan and I didn’t know what I wanted to do even in the first crit. I was drawing very loose figures at that time and was pushed to attempt to work them into my paper reaction piece, or to somehow capture the looseness of them in paper cutting. What I ended up presenting for final were two large papercuts of seated women and a moth in a circular or moon shape. I wasn’t sure how to hang or present them, but the quality of the lines in my papercuts were very expressive. If I were to revisit this project, I would have liked to have them freestanding and existing in space in a more sculptural way.

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LETTERPRESS

We had the opportunity to create a plate and print it on the Baltimore Print Studio’s letterpress.

We sent out Illustrator files to Boxcar Press who made polymer plates for us that could be run through a letterpress. I sent two files to Boxcar, a wolf and a snake, both very graphic images. They worked really well on the press and the resulting prints are some of my favorites.

FABRIC/SEWING

For this project, we were introduced to various techniques for working with fabric in a workshop with Kim. While I was completing my reaction piece, I I came up against a lot of stumbling blocks and was really unsure of myself in my final crit. I had intended to make small spell sachets out of some of the embroideries that I had created and was so focused on this end result that I charged ahead even though my sewing skills weren’t very strong.

I should have instead focused on the drawing aspect of the embroidery which would have played more to my strengths. What resulted were a couple of small, misshapen pillows with some interesting embroidery work.

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TYPOGRAPHY

For my typography project I chose to turn another artist’s text into a typographic zine. The text I worked with was “I always put my pussy”

by Eileen Myles. This poem is originally from her book Maxfield Parrish. I found it liberating to work with an already existing text, especially one as powerful as this. It freed me up to concentrate solely on the design of the project rather than being anxious about writing a story or a poem of my own. Formatting the pages to match and evoke Myles’s poem ended up giving me more confidence in my design skills of which I was very unsure prior to finishing this project.

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SKETCHBOOK PROJECT

As a group, my fellow first years and I completed sketchbooks for the Brooklyn Art Library. We were each asked to pick a theme for our sketchbook and every first year in the class would contribute to it.

The theme that I chose was Into the Woods. This was a fun, low-stress project that then became a small hallway gallery show prepared by the Gallery Team. It was really interesting to see how my cohort interpreted the theme that I chose.

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PUBLISHING PROJECT: MATCHBOX BOOKS

Whitney introduced this project as a book design project with one catch: All the books had to be matchbook size. I was very engaged by the thought of designing a book cover for my chosen book, Lolita

by Vladimir Nabokov, but was worried about the size restrictions.

The imtage that I came up with for the cover arose out of an interest in avoiding the stereotypical book covers for Lolita all of which I thought seemed to gloss over the central trauma of the narrative. I wanted to avoid drawing girls or saddle shoes and socks so I used the image of a snake constricting a sparrow. I felt that this image was more suitable to the story. We were also asked to chose a word that described the book’s plot and to have it extist inside the matchbox. The word I chose was “Predator” because that struck me as appropriate for the narrator, Humbert. I went with a bird skull at first but later changed the item inside the matchbox to a bird’s foot.

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The imagery that kicked off the whole project.

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IMAGE HARVEST: YOUR BLOOD IS ON FIRE

Image Harvest was the longest project we were assigned. We were asked to mine our current body of work for 10 ideas out of which we could then create a larger piece. The piece was to be shown in the Fall Image Harvest show. This was the first assignment we were given as first years and it was daunting but managed to come up with 10 ideas. Eventually, and after much going back and forth, I chose to make a short comic. For this comic I took a drawing of a werewolf that I had presented for the first crit as a jumping off point.

Part of the difficult work of this project was exploring the metaphor that I was trying to create with my animal imagery and the unwieldy nature of the semi-personal narrative. I also struggled with writing and illustrating something at the same time. I would have lots of text and then find that either the writing made it unnecessary or the imagery didn’t work with the text so I was constantly starting over. It taught me not to be precious with my writing and to scrap anything that wasn’t useful to me. The final narrative was called Your Blood is on Fire and deals with mental health, hospitalization, and the abuses of power. This was the most time I have ever spent on any one project and it was an intense learning experience.

Preliminary sketches for Your Blood is on Fire, exploring animal metaphors.

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At the Image Harvest Exhibition.

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SPRING

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SILLY CITY

A client based project, Silly City ultimately became about drawing lots and lots of architecture. Fresh Artists, who distribute lesson plans about architecture and cities all around the country, asked us to illustrate a lesson plan for them. We were given a lot of material to work with from a vocabulary list to worksheets to a timeline. I chose to focus on the architectural timeline and created a poster that could be hung in a classroom. There were more than 20 architectural styles and time periods that I had to illustrate. I ended up being very satisfied with how the poster turned out and it taught me a lot about drawing details.

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ANIMATION

The second project of the Spring semester was a stop motion animation workshop. During the workshop we started out by animating a kind of exquisite corpse where there were several stations with different materials. Working in pairs, we would animate from wherever the pair before us had left off.

The result was a really interesting and bizarre set of animations. Then we were assigned a slightly longer animation project.

My partner for the animation project was Yifan. We decided to animate a story from Greek myth, the story of Artemis and the hunter. Working with sand, we spent a whole day on shooting. Sand was, at first, very frustrating to manipulate but has a very beautiful effect when lit from below with a lightbox. I think that Yifan and I worked really well together. There was something very seamless about our process. I would push sand around for awhile and she would shoot and give me suggestions or we would switch, but often we would be drawing in the sand at the same time and that was very productive. It was good too that we both had an interest in Greek myth, it worked out extremely well. This project also spurred my interest in animation.

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HAND LETTERING

In this workshop, Whitney had us exploring different kinds of typography and the emotive quality of text. As a reaction piece we had an option of hand lettering a selection of text or creating an alphabet. My first attempt at this project was to hand letter a poem by Sylvia Plath (called the Hanging Man) on the back of a related tarot card. This was, I found, pretty unsuccessful.

Later as an alternative, I came up with the idea of doing a book cover for We Have Always Lived in the Castle, a novel by Shirley Jackson. The narrator in that book says that one of her favorite things is the death cap mushroom. I decided to design an entire alphabet using the shape of the death cap or Amanita Phalloides.

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PATTERN

I find pattern-making to be frustrating but rewarding work. The assignment was to create three patterns that centered around a singular theme. The theme I chose during workshop was games. I was primarily focused on creating a pattern out of items that a player might pick up in a videogame and carry around in their inventory. The inventory pattern was a lot of fun to play around with but the other two patterns were less successful and I eventually scrapped them.

The next theme I chose came out just playing around with ink, painting forms from nature. I amassed a large number of drawings of insects and reptiles and then began putting them into patterns. The three patterns I ended up with are Underwater Floral, Reptiles, and Insects. I still struggle with making patterns, but overall I was pleased with the results.

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SELF-DIRECTED PROJECT

Oh boy, this one was a toughie. I was really set on doing an animation for this project and I was also really set on it being totally non narrative. The result was hopefully going to be some kind of music video. Of course, I totally underestimated my ability to animate a large amount of material in a very short period of time. After meetings and crits, this became clear to me and I struggled to focus on creating storyboards for only a handful of scenes. Over time, it did seem to coalesce in theme: I was trying to explore different archetypes of women and girls in film and media. What I brought to final crit was, however, a very incomplete twenty seconds of animation. Something that came up in crit was this feeling that I was not doing an animation but was writing a kind of theoretical paper, so I decided to tap into that more and create a short artists’ zine exploring the archetypes I was interested in. The project then developed further in a different direction where I more fully explore the archetype of the robotic feminine.

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The second iteration of the project was a zine.

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The third was more focused on the female robot, inspired by the reality that one of the largest markets for AI are in sexual robots. I tried to imagine what that advertising would look like. This may be the groundwork for future projects of mine.

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BONUS or OTHER COURSES 37

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EXPANDED DESIGN

Amanda Agricola’s Expanded Design was a fascinating way to explore coding, something of which I knew very little. While it doesn’t necessarily fit well into my current practice, it really fed my interest in net art. I spent a lot of time researching cyber feminist art. Most of the class was dedicated to learning Processing.

My final project was a narrative-based Processing sketch that was designed to look like an old Windows computer. In the center there was a AOL chat window open with It was minimally interactive in that there were several places where the viewer/player could click (an AOL icon, for example) and bring up different windows. This project was based around feelings of nostalgia that I associate with the old internet and computers.

The longest text in the project was a stream of consciousness poem reflecting on the impact of The Oregon Trail video game and how it shaped my understanding of America. I also tried to explore ways in which the internet is unsafe territory for girls and women who are often subjected to unwanted sexual advances and targeted bullying from male internet users.

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GRAPHIC NARRATIVES

Sara Lautman’s Reading and Writing Graphic Narratives course was great for getting me to complete a comic narrative. I have always struggled with completing projects where I have to write and illustrate my own narrative so working on Abandoned #1 and #2 was extremely helpful. Sara’s suggestion to draw a continually morphing character became central to the comic and I was using a strange, loose style inspired by artists like Mickey Zacchilli. I have become really attached to this comic and hope to continue it in some form, even as the style becomes more of a hinderance than a boon. It felt good to let myself draw in a sloppy, emotional way, there’s something really cathartic about that process.

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CREATING THE GIF

Laurent Hrybyk’s Creating the Gif class is a great introduction to animation on the small scale. I had always wanted to make gifs but never really pursued it until this class. There was a lot of freedom in Laurent’s prompts and it was really good to be animating every week. Some of my best images came out of this class.

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Thank you to Kimberly Hall and Whitney Sherman and everyone in my awesome cohort! This has been a whirlwind of a year and I can’t wait to start the next one.

Gabriella Santiago-Vancak 2017

gsantiagovancak.com gsaantiagovancak@mica.edu

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