4 minute read
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Poster 1
Changing it up
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a little, I decided to make a couple posters horizontal just for variety. The process going through this poster was also a long one. I left and came back to this a number of times because I was never quite happy with it. I eventually landed on a version I was satisfied with though.
Content wise, this piece is about how all moments blend into one another, and how the past and future doesn’t exist. It’s all the same moment. Happiness won’t be found in the future because once you get to the future it’ll be now. What everyone seems to be looking for, at some metaphysical level, can be found right at this moment. Though it is easier said than done.
Emotional type,
and the blending together of two different environments are featured. Through this, I highlight my own struggle with staying in the moment with the knowledge that nothing else exists other than now.
Final 16"x12"
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Poster 2
In this next horizontal
poster collage I wanted to talk about how little of the universe we can actually interact with, and how little we know in general.
Rumi, a 13th century poet and mystic said, “You are not a drop in an ocean, you are the entire ocean in a drop,”
And with that, this piece becomes a kind of paradox, because even though we can only observe a droplet of the universe. As Rumi said, inside that droplet is also the whole entire universe. This is because the patterns and intelligences that construct our world are present across everything seen or unseen.
Now, visually
I wanted to make this piece a little bit more calm than the others while still staying the same general aesthetic range. Different natural environments blend into each other, showing everything is connected by the evolutionary intelligence present in all things. The type is less experimental and the hierarchy is fairly simple making this piece a kind of oasis away from all the chaos of my other work.
Final 16"x12"
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Poster 3
Taking the longest to create, this is one of the more important posters to me personally. It is about me, and my emotions surrounding my mental differences. Those differences caused me to experience psychosis for the first time two years ago. Since then I’ve struggled with delusions, as well as other issues stemming from that initial break from reality. This created a very deep seeded fear of insanity within me that I wanted to express with this piece
Now that I’ve been able to talk out my fears to a therapist, I’ve been able to move past this fear of being crazy. I did this through analyzing internal conditioning from society and culture that taught me that experiences out of the ordinary are unacceptable and that because I experience reality a little differently from most people, I’m a danger to them. This was internalized ableism and since working through this conditioning I’ve actually become more confident in myself than I was even before my psychotic break.
The piece talks about my fear of insanity, as well as the extreme invalidation that comes with that label. It shows old pictures of myself before my break, with the darkness of my mental illness closing in around them. The dead bird shown, represents change and the terrifying death of a previous version of myself. The eyes represent an uncomfortable self-awareness in my role as the observer, observing the disintegration of who I thought I was.
At this point I realized
that all of my posters so far have stemmed from my initial experience of psychosis and the real life lessons I’ve acquired through attempting to work through my complex problems. From this place in time in the project I decided to make my thesis as a whole about my experience with psychosis, my engagement with my mental illness, and how living in an interconnected digital era has affected that mental illness.
Final 12"x16"
