M(O)cked
“We Wear the Mask” is a lyrical poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar about the lives of African Americans after the Civil War. The poet explains how the people had to pretend that everything is better and the mental torture they went through. The popularity of the poem lies in the fact that it reflects the miserable plight of African Americans forced to hide their painful realities and frustrations under the mask of happiness and contentment.
The masks we wear are a form of protection. We wear them to protect not only ourselves but people around us from our burdens. The helmet-style mask signifies the barrier of protection that we use in this manner. The helmet is made of two layers, a thinner underlayer that is fragile to the dangers of the outside world. The thicker outer layer is a pretty flowery layer meant to cover and protect the thinner layer of the mask. The mask we wear is easy for the eyes to digest; it's pretty and inviting. The snakes on the mask represent the intrusive thoughts we have sometimes, slithering to the back of our heads. The snakes are also a representation of other people's thoughts about us, infiltrating our minds. The hand on the mask, although pretty and decorative, is there to maintain silence among the mask-wearer. It's there as a preventative measure, to make sure the mask wearer's real feelings aren't accidentally spilled.
VI(O)lET FEEL'DS
Terraforming is the hypothetical process of deliberately modifying the atmosphere, temperature, surface topography, or ecology of a planet, moon, or other body to be similar to the environment of Earth to make it habitable by Earth-like life.
As the final terrain to endure at the end of a lengthy journey, the beautifully familiar Violet Feel’ds tantalizes the exhausted and desperate hero with the feeling of comfort and delicious serenity. Before they prepare to meet with their most ferocious and vicious match, they lay their head on a sturdy crystal and fall into a nap on the tall soft grasses. But horror soon arises as giant, jewelry-adorned hands break open the sky and whisk them above, taking them to meet their fate and fulfill their prophecy...
(O)verlaid
Challenging the smooth slickness of spline and polygon modeling of the 1990s and early 2000s, this project will operate within the current post-digital context, investigating ideas of precise and intentional unruliness, mixing rustication and delicacy and how formal legibility is affected by layering, filtering, rips, wrinkles, peeling, and fuzz.
It seems everything we do at the moment is overlaid, filtered, and masked - once, twice, or in many ways. Formally and texturally, “overlaid” elicits thoughts of many layers of fine detailed mesh, multi-layered semi-opaque synthetic materials, murky reflections, and bundles of particles. At the same time, “overlaid” and “masked” bring up issues of politics, post-processing, and applying filters to images and ideas.
Fall 2021 / Academic Project / SCI-Arc
Instructor / William Virgil, Kumaran Parthiban, Rachael McCall
Partner / Zarina Farmer-George
Instructor / William Virgil, Kumaran Parthiban, Rachael McCall
Partner / Zarina Farmer-George
