The benefit of beginning one’s creative journey from an early age is that art becomes intuitive. At least for me. Before I learned to talk, I was drawing and playing with clay. My memory doesn’t trace far enough to yield which day I learned to hold a crayon. My tendency to create made me a prolific art student throughout my education as well. The crit deadlines in college always seemed generous when the quarter system was aiming to squeeze out every drop of the students. I didn’t mind the pace because I enjoyed hypostatizing imaginary worlds and finding peace with various formal elements.
As much as I grabbed onto the productivity wave since childhood, I still hit some speed bumps here and there. Except, I hit the LA traffic of creativity this past fall. During my senior capstone class, I experienced the worst version of time relativity. Fifteen minutes in the studio always felt like one hundred and twenty minutes, and the temperature of the shaded shack dropped a little more each day. So I invested my time in the most laborsome and brain-numbing medium there was — plaster. Meanwhile, the people-pleaser in me was being a “Yes Man” to my professor’s suggestions.
“Scale up!”
“Looks good. Have you considered including your engineering background in this work?”
I found a way to set up a skeleton for a sculpture that would take weeks to layer. In the wedding section of Michaels, I found colorful scaffolds for the structure. Meanwhile, I was researching the works of Anicka Yi, Nairy Baghramian, and Sahej Rahal, trying to harness the ability to construct a narrative through materiality and technology. I stumbled deeper and deeper into this madness of attempting to create a sculpture with too many leads. Whenever I felt fear, the platitude about stepping out of one’s comfort zone pushed me to move forward with the piece. In hindsight, I was just worried that if I put more thought into this piece, I would be confronted by the flaws in my logic.
The sculpture continued to grow in a damp corner of the studio. Originally, I was excited for the possibility that I would strike an exciting concept in the meditation of creating the plaster sculpture, but as the days passed by, I grew more disinterested in my creation. In the background of my personal life, I was experiencing studio burnout, relocation, and school applications. It’s reasonable to conclude that I was overwhelmed, but the catch is that I always sought refuge in art when I experienced stress in other parts of my life. For the first time, I lost my ability to use art as an outlet. This time, art was stressful.
Nevertheless, I continued to build my sculpture and a few side projects. How far could this autopilot travel? During class, someone suggested that my sculpture looked like an elephant, so I caved in and added a trunk to the head. After viewing the show by Pipilotti Rist at the MOCA, a video element was integrated into my work. I decided to succumb to my environment, hoping that the stimuli would link with one another.
And the result? I did everything I could with this work, as well as everything I didn’t need to. I collected notes from research, generated a video projection, and wrote an essay on how synthetic plastic saved elephants from ivory harvesting, because of billiards. I gave my last-ditch effort to back my concept during my last critique as an undergraduate artist. However, I knew that this time, my theory didn’t add up. The individual pieces of this work meant so much to me, yet when they’re put together, they’re incoherent. What I sincerely meant to present was the physical representation of my distracted and hyperactive mind that continued to run on empty during this final stretch. When I deal with frustration, I seek out other opportunities to make my life more productive and evade the sense of defeat. In this art project of mania, I finally confronted the elephant in the room, which is how I ignore doubt by adding more responsibilities to my life (furthermore, the idiom, “the elephant in the room,” ended up occupying too long during my crit). I wasn’t happy with the visual and conceptual qualities of this work. Like… I abandoned the elephant in the lab. I haven’t uploaded the full documented work on Vimeo either, because I’m reluctant to purchase more storage on the uploading platform. The object isn’t precious, but the act of creating was cathartic.
My professor for the senior capstone course advocated for didactic art. He thought that art without politics is merely formal, and thus secondary in today’s modern art world. I have been privileged to rely on my art practice for emotional comfort. And while this motivation to make art is less heroic, I would like to challenge the idea that comfort in art doesn’t have value. Many of us have experienced the manifestation of our mental states in various forms, so we have a language to decipher artists’ emotions in their works. A lot of artists understand that their concepts are a stretch, but the act of giving their work everything, to the point of mania, leaves a trace of the artists’ passions.
Throughout college, I rarely painted self-portraits or projected my own stories onto my creations. Yet, above the rapidly changing backdrop of my life, I spilled it all out there: an elephant, Lego blocks, polymers, and bugs. The futile yet intensive labor left me exhausted. I kept going without a purpose except to run away from any purpose. When I looked back, at the end of the journey, the elephant stared back at me, gave me a chuckle, and seemed relieved too now that I stopped painting on it with light.
