final review/exhibit

As quick as it came, my semester abroad is coming to an end. Last Saturday was our final review for our studio projects and an exhibit showcasing everyone's work from all the classes that was open to the city residents. Even the mayor came, since they also announced the winners of an art competition they held in the city (one winner from Cal Poly, three from UT, and one from A&M, my friend Jennifer - all the ones that won were abstract/non-representational/non-traditional art pieces... one was even a strange black and white film about the town). It was a crazy day getting everything set up and ready in time, but it finally came to an end and it was so nice to relax and see everyone's hard work...

... plus there's always plenty of good food, lol.

This is my group's studio project. Our project was based on a site in Ostia, a suburb of Rome, on an abandoned plot of land. We were supposed to bring all the different sectors of the community - residents, river workers, cultural associations, tourists, students, homeless, etc. - together with the development of the plot and throughout the city. My group decided to plan six ideas of "tools" that could be used throughout the whole area that could work to benefit everyone and improve the economic and social divisions that are there. One of our ideas for our solution was that there wasn't just one set senario, like this must be built here and that must be built there, but that many different senarios could work equally well using our developmental "tools". In order to show that, we designed a game that used all these elements and through the game play, came up with varying results that could help aid design by showing potential patterns and layouts for the site.

For my contribution, I created all the icons used in our layouts and game, plus created and produced the entire game board and pieces. These are some details of the board and the cards in the game with the icons I made, which, for a graphic-design-challenged person like me, I'm pretty proud of:

...each of the colored tiles represent tools that can be played, with a limited number of each one. Each territory that they can be played on has specific wants of how many and what kind of tools.

...these are the tool cards. To play the game, each person draws a tool card in turns and plays it where it would most benefit the identities that person is representing. If they draw a tool they can't play or don't need, they can barter with other players for different tools that that person may have drawn or will draw. Once all the tools are placed, the result can be analyzed.

... these are the identities that each person represents (they can have more than one) and have a territory on the game board map. (... you know, while making this whole thing as I cut, glued and colored, I couldn't help but think - who would've believed that I'd be cutting, gluing, and coloring in my third year of college for a design studio?! haha, whatever.)

Overall, I think our review went pretty well. It was really long, but they seemed to like the game theory idea. My teacher even played a game with us when we were making it, and he told us it seemed to work. Hopefully that's all good. Fortunately, once the review was done, we were free to roam the rest of the exhibit. Here are some of the other projects on display.

... our sketchbook journals on display from our writing class

... this is the other studio's class model of a large chunk of the city. There project was to replace one of the older buildings with a new hotel complex, so they built this gigantic model of the surrounding area to be used for their presentations. I just thought it turned out so nicely, such good craftsmanship (and so much more architecture-y than ours) so I thought I show off about the other studio's work.

... these are from the stone carving class - I particular liked the 1-up mushroom and the IPod, lol.

... work from glass sculpting... if you can't tell (because I couldn't), several of the green pieces are casts of body parts, including a face, hands, arm, foot, and a neck/shoulder piece... a little too strange for my tastes.

... works from the metal working class (...they actually sculpted a lot more stuff but just didn't have it cast, since they had to pay out of pocket the costs for the metal by weight that they used, so they would've had more to show... plus, the big ones, like the dancer, took many weeks with many processes to make, so I was told.)

... some of the black and white photography. They use film cameras and learn to develop their own pictures, kinda cool and retro in the era of digital, haha, but they had some amazing results in this class - this was the biggest class as well, with ten people. The others had around five or six (or four, in my case).

... works from the mix-media class, aka print making class - they turned out a lot of work and all very vibrant and colorful nice pieces as well. They even set out the print blocks they made as well, which was fun to see more of the process of the art.

... and last, but not least, watercolor! :D Chris had already packed his paintings, and no matter how much we begged, he refused to put stuff up, but fortunately, Jenna and Maggie put up their pieces along with mine to help fill out the board (Chris kept telling me to just take the whole board for myself - uh, no way! I don't have that many good pieces, and I'm not going to be the only one, lol). We all got lots of compliments on them too, which is always nice to hear, especially from the locals. While it would've been fun to take all of the art classes, I'm glad I chose watercolors.

And now, just a few days away from it all being over. Everyone is packing up, cleaning up, and leaving. Hard to believe that my study abroad, my trip to Italy that I've been anticipating and looking forward to since I first heard about it back in high school, is almost a past experience. Now, what do I have to look forward to? a year and a half of school left before I graduate? attempting to survive three more studios? deciding to go to grad school or instead entering the real world? ... at the moment, none of those really seem all that great to be my new focus point, my new anchor that keeps me going when it gets so tough... I can no longer say in the back of my head after a ten-hour day in studio "just keep at it so you can go to Italy"... definitely a bittersweet moment, seeing everyone go, people I've been with every minute of the day for the last three months, having to leave this beautiful country, but also getting to be home, and see family, and not have to live out of a suitcase anymore.

I suppose for now, I'll have to be content with looking forward to going home and having a great holiday season with my family, and just let life in the next couple years take its course.