What My Future in VT's Looking Like

I have been thinking about a great deal of things concerning the accidental, the intentional, and the coincidental, particularly in relation to family and to soil. Soil, a medium which I have spent a great deal of time thinking about over this past semester, is kind of like a physical documentation of everything that has historically happened to our earth, and contains all the information we have about our ancestors. The entire human race, from the lens of soil, starts to look like one family. This, to me, became very religious.

As I started to think about religion, I began to think about my background in general as well. While I believe we as humans have some kind of say in the direction of our lives, I also wonder if there isn't a sort of set path we are all on from the moment we are born. I wonder if the way children are raised, the influences that cause them to become the adults they will become, form a kind of familial fractal. The children are in some way like the parents. The parents are likewise like the grandparents. The children's desires and emotions are shaped by the parent's choices. This, to me, forms a pattern, as well as a spirituality behind our universality. 

The exact performance I am thinking of will be something like this: the audience will be directed off of the main path into the woods, and they will come across a space with several shallow pools (frames built from wood, mirrored on the inside with maybe some lights to cause the reflections to pop). I will be sitting in the largest pool and will be singing "As I went down to the river," a folk song popularized by Allison Kraus. I will ask audience members to come forward and I will wash their hands with a cloth from the pools. When I am done singing, I will stand and lead the audience through the woods to the next performer. My idea currently is to bring a bowl of water from the pools to bring to the next performer and wash their hands as well.

This references many ideas for me. The pools are symbolic of multiple paths and differences between people, although the pools themselves are all very similar. It is actually a direct reference to C. S. Lewis's The Magician's Nephew, when the lead characters, the discoverers of Narnia, come across a place filled with several shallow pools. Stepping into each pool would result in the discovery of another world. It symbolizes blind choice. Choices that we have yet cannot know the impact of. What is random? What is intended?

The song is a song I used to sing to my parents as a toddler. I knew all of the words by the time I was two. My father, being a writer, wrote a story about me singing that song, and to him, it meant everything I'd already overcome and everything I would have to overcome. To me now, I think of what we must all overcome as a race. How we must all put our differences aside in the light of a celebration of our sameness. This is definitely a very positive outlook on struggles that the human species is currently facing, and I am most certainly not downplaying those who fight for the right to live as equals. I am simply imagining the simplicity of equality in a perfect world.

A world of equality must mean that we must make choices to strive in that future, though we may not know the impact of our choices yet. We must do the best we can in the hopes of improving the species. That is the gist of what I'm thinking about right now.

Plum Nelly, Fall 2016

Plum Nelly, December 2016

Glascock, Fall 2016

Glascock, December 2016

Black and white film photography

This piece was purely meant for myself. After thinking about the idea of process and remembering where I come from, I knew I needed to draw back to my family and focus solely on them for a moment in order to finally be able to branch away and make something new for the world. The piece consists of images I took on my own of my parents and brothers, as well as reprints I made from my mom's old negatives from the year 2000. She always wanted a photography wall to summarize our family and I wanted to make it for her, in a way. These images to me feel extremely similar to the whole experience of growing up as a Glascock and hopefully I will be able to pursue greater things outside of my family after completing this.

patience, Fall 2016

patience, November 2016

Mixed media

When I made this piece, I was thinking of a person viewing an artwork for mere seconds before concluding what it is in its entirety, so I made something that could only be fully understood with patience and endurance. The piece started as a messy blob of wax and sand, and over time, it melted to reveal venus figurines, some of the oldest recognizable artwork in history. I wanted to question how long we give something before moving on, and how sure of ourselves we can be without noting what time can do to change our perception.

self portrait, sans flesh, Fall 2016

 

self portrait, sans flesh, September 2016

Steel, copper wire, latex paint, wood

This piece is meant to be a figurative self portrait of my past. I was born with spina bifida, and in 1996, the odds of me being able to walk were almost one in a million. Later on in life, my twin brother Riggs would go on to build wheelchairs for children born with the same disability I was supposed to have. I chose to weld the entire thing based on the idea that metal is essentially the backbone of the earth, making this piece both extremely personal to me and ambiguous in the way people could receive it.

Failed, Spring 2016

Failed, Spring 2016

24” x 48” mixed media

This piece was made in slight reference to Mark Rothko and the Modernist movement. I enjoyed the idea of using color and size to convey a specific emotion, and, going through a particularly rough phase in my personal art, I wanted to replicate the feeling of failure. What ended up being more fascinating to me than anything else was that during the critique, a classmate’s friend visiting from Belgium thought of the Belgian bombings that had taken place only a week earlier, and I loved that my artwork, through its ambiguity, could relate to several ideas at once.

Unraveling, Spring 2016

Unraveling, Spring 2016

Bricks, canvas, watercolor

This work is a portrayal of my feelings toward my home to people in Richmond who have never heard of Chattanooga. I painted a landscape of the view from Signal Mountain looking onto the downtown city, unraveled the canvas, and wrapped it around loose bricks from the sidewalks of Richmond. The main idea was that the viewer could not see the painting although it was still there, surrounded by culture that contrasts against it. In my original presentation, I showed a video of blank canvas being unraveled inside of the canvas frame on the wall (see the above link).

A Southern Family Tree, Spring 2016

A Southern Family Tree, Spring 2016

Acrylic paint, paper mache, multicolor thread, and dirt

I made this piece to speak about what it feels like to grow up in the south. Many dismiss it as a hateful, conservative, racist place, and while these negative aspects do make up a majority of the ideology, there is far more to what it means to be Southern. I was questioning why it is a seen as a problem to want to identify with where I am from, when it is possible to acknowledge the past, actively fight against the ideology of it, and still love the place and what it means to me all the same.