Artist Statement #1

For this Zine, I wanted to create a project that meant something to me. Something that represented who I am and my interests. Nothing more represents that than film. Being a film major and hoping to get into the industry as a career, much of who I am revolves around the subject. When I was coming up with ideas for this personal project, I would take inspiration from other projects I had seen in the past such as old Zines or internet trends which is where I came up with the idea of creating a film/TV themed color palette booklet. I wanted this booklet to show how different colors are represented in the visual media by having each page be a color and including characters, objects, and backgrounds that follows that page's color. To manifest this, a collage worked best. But instead of just having a jumble of pictures scattered across the page, I wanted to have some uniformity to the structure of the pages. An example of this can be seen on page Green, where if you notice, I situated Kermit from The Muppets and Travis from Taxi Driver in a way where they almost have the same silhouette. You can look through the entire project and see many instances where the composition is deliberately laid out to have the various entities interact with each other. This project doesn’t come with its faults however. In the middle of the process, I had to undergo an urgent surgery which left me unable to work on the project for a while. Luckily I had finished creating all the pages, however I was left with the task of printing the pages and putting them together during a time when the most mobility I had was hobbling from the couch to the kitchen to get a snack, then back to the couch to rest. Wednesday, 6 days after my surgery, I was able to come to campus to print the pages which was a whole ordeal in itself. The printers on campus are not intuitive at all and it took 3 different printers and many tests to finally get it right. I believe it took a total of 4 hours to figure it out and print the 15 double sided pages. But even after that I was not finished, I had to put them together into a booklet. I decided thread would work best so late that same night I went to Target and got a sewing kit with cool looking thread (which I wouldn't even be able to use because the needle was too small for the thread), and used the thread that came with the sewing kit instead. It still worked well and looked good but I did not realize how intensive and time consuming it would take to stitch a book together. But in the end, I am happy with the product and the fruit of my labor. This project showed me what I can create if the passion is there, even when facing life changing challenges, such as important medical procedures, or technology issues. But I can look at the Zine and be proud of myself for creating “something”.

Picture shows workspace and outlines for the cover page

Image key I was planning to add but didn't