I originally started by exploring transparency as my main concept, seen in the attached mind map. This led me to the idea of government transparency and my original proposal.

 

I realized that, as I was addressing a very generalized topic, it needed to be scaled down to something more personally relevant. I changed my direction towards media, specifically social media, as the primary source of news, documenting the difficulty of finding real news within the oversaturated contents of my own media outlets.

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As I pursued this concept I felt continuously unsatisfied with the direction. The subject matter felt generalized, cliche and, in a way, pushed upon my generation of "millennials".  Feeling disconnected from the topic I decided to re-evaluate my motivations and in turn I decidedly pursued a deeper personal subject relevant to my emotions now.

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My new concept evolved from my nostalgia of home or a yearning for family connections. Not having seen my family in almost a year and my extended family in almost three, the sense of yearning to reconnect has become a very imminent part of my current life. My exploration of memory and human experience of time came naturally as I internally explored this feeling.

 

As a human, I can only perceive time in chronological order: the instance of happening becomes past memory, which I recall in the present and create potential through want for reconnection in the future. But in reality time is not defined clearly by three stages, and I wanted to represent this through the transparency of the layers creating a a multi-layered image. My grandmother in Vietnam became my main subject as my memories of her are so momentary and her age makes the potential for future reconnection urgent. 

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My final project has three prints each representing past, present, future. the first image is a double exposure of my grandma sitting to emphasize the vividness of that moment. The second print is the same image but split, blurring the image like my own distortion of memory. I was greatly influenced by Kenya Hara's ideas on the colour white as symbolic of empty potential and hence used it as a tool to demonstrate potential in thought and emotion throughout the piece. Text is cutout as a metaphor for my feelings of yearning and the potential that creates. The third is just text symbolic of the undefined potential that awaits to be filled.  The text reads in English: 

Grandma,

how are you?

It's been awhile since we both last met.

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Both vellum and acetate was printed originally intended to be shown side by side, but after last weeks class I think acetate works best in the format of hanging whereas the vellum works better in a book format just because as there is distance the prints seem more opaque.

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