Grass

Imagine this piece with Claude Debussy's The Little Shepherd.

This project was based on the work of Robin Rhodes. He uses paint or chalk to create an image on a wall or the ground and then, quite often, places himself in the picture and interacts with the image. His works are almost always sequential and usually have at least six or more images per piece. My piece is made up of 15 images, and instead of paint or chalk I used rope to create the two dimensional space that the actors interact with.

I wanted to follow the theme of relationships as we are nearing the end of a year at Duke. These series of images are loosely based on how people drift apart and come back together. Sometimes they never come back together, but I wanted this to have a happy ending. A girl and a boy meet and are happy with each other. Then they start to drift apart. The girl grows butterfly wings and starts to fly away. Afterwards the boy lassos her back in and they continue their relationship.

I added a cement block underneath to give the images some sense of grounding. It is clearly photoshopped, however, in a powerpoint presentation the illusion works fairly well because the viewer will (hopefully) be looking at the people and noticing their changes rather than studying the concrete, as one might with a still image. I chose black and red specifically to contrast with the green grass. The costumes of the boy and the girl also correlate. Wherever there is red on one person there is black on the other, with the exception of the belt of the boy and the fact that they both wear black shoes. The colors of the ropes are completely arbitrary--they were whatever I could get. I changed the contrast levels to bring out the colors more, however I was not able to make it so that my dress did not blend in with the shadow, which was very disappointing. I would have also liked the girl's wings to stand out more.

This project was very collaborative. Kirsty, my roommate, was very good at helping us position our bodies to aid the illusion. We spent many long exasperating minutes trying to figure out exactly what angle our feet should be. Jake was very good at recognizing movement and gave me the idea of being tugged from the middle down and helped me to determine who I should position my body. All in all, I had a lot of fun doing this project. It really showed me how people could work together to create something amusing and worthwhile and it helped me learn how to artistically direct (direct an art piece? direct artistically? be an artisitc director?).

Credits:
Photography-Kirsty Fang
Actors-Alex Young, Jacob Harer
Director/Photomanipulation-Alex Young