(For meaning of the title, please refer back to the end of my last post.)
Let’s start with the work first!
My use of cyanotype in these piece is symbolic of numerous things. The topic of the piece being the the Gulf of Mexico oil spill of 2010 (not to be confused with the one of 1979) is a news story that is now permanently a part of our history. Not only is a part of our history, but the aftermath of its occurrence could have permanent effect on the Earth, there is no study to prove differently. The color of the process brings many associations with it as well, being the color of water and it’s representation of sorrow.
The imagery of this piece is layering of text. The excerpts presented here are only three out of the innumerable news articles occurring directly following the break of the story. My fascination with this event and the news coverage was not only because I try to be an environmentally responsible human being, but because it set a surge into the general public. Those who had possibly never considered the damage we are doing to the Earth previously, may have had their eyes opened after this sad occurrence. For the time that this story flooded the front pages of newspapers, people actually cared, but do they still? Now that the story is hardly visible in the news, who knows what is going on with the clean-up? Or, what effects we can already see happening in it’s wake?
I would like to use this method of creating to track the “trending” of this particular event. Maya has informed me that she may have the actual New York Times from this period in time, and if so, I see the ability to keep a similar analytical component to the project. I could evaluate the percentage of the paper that is dominated by this particular event throughout the month following and use that ratio to determine how much of the paper I “cover”. In a sense, I would be tracking the news coverage to investigate how it is faded out by the agenda setters and gatekeepers. The lack of coverage as time passes would not only be represented by sequencing of the pieces, showing the percentage of white (the news not covering the story) starting to take over the image, but also that the layering text would become less overwhelming or abundant.
Now, not so much about the work, but about my relationship with the news (it needs to be clarified).
So, after last weeks meeting I started to think back to where my feelings of news came from. In my thinking I wrote a fairly long post titled “I believe in change; I am not an ostrich” but one reason or another I did not actually post it. I will not go as deep into it here (unless someone asks for the details). To sum it up, my tendency to not follow current events isn’t necessarily to hide from them. I know that even if I don’t hear them, they will still exist. The problem is that I believe myself to be an overly-compassionate person (it’s actually a problem). There are too many causes I’d like to be a part of, and because of this, I was trying to be the initiator of change for more than one person can handle. After a minor case of compassion fatigue, I came to the realization that if I really wanted to initiate change, I needed to stop spreading myself so thin. This is why I started to concentrate all my thoughts and energy on a select few issues I felt were most important to me. Environmental issues are something I feel so strongly about that it resonates deep within me; I couldn’t keep it inside even if I tried. As a result of this decision, I made another conscious decision to do whatever possible not to stray from my path. Its almost like I have blinders on, I care so deeply about this one issue, that I would rather concentrate all my energy on assisting it’s change before I start on another issue. I believe there is an issue like this in each of us; if each person chose to work on one change at a time, instead of trying to change everything at once, maybe change would actually occur. Think about it.
