Surrounded by Shadows: A Junior Conceptual Project by Zipporah Alcaraz (2015)

In the beginning of the Conceptual unit, we were asked to pull two slips of paper from two paper bags. One representing emotions and the other representing an experience. The two slips were combined into a statement that is the basis for the whole project. The statement randomly chosen for me was I’m exploring the feeling of denial through the experience of a long walk. After choosing our statement we were then asked to create a multimedia project in Design that would incorporate it. As I thought about my concept, I realized two things. One, a long walk could mean various things, such as one’s journey through life or taking a break from something you’ve spent too much time on and two, denial is a clouded feeling mixed with confusion and avoidance. Once I figured this out I had an idea of what I wanted to do.

My piece is called Surrounded by Shadows, because it is based on not being sure of who you want to be, and denying your true self. In the picture I created there are two sides, the top being a light pink outline of a person, and the bottom being a dark overcast shadow. The light person represents who they want people to see, but their dark shadow ties them down. The other people behind them represents who they were in the past. I used chalk pastels to blend the colors together to show how denial blends through reality. Also if you look closely you can see different words, such as stop, truth, deny, fake, and reject, which exemplify the inner thoughts one has when they are in denial. It took me some time to figure out what I wanted to do for this piece, but I pushed through and was able to make it the way I envisioned. Overall, I really enjoyed this project, especially since we were able to use an assortment of art mediums/medias.