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Matches: A Junior Design Student Conceptual Project by Benjamin Shell (2017)

I am exploring the feeling of resignation through the experience of preserving memories.

When I thought of resignation, I immediately thought to the reluctant acceptance of a tragedy or of another unfortunate event. This got me thinking about the dreadful fires that swept through Northern California and the destruction that these fires caused. The homeowners whose houses were destroyed had to, unfortunately, reluctantly accept that their house had been destroyed. I also thought about the memories that people had in these houses that were destroyed. Physical memories buts also intangible memories. I wanted to demonstrate the tragic events of these fires through my concept statement in this assignment. To demonstrate the resignation, I choose to show something that had the potential to do destruction because destruction often forces us to reluctantly accept a situation; as seen with the Northern California fires. To demonstrate the potential to do destruction, I choose to label a rusted paint bucket with a flammable warning and surround it with matches. This creates the potential for destruction to occur and also creates tension. To demonstrate the preservation of memories, I choose to use a Christmas box. The box demonstrates the preservation of memories as many people, including myself, have many fond memories of Christmas. To put the two objects together, I placed the “flammable” paint bucket into the Christmas Box and surrounded it with matches. Then I put the lid off to the side so that the box was open. However, selecting the background was harder than I thought. It took many trials to find the perfect background that also represented my concept statement. I ended up choosing a wooden table as it was a simple background but also fitted the concept about the fires as it represented the wood of the houses that were tragically burned down. I didn’t do much in Photoshop besides cropping and changing the exposure a little bit. I also gave the flammable logo a little bit more brightness to really make it more clear and give it more “pop”. Overall, I believe that with minimalist edits in Photoshop and a simple set of objects, my concept statement was nicely executed.
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