Personal Museum Curation
After visiting the SFMOMA I designed our very own museum. It includes three pieces that remind me of my own values and overall resemble how I view myself as a person. I also included two photos that I feel don’t relate to me or express how I am as a person.
Museum of Vibrance
Seestuck (Seascape)
Gerhard Richter
This art piece displays rolling waves at the beach. I believe that it helps show my calm and collected nature. There is a slight contrast between the ocean and the sky, showing different parts of my personality. The down-to-earth side that gets work done and keeps persisting, and the up-in-the-sky side that takes breaks and remembers to enjoy life. This photo shows how peace and balance makes life complete- something that I feel I exhibit.
Ich
A.R. Penck
This art piece shows a stick figure holding shapes and being surrounded by shapes. This piece reminds me of the way I was raised. I was always told to chase opportunities and learned that experiences help shape us. As a kid, I learned in a very hands-on way. My elementary and middle school was based around projects and implemented a Project Based Learning curriculum. This art represents how I used tools given to me to help develop my skills.
Janus
Gerhard Richter
This art piece displays an array of colors with a dominating green, blue, and red scheme. It shows how I value diversity while also being self-aware. I am accepting of others and enjoy understanding other people’s perspectives, without straying from my own beliefs and sense of individuality.
Daath
Anselm Kiefer
I would not choose to display this piece in my art museum. The dark colors create the look of blandness and lack of depth. I like to believe that I am neither of these things. I don’t relate to the lack of life and overall creativity shown in the painting.
(no name)
Georg Baselitz
I would not choose to display this piece in my art museum. The piece has major divides between different sectors and shows a woman seemingly in distress and lost in the background. I don’t relate to this because I feel very unified as a person. All of the pieces in my life fit hand in hand with each other and help compliment the person I am becoming. I don’t feel divided or in distress during this process of maturing.
Conclusion
Through creating my own art I am able to display my thought process and beliefs in a way other than words. I can relate most of the paintings I have chosen for my museum to my Digital Media design work. I often chose happy and vibrant colors when creating art. I also choose complex designs that are unified creating a whole photo. I think this relates to who I am because it shows my positive nature and deep thinking.
Memoir Essay
I read the memoir Hunger by Roxanne Gay. Below is my essay answering the prompt, Some memoirists rely on plainer and more common language which appeals to a wider reading audience, while others use a more sophisticated style and surprisingly unconventional narrative techniques which make their work stand out as distinctly “literary.” Choose a memoir which fits the latter category and write an essay in which you identify and analyze the stylistic and narrative techniques the author uses for the purpose of shaping the reader’s experience in a novel* way. *Note: please look up in the dictionary and thesaurus both the noun and adjective forms of “novel”; either or both meanings of this word may be applied to your argument.
Hunger Memoir Essay by Kirsten Andrews
Food became a coping mechanism for Roxane Gay: an escape from the traumas in her past and a way for her to hide from the guilt that she feels. The simple object of food soon became her largest monster. Her memoir, Hunger, uses contradictions and conversational language to allow the reader to feel comfortable and close with her writing. This writing style is used particularly well in her memoir because the discussion is based around a sensitive topic and relates to delicate past experiences.
Contradictions, opposing ideas, benefit Gay’s writing by letting the audience humanize her words and create empathy while reading. While Gay clearly values her family, relying on their constant support, she laments never opening up to them about how she was actually feeling: “Though they did not have to, though they were frantic with worry, my parents welcomed me home. They had questions and anger and hurt and I couldn’t do much about any of that. I could not tell them the truth. I could not explain why I continued to gain so much weight. I could not figure out how to be less of a disappointment. And still, I had a home to return to, a home where I would be welcomed and loved” (97). Her inability to open up to her parents balanced with her need for their support represents one of Gays many noticeable contradictions. Contradictions can be considered inherently human because they simulate how people think when they don’t fully comprehend their feelings about something. Therefore, her ability to use this technique in her writing creates rapport with the audience reading it. It instantly makes her writing feel more relatable, almost as if Gay is having a direct conversation and formulating her thoughts in the process. This makes the audience feel more familiar with Gay when they begin reading more personal and in depth parts of her body journey. By creating rapport, Gay has introduced her audience with empathy to her style of writing and her general beliefs.
Gay’s conversational language creates a sense of belonging within her book. When she writes about specific events she paints a picture using a tone that sounds like she is discussing her current thoughts with a friend over coffee. For example, when she discusses rape, she writes, “Thanks to books and therapy and my new friends online, I knew ever more clearly that there was a thing called rape” (92). This simplistic sentence is easy to follow and shows us her learning clearly. Gay continues with, “I knew that when a woman said no, men were supposed to listen and stop what they were doing. I knew that it wasn’t my fault that I had been raped” (92). The audience feels as though they are given special access to the learning portion of her rape story. Gay is being vulnerable by allowing anyone who reads her book to understand her thinking. Her choppy sentences resemble thoughts which create a kinship between her realizations and the audience. Instead of being confined to literary rules or the style of writing through metaphors, Gay’s use of this informal writing lets her employ repetition and a light tone to describe her situation. By repeating “I believe” in the passage, “I believe we should have broader definitions of beauty that include diverse body types. I believe it is so important for women to feel comfortable in their bodies, without wanting to change every single thing about their bodies to find that comfort. I (want to) believe my worth as a human being does not reside in my size or appearance,” (17) we see a point she is making come across clearly. The concise sentences show us her thought process and ultimately what she wants but doesn’t have. Her beliefs are displayed while creating a sense of vulnerability when she admits that she doesn’t fully believe that there is no connection between self worth and her size. Gay using simplistic sentence structure creates togetherness between the audience and her writing.
Hunger, by Roxane Gay, grants the audience the ability to feel close with her story. Gay displays extreme vulnerability by opening up about a traumatic rape experience leading to body issues. In order to show her thought process she uses human traits such as thinking with
contradictions and easy-to-follow language. These informal writing techniques create a connection with her readers: a connection that makes the reader feel as though Gay is talking directly towards them. Her ability to write about a sensitive topic shows that she has come to terms with her situation and has gained confidence about her experience.
Work Cited
Gay, Roxane. Hunger: a Memoir of (My) Body. Harper Perennial, 2018.
Lyrical Essay Study
I stepped out of my comfort zone when reading “The Book of Beginnings and Endings,” by Jenny Boully, as it is a lyrical essay. A lyrical essay is an unconventional contemporary writing form that combines aspects of poetry and essay writing.
Here is my initial analysis of the chapters white reading: Lyrical Essay Analysis
I decided to mimic Boully’s lyrical writing style in my own essay. Make sure to read the reflection at the end where I explain which aspects of her writing I tried to imitate.
The Feeling of Fulfilment by Kirsten Andrews
The average lifetime is around 80 years. That is when infancy to adolescence to mid-adult life all happens. Flowers bloom in those 80 years. Deer graze in those 80 years. And you achieve in those 80 years. What is the feeling of fulfillment? Is it spending those 80 years doing your hobbies or spending your time with the flowers?
Sunflowers turn to face the sun. When they cannot face the sun, they face each other. When they are facing each other, what are they saying? Will never know, as we cannot speak the language of the flowers? When humans no longer face the sun, and turn to each other, what are we saying?
Kind words can hurt. Harsh words can heal. Sometimes opposites attract. Sometimes you need to be with someone who is the same as you. Where does the line get drawn? When do you stop focusing on someone else, and begin to understand yourself? The sugar that is drizzled on your life is for you to choose. The human mind decides how much glucose one can handle.
Some live simple. Just them, a few flowers, maybe a mut. A simple house, simple connections, and a boring job. So boring. The hours are drawn out as the social clock ticks away. The social clock telling you that between the ages of 40 and 60 you should have decided whether to want to pursue parenthood or work. The social clock telling you how to live your life. You are arriving close to your 80 years.
It is all an equation.
If you ignore the social clock, do you reach a different level of fulfilment? Maybe. Fulfillment can not be defined by what Psychology is determining. It is instead defined by who you are and what you choose to do. The flower you become, the other sunflowers you talk to.
The equation makes sense.
Fulfilment is a feeling, an expression, a form of a human. You are fulfilment. You are your own fulfilment. Confusion stings fulfilment. One of Erik Erikson’s Psychosocial stages is Initiative vs. Guilt. This is when toddlers begin to understand their environment and control the difference between good and bad. This is when they begin to feel fulfilment. Baby sunflowers at the beginning of life, learning something that grayer sunflowers still don’t understand.
So do we ever fully understand fulfillment? That is for you to decide. Do we ever fully feel fulfillment? You can, if your equation makes sense. 80 years. You being understanding your environment around ages 2 or 3. That gives you ample amounts of time to determine what your definition of fulfillment is. It is a conscious effort.
The effort of the deer to figure out where he wants to graze. The effort of the sunflower to figure out who it will turn to.
Expository Essay
While reading Jenny Boully’s lyrical essay collection, The Book of Beginnings and Endings, I admired her approach to writing which included taking a concept from the world and thinking about it abstractly. Throughout her writing she used literary devices, such as metaphors and comparisons, to enhance her abstract way of thinking. Boully’s lyrical writing is unique because she often refers to flower metaphors, she jumps between many topics in one essay, and she actively considers many different perspectives of one idea.
In my piece, The Feeling of Fulfilment, I relate the concept of Psychology in an abstract way. When I refer to the “social clock” and “Erik Erikson’s stages of development,” I am taking true scientific information and incorporating it into the contemporary and innovative essay format. This is similar to Boully’s essay titled Strange Mechanism for a Dream where she uses the idea of star death to explain a romantic relationship, while mixing in metaphors about a doctor. In the passage, “the star still exists; some stars; such as quasars and pulsars, will continue to give off signals, such colossal amplitudes of last life, a life-line showing up on no screen, continuously beeping for a celestial doctor who does not come,” (51) we see Boully take an analytical approach to her writing. She discusses the concept of stars and relates it in an abstract way by using a doctor metaphor to express the way in which it is dying, similar to how I relate Psychology to fulfilment.
Another common Boully technique is the use of flowers as metaphors. Flowers are a consistent theme throughout many of her lyrical essays. In her essay titled I. she writes, “given the dread and the sorrow of everyday life, of the mundane and the platitudes, we see how Aboullie offers the flowers as a sign of moving out of the quotidian and into the miraculous. By introducing forsythia, hyacinths, laurel, and lilacs, Aboullie not only evokes all the various poems and literary moments involving such flowers, but also the suggestion that even within the darkness, among the dust and decrepitude, whatever blooms” (Boully 46). In order to mimic her appreciation and use of flowers, I included the theme of the sunflower throughout my piece. I used sunflowers to describe people and used it to depict situations such as, “baby sunflowers at the beginning of life, learning something that grayer sunflowers still don’t understand,” showing how understanding of fulfilment changes as you age.
In her writing, Boully jumps between topics in order to create abstract connections. In her essay titled On Probability she discusses both statistics and the concept of miracles, “Children live in miracles, but for the adult a miracle becomes something unbelievable: I can’t believe it: it’s a miracle, people will say upon the resurrection of the dead or the ability of some people to walk away from scenes of disasters unscathed. In adulthood, only those events which seem to live in the 0.00000001 percent margins of probability and which seem to have no rational basis for occurring can be attributed to a miracle” (19.) Boully’s ability to connect two topics that aren’t often considered together demonstrates her thinking in the abstract. I connected the topic of fulfillment with the idea that your life is only 80 years. Even though the topics I chose are frequently related, I connected them in a way that still requires the readers to contemplate in the abstract. By tying in the idea of a social clock, “The social clock telling you that between the ages of 40 and 60 you should have decided whether to want to pursue parenthood or work. The social clock telling you how to live your life. You are arriving close to your 80 years,” I imply that you have to decide how to achieve fulfillment before your 80 years are up, similar to the way Boully uses statistics to back up her theory of miracles.
Another classic Boully writing tactic is examining different perspectives. In her essay On the Care & Repair of Books, Boully explains the lost poetry she notices when people don’t take the time to fully read and appreciate old works. Boully uses the vocabulary, “twice-dead poet,” to describe the under-appreciated poets in the passage, “The scholars made notes to reread the works of the twice-dead poet, but of course, never came around to actually doing so. No one would ever understand the appearance of all the animals at the end of the famous poem or why the field butterflies behaved as they did, yet everyone would all say that they understood, that they understood completely and with textual references and secondary sources even.” (40) This shows contrasting perspectives. Boully explains how everyone claims that they understand the writing, which is the scholars perspective, when she believes that they really don’t, which is her perspective. In my writing, I mimic this tactic in the section, “some live simple. Just them, a few flowers, maybe a mut. A simple house, simple connections, and a boring job. So boring. The hours are drawn out as the social clock ticks away.” Here I explore one person’s lifestyle and compare it to what I have been referring to in the entire essay as the other perspective of continuing to reach for fulfilment.
In both The Book of Beginnings and Endings and The Feeling of Fulfilment flower metaphors, multiple topics, and contrasting viewpoints are used. This is Boully’s way of combining concepts with abstract thinking, and something I used to combine Psychology with fulfilment in my own writing.