Reflections

Introduction

Welcome to Reflections! This was our first unit in senior year, and was meant to allow us to reflect on ourselves and our experiences, with the central question being “Who am I?” This wasn’t always an easy question to answer, but every classes different projects made it a fun and engaging experience. From college essay writing in English to mandala making in Digital Media and a personal video project in Film, each project had its own challenges and was satisfying to work on. Come check it out!

But before we dive in, to start off, here’s a list of essence objects I created when preparing to write about myself. I think these represent many different parts of myself.

Essence Objects
A framed photo of me and my mom
Another photo and me and my dad
A plain black notebook with a black mechanical pencil
A monster of the week character sheet
4 hand drawn birthday/holiday cards from my best friend
A tower of 3 hats glued together (a viking hat, a pirate hat, and a crown)
Multiple pads of sticky notes in a variety of colors
A delicate Japanese black lace fan bought at Obon with my friend
A heart shaped rainbow pride pin
A pair of tweezers
A photo of my family at Christmas time in matching PJs
A red scrunchie
A stanford basketball shirt
The entire Harry Potter series, hardback without the covers and worn from being read aloud
A shaving razor
A baking mat
An elephant pillow pet
A full prompt book from an old show
The card game Anomia
A comforter
A necklace with a sun charm

Personal Museum Curation

At Freestyle, we have a yearly field trip to the MOMA in San Francisco. We’re set free into the museum and the streets of San Francisco to learn and explore for an afternoon. Each year, we have a project relating the art in the museum. This year it was to create a person curation of art that we felt answered the question “Who am I?” as well as pieces that did not answer that question. Here is my finished curation:

My Personal Museum: Hue: A Modern Art Collection

My first piece is Spectrum I by Ellsworth Kelly, a piece from 1953, oil on canvas.

I included this piece because it represents many important pieces of me, being an overarching descriptor of many things with one simple word: colorful. I love beautiful, bright, and contrasting things. I like the creativity in things, the beauty, in short, the color. I like to think of myself as a colorful person, someone bright and playful and kind. I also like this because rainbows are a symbol for the queer community, of which I am a part, so I feel that it also represents my community to some degree, even if it isn’t the exact color scheme in that exact order. It reflects my values of community, creativity, joyfulness, and color.

My second piece is Torus Wheel Settlement by Rick Guidice from 1976, paint on board.

I think this piece is beautiful. Space has always been a beautiful and interesting thing to me, so the topic itself immediately represents my love of the way a clear night sky looks. However, this piece is also the most detailed of the three I chose. It has shadows and light, actual physical objects, and depicts a real scene of something rather than just colors or an idea. This represents my love of details, creativity, design, planning, and beauty. The details in the shuttle docking, and the reflecting. The creativity and design of the spaceship itself. The planning required to create this piece, likely coming from a sketch. And the beauty of the planet Earth leisurely floating in the peaceful starry night.

My final piece is Spiegel, blutrot (Mirror, Blood Red) by Gerhard Richter from 1991, pigment on glass.

This is an interesting piece to choose. It is not colorful, or detailed, and many wouldn’t call it beautiful. But my choosing of this piece is not about how it looks on its own. You can see it in the picture, me and friends posing and messing around, art being reflected back at us in a new red hue. Despite the somber use of blood red in the title, this represents fun, interactivity, friendship, and reflection. This piece is not one that you just look at, it looks right back at you. It’s fun to mess around in, and interactivity is something I really value in things like museums or schools. This piece reminds me of my friends posing in it, as well as reminding me to reflect on myself.

My Least Favorite Pieces

The first piece chosen for the anti-museum is Michael Stein by Henri Matisse in 1916, Oil on Canvas 

This piece is nice, but simply doesn’t have anything that resonates with me. It isn’t colorful, nor detailed. It’s a portrait, so it isn’t particularly inventive or creative. It also doesn’t represent me. It’s a man who I don’t know, so it doesn’t have anything I really resonate with. I’d rather keep it out of my collection

The second piece to be brutally rejected is Collection by Robert Rauschenberg from 1954, oil, paper, fabric, wood, and metal on canvas.

My values previously have been colorful. However, they have also been beautiful, creative, detailed, and personal. This piece has many colors, but they class messily and seem too disorganized and yucky. I like organized chaos, the kind where things are still contained and have their place. This would look crazy next to my other pieces. The colors are also desaturated, and brown is the main color, making it seem darker and less fun. I’m just not a fan.

How has your own work as an artist and your own criticism of your artwork influenced your choices about which pieces made your Personal Museum and which pieces didn’t make the cut?

My own work has always been me striving for individuality, creativity, and good craft. I also want my work to be something I’m proud of, something that has meaning to me. The pieces I chose were ones that, if I were to make them, I would be proud. Even simple ones like the lines of color are uniform and look beautiful, and are something I would want to make myself. Things I don’t like about my work are often that it isn’t cleaned up, it hasn’t been the best it could be. This is reflected in the pictures I chose not to include, as those I felt were messy and could have been improved. In the future, I also want my pieces to reflect me more often, stories I’m very passionate about telling. This is why I chose pieces that didn’t just look nice, but that I felt really resonated with a part of myself I’d like to display in future works.

Mandala

In Digital Media, we tackled “Who am I?” by creating circular, repetitive art pieces called mandalas. We learned how to create templates for the mandalas in Illustrator and then got to draw whatever we wanted, before getting that laser engraved into a material of our choice. I had mine engraved into wood. To be honest, I wasn’t the biggest fan of the mandala I had engraved. I hadn’t really figured out what I wanted from my mandala, and was just trying to get something turned in. We had a greater amount of time for our colored mandala, so that one turned out a lot more favorable in my opinion. Here are the finished mandalas.

Black and White Mandala
Laser Engraved Mandala
Full Colored Mandala
Close up on Colored Mandala
Close up on Colored Mandala
A video of my Mandala being built
My reflection on the Mandala process

Perspective Piece Video

I had a lot of fun with the Digital Media perspective piece. We could write it about whatever we wanted, so I chose to write about my frustrations with poor representation of the LGBT community in media. Honestly, the video could have been at least ten minutes long, as there are a million other points I didn’t include, such as bit role representation that can be cut for international release, after-the-fact representation, and more in-depth research on the issue rather than my surface level knowledge. However, I’m very happy with the final result. I think it gets my point across, and has some comedy beats and good visuals, making it enjoyable to watch as well.

My Perspective Piece Video
My After Effects workspace

Personal Essay

In English, our biggest challenge was to create a personal essay for colleges. I’ll be honest, I hated the essay I created in English, and much preferred the one I wrote in my spare time. I really enjoyed all the activities that we did along with the personal essay though, such as the essence object list seen in the introduction. Below is my completed English essay.

SydneyE-Personal Essay

I’ve always really enjoyed the twist ending. Who was the true villain? Who was the creative genius behind all this? The little details are something I love to obsess over and analyze, the smallest hints hidden in the placement of a prop or the delivery of a line pointing to the truth. I’ve always been in love with details and stories, from the second I stepped into a theater.

When I was younger, I preferred to be on the stage, ignorant of everything behind the scenes. However, despite my lack of technical knowledge, summer theater camp taught me crucial skills that would eventually lead me down a different path in high school. Responsibility, accountability, trust, and discipline. If I missed a line, missed an entrance, the whole show could be ruined! I had to set my own deadlines for memorization of blocking and lines, and trust that everyone else would do the same. I also found out that I truly loved stories and performing them. However, my persistent love of details and design never let go, and in high school I saw a new road begin to form.

In sophomore year, rather than be on the stage, I took a chance and decided I wanted to run the show instead. My detail obsession helped in unexpected ways, filling plot holes. I remember during our first show my reading of the script had been so thorough I was able to point out a mistake the writer had made, and worked with my director on how to use blocking to fix it, having the actress storm off stage to safely be revealed as the killer later. And though I had successes like that as a sophomore, it was scary having authority over people two years older than me, and frustrating to earn their respect. But despite the struggles I faced in year one, I loved creating the shows, and Junior year handed me the opportunity to do more with my ideas.

At 16 years old, early lessons and responsibility and discipline as well as my love for details crashed together into something beautifully creative and my own. When I got the script for our winter drama, I knew exactly what I wanted everything to be. And my director, who I had known for the past two years, gifted me her trust to create something something great. The lights should be cooler stage left, warmer stage right, use the cyc for silhouettes, and this lighting absolutely must be a center spot. And seeing everything come together, seeing my ideas about how the blocking should reflect the script, about how the lighting should be intense and break the fourth wall, I don’t know if there are any other words to describe it than magical. No matter how many sunrises, rainbows, or beaches I see, I still think nothing is as beautiful as a perfect lighting cue.

Now that I’ve had a taste of creation, I’ve realized that rather than reading the twist endings and pouring over my favorite scripts, I want to make them myself. My combination of traits taught to me over the years of theater and my nit-picking attitude toward details is sending me racing down the path of life to a creator, behind the curtains and the camera. So I guess in my own little twist ending, I am no longer the actor on stage, but the creative genius behind it all. But don’t worry, I’m not the secret villain. Or am I?

Memoir Essay

English Honors students also had to craft a second essay analyzing a memoir of their choice. I chose the book Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen. This book cataloged the experiences of the author in a mental hospital. Here is a link to the essay.

Lyrical Essay

In English, we created a lyrical essay after interviewing someone to understand their story. This essay was written in second person to reflect the book we were reading at the time, citizen. I chose a friend who is half-Japanese, and wrote about her experiences from a child to now, and the challenges she’s faced. Here is a link to the completed essay.

Film Project

In Film, we created a piece about ourselves. This took a lot of rewrites from me to get everything sounding the way I wanted, and was difficult to create in such a short period of time, as I was also in volleyball season at the time, taking away from filming. In the end, I was very happy with my piece. I think it’s a good reflection of who I am as a person and how I look at the world.

My finished reflections video
My Premier workspace

I really valued this project for what it taught me. I got a better understanding of who I was, I learned how to film and edit quickly and efficiently while still making a quality product, and I learned how to use what footage I had to the greatest effect. I think this will be very helpful as we go into creating our senior narrative.