Thesis website

More thesis work can be seen at this website: http://digital.mica.edu/courses/mfagd/2008/bentley/index.html

Thesis: book 5

My own collection consists of endless photos of my family at the dinner table. Almost every picture in my family’s albums includes us sitting around a table. Year after year, we are in the same positions, in the same house, often with the same people, usually celebrating some kind of holiday. I find this repetition and predictiability comforting, knowing that, although a photograph cannot always accurately portray our lives, we still continue to take them. I scanned over 200 photos from my collection and joined them together in one long line that turned into a 60-page book. The colored dots above each head refer to a key in the introduction paragraph and indicate people’s relationships to me. This book measures 6.5″ x 10.5″ and is 60 pages.

Thesis: book 4

John Carr has had his 1948 Chevy truck for over 40 years, since he bought it from his high school’s bus driver when he was 15 year’s old. His relationship with this truck has lasted longer than his relationship with most people. I asked him to document the milestones in his life that involved his truck and created an accordian book that intertwines those timelines. The red, green and yellow wires that flow through the book represent the ties he has and the connection he feels towards this beloved vehicle. This book measures 8″ x 10″ and is 12 pages.

Thesis: book 3

Many of us moved to Baltimore specifically to go to school and went through the decision-making process of what to leave and what to bring along. I wanted to profile a graduate student who did just that. Joe Galbreath left some of his favorite records home, but made room for 5 mannequin heads, an Indian bust, a plastic skin diagram, and a mounted deer head. Each of these objects locates a specific room in his apartment. The deer head faces the entrance door, the skin diagram hangs in the bathroom, the Indian bust sits in the kitchen. Various mannequin heads decorate the shelves and bedroom. Through 4 moves and different living situations, these objects always go in those specific places. Each object has a history and a meaning for where it’s located.

The left side of every spread shows a diagram of each of Joe’s apartments. Colored dots and lines indicate where each object went and builds with objects as the book progresses. The final spread shows a large-scale version, including all the objects and their locations. This book measures 6.5″ x 8.25″ and is 24 pages.

Thesis: book 2

I interviewed my brother, Andy, for this book. He has saved his collection of matchbox cars since he was 7 years old. At that age, he used to set up his cars into football teams and play them against each other. A play was ramming one car into the other, and whichever car didn’t tip over, won the ball. These incredibly beat up, wrecked cars were repeatedly taped together and used over and over. I photographed his car collection on a cement floor and illustrated our conversation throughout the book using graphic language from football play drawings. Each page is printed on both sides of heavy watercolor paper and bound with screwposts. The book measures 8.5″ x 13.25″ and is 22 pages.

Thesis: book 1

My thesis explores the attachments we make to ordinary objects; why they are kept, how they provide comfort, and how we use them to recreate a sense of home in new environments. I am interested in the kinds of relationships we form to our particular things and the meanings we assign to them. I am intrigued by the stories that exist behind these objects and what they tell us about ourselves and the things we value. I created a series of handmade books that illustrated 5 people’s collections. I let the narrative, the objects, and the personality of my subject shape the structure of each book to best display their particular set of things and tell their specific story. Each book is designed to encompass the individual’s personality, voice, and experience.

This book represents my grandmother Pauline’s ties to her old life and past friends. As she lives far away from her hometown and can no longer easily travel, she keeps connected to home and family through her phone conversations. I created an address book that maps the distances relatives and friends live away from Pauline. Each page represents 50 miles. Blank pages in between people add to the feeling of distance. This is a perfect bound accordian book, measures 5″ x 9″ and is 44 pages.

Stephen Farrell Workshop 2

2nd night’s homework involved diagramming a narrative map of your fable and then using it to help graft your final piece. I made up a “This Big” fishing story that closely follows the architectural map of the Little Red Hen story. The piece above that is the final, where I tried to define some basic fishing terminology and use the illustrations to tell the story of my fable. I love the gesture of casting in fly fishing and I used the line work in that one to mimic the gesture. I wanted each word to flow easily into the next. It’s very abstract and different from how I’m used to thinking about my work. That’s good, even if the work itself is a little confusing.

Stephen Farrell Workshop

Another visiting artist came last weekend for a 3-day workshop in our studio. Stephen Farrell has created a way of working he calls graft, or grafting. By taking two very different subjects and combining them (or grafting one onto another), you can get some really interesting results. We each chose a fable and a broad knowledge domain, such as dentistry, bowling, botany. My group chose fishing. We were to take the broad fishing domain and tell the story of our fable using only language from the fishing domain. Sounds very confusing, but we had a whole weekend of exercises leading up to the final. It was an intense weekend, but I really enjoyed experiencing another totally different process.

The work above is from our exercises. We exchanged fables and I got The Little Red Hen. Our first exercise was to graphically illustrate the combination of our domain and a sentence from our fable. I used a diagram of the sound waves from a fish locator and attempted to illustrate some of the repetitive nature of the dialogue in the fable, showing the animals who consistently say “Not I” and the one hen who says “I will”. The second image is of the hen scratchings from the beginning of the fable and the river current markings on maps that help fisherman know where to fish.

Laurie Rosenwald Workshop

Laurie Rosenwald spent a weekend in our grad studio and gave a workshop called “Making Mistakes on Purpose.” The idea was to think less, get away from the computer, let go a little, and perhaps create something surprising and new. The first day, we each had a large pad of paper and some messy mark making tools like paint, crayons, markers, ink, etc. She shouted a word, such as skeleton, and we drew it in seconds. She shouted another word, and we drew that. We did this for hours. The next day, we scanned our images into flickr and drew from that image bank to make very fast design work. She said design a postcard and we grabbed someone’s random image, added some type and tada, postcard! This was a really fun way of exploring another process of working. The last thing we did was make a book in 8 minutes. Mine is about a skeleton who plays the drums, tried being a hippie once, and likes girls who dance to his beats.

Collage

This is from an exercise we did in letterpress class as a way to free us up a bit. We each took part of the city paper from Austin, TX and one from Baltimore and combined them into a postcard-sized collage. The intent was to print all of ours into a small book, but we never got around to it before the semester ended. I hope to print them this spring so we can all have copies of each of ours.