Title

Meditation on a Cat Picture and a Flamingo Statue

Document Type

Article

Date

2016

Submission Date

March 2019

Abstract

I am a very visual person. As a student studying cinema, I’m interested in creating stories that can be woven together into a film. Even when something isn’t “supposed to” contain elements of narrative and fiction as defined by its medium, I do my very best to put them in there anyway. I want to make my own unique stories, in pictures and in words. Optimally, they end up being amusing.

When making anything, I tend to hack a jagged path through the whole mess as fast as possible, and have something technically defined as a finished product as soon as I can. Then the real work can begin. I read or watch what I’ve put together more times than I can count, making changes, large or small, each time. When a piece is near done, it’s a family member I am dying to distance myself from. I have to take long breaks after making any work before I can survey it without it nagging me to consider switching the order of two shots, or to say “stupid” instead of “lacking of brains”. Whatever the work is, it usually ends up embodying my emotional state during the project, and contains themes and ideas that have recently been rolling around my head.

My meditation on a flamingo statue is the most fun I have ever had writing something described as nonfiction. I researched as I wrote, and the research helped me gain momentum and interests in the themes I attempted to cover of real versus fake and a search for meaning and purpose. I have been a lifetime vegetarian, and this guided some of the pieces ideas as well as my research on salmon, unexpectedly teaching me that many of the salmon found at the supermarket could be another fish entirely, something interesting to learn and fun to play with thematically. The sculpture of melting flamingos I chose to marinate my thoughts over haunted me with a dark feeling of decay, which I attempted to portray throughout the piece. My goal in writing it was to build an uneasy adventure through imagination to bring my thoughts and feelings into a physical space and over a narrative arc instead of leaving them as just words on a page.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.70018/GYKH-N857

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