12.25 x 14.25"; 27 leaves (some folded). Mixed media: various papers, types, and printing methods. Scott Freutel / Whitney Lowe, introduction: "To begin with each student selected an object — something one usually hardly even notices, let alone focuses one's attention upon. "We did exercises in free association, and we read from books in which perceptual shifts are important — notably Nicholson Baker's finely observant (and very funny) novel The Mezzanine.... "We classified the objects taxonomically. What were some encompassing categories? Where in the world is the object located? "We listened to music with an ear towards appreciating simplicity within complexity ... and complexity with simplicity....We connected our auditory perceptions with all our objects. "Students were asked to bring in some favorite junk food and compare it with their object: How was what they were eating like their object? In what way unbridgeably unalike? Munch, think, jot. Then each student was asked to draw his or her object as if — perhaps through some puzzling corporate slip — it had come (mis)packaged in that junk-food wrapper..... '"Students were asked to write sonnets to their objects, and later, haiku. "We remade ourselves as cultural anthropologists: One assignment was to imagine a preliterate community in which the object was somehow venerated, worshipped, paid homage to. By virtue of what perceived qualities was that homage due? ... "Students were asked to devise and then most carefully render a logo of their object: abstract, symbolic, readable, elegant." The result of these labors is Homage to Object which was produced by the Senior Project Class, Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design, Department of Communication Design & Illustration. Each student contributed a page he or she designed. Colophon: "Each page reports or distills its author/designer's thoroughgoing explorations of a common object." |
