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~{My final University project in an Assemblage medium} Starting in the first days of March 2022, I have been slowly adapting to my new hometown - Yerevan, Armenia. This work is my outtake materialised through an assemblage made with components, each having a narrative and a site-specific context to the city. Most of the context are either new or just valuable experiences I had during the project’s development.The list of components goes (starting from upper left) like this:
1. - Photo cutouts of upper city parts - segments from the photos I was making before knowing how exactly the project will turn out, were taken in the more elevated parts of the town so are placed high too. The brightest cutout is of a pretentious furniture store. With it I also included curvy buildings which were there together with the statue of the key to Yerevan, a very pretty sculpture stationed in the shopping epicentre of the whole town.
2. - Carpet texture 1 (flat) - famous Armenian carpets are valued all over the world and I could not not include one if I was making a representation of my new Armenian begging. Actually bought it dirt cheap, originally just a flimsy wallet with a carpet print going for just 1.2 usd. I cut out the two printed sides of it getting myself the patterns.
3. - 3 cutout vases - near the capital’s Opera house, there was this little patch of grass with pretty vases standing there. It was not an exhibition or an event of any sort, just vases being there, decorating the area. I included em cause I liked em, that is all the reason I needed hehe.
4. - Cutout from the drawing 1 - The very first thing I started doing while developing the work. Still with no idea what future mediums to use, I went with the one I knew the most - drawing. It is also the most conceptually interesting part of the work, I think, as even the way I was drawing had a meaning behind it. I used a very long stick with a pencil tied to the end of it and drew with it to symbolise me still being just a visitor there, someone distant drawing from a distance. The original idea of the drawings was to have 5 of them and shorten the stick with each passing drawing as to show me getting closer to this place and, with the lines getting less and less wonky, more comfortable there. This first drawing is the one of St. Grigor’s church, the most monumental thing near my new house, smth which would capture the attention of any visitor. Undetailed and very big this is the perfect object to visualize how I viewed the new place once I settled down. Also churches, being heavily filled with cultural and historical meaning, can be a symbol of me finding at least some peace and a safe place to stay. The included cut out part here is the left tower of the church.
5. - Photo cutout of a dirty colorful billboard - one of my main skills developed while learning in the University was making unappealing into aesthetically pleasing and this dirty but beautiful billboard is one example of that. Together with including things unique to Yerevan, I also needed stuff purely connected to me.
6. - Cutout from the drawing 2 - second drawing was supposed to be the view on Yerevan from the largest structure in the town - Cascade, a huge pyramid structure in the middle of the city. The zikkurat also has a eternal little art gallery near the start of the climb - a good indicator for me that, as an artist, I can vibe with it just like i vibes with the church from the first drawing. Sadly, it turns out it is prohibited to draw on upper levels of the structure meaning that I had no view to draw. Add to it that I needed to be dodging rain while drawing and, do not forget, still using a meter long stick, this drawing was especially unforgiving (particularly, if you also count in me climbing the whole Cascade before starting to work). Conceptually, the plan was to show me now seeing this new place as a town, no knowledge of the houses, no particular details I could point out about them - just a barebones view on the city. With this idea ruined, I was forced to draw a particular fountain on one of the levels of Cascade. In the end I included into the drawing just one pillar near the fountain as a cutout. Drawing a detail of a structure rather than a whole thing made the conceptual content of the second drawing more akin to what I would be doing in the third one...
7. - Small beads - parts of the neckless the cross I bought was on. Wanted to include smth similar to pomegranates (Armenia’s national fruit) but did not want to just add a fruit to it, would have been too cliche. Instead I used the beads like pomegranate seeds. The seeds outside of the fruit culturally portray fertility and monetary prosperity so portraying the seeds instead of a whole fruit was a more meaningful idea imo. The beads also form lines tying parts of the work together.
8. - Cutout from the drawing 3 - ...third and, surprisingly for me, the last in the series was one of the big red door of the city’s opera. I found that huge door at the back of the opera house, all alone but oh so outstanding visually, I instantly caught a liking to it. Here is where the conceptual parts of the second and third drawings intercept as both are about now seeing things in detail and pointing out the stuff you like the most about them, looking at things more deeply. The big red door was a perfect such detail to portray. Nothing more to say about the drawings tho, during one of the mandatory tutor talks about the project development, my sensei (lol) encouraged many things with one of them being stopping focusing on one medium and finally start doing smth else too. That was the moment I dropped the “5 drawings” idea and went straight to my second most comfortable medium of Fine Art to work with - photography. The part of the door included in the final thing is one of it’s ornamented segments.
9. - A little additional cutout of upper city parts - purely for decoration, a part of one of particularly pretty door handles of some store was cut out and used here.
10. - Layered and cut chess board - believe me or not but chess is not just a game here, not just a professional sport, IT IS A MANDATORY SCHOOL SUBJECT. Who knew that chess is such an important for Armenians thing. With it having that much of a presence throughout the country I decided to make it into one of primary backgrounds in the work, just like this game is one of Armenia’s backgrounds too sort of say. Funny story: it was incredibly hard to find a good board to cut up and use, you either could find smth for preschoolers with wrong colors and very cheaply looking board print or smth made from hard wood, hand made and decorated, for at least 600 bucks lmao. I settled with a lucky found fabrically made one which was thin enough to cut and ok-ish looking enough for me to work with.
11. - Rope residue 1 - having severe money problems (still kinda do but thankfully not that much), nothing was going to trash without a use. This old rope I found on my way home from one of the drawing trips was one of the materials perfect to portray my uncommon but needed resourcefulness. Everything can be put to a good use.
12. - Combined photo cutouts of a mannequin and two fences - both are parts of quite nice but busy with unneeded here visual info photos I took. In the end, I cut elements from both and combined them to produce a new aesthetic.
13. - Rope residue 2 - same thing as with the first one.
14. - First big leather chunk - while searching for materials I realised just how much leather was all around me, literally every tourist store had smth made out of it. I knew that with it being so prolific here, I needed to include it too. At the Vernisazh, a legal black market I visited a few times while working on the project, I found and befriended a native artist who specialises in leather, to the point of making collages out of it. After a few chats we agreed on him making a simple leather collage under my control so I could then use it in my work.
15. - Carpet texture 2 (roll) - originally, the famous Armenian carpet patterns came from Turkey, currently Armenia’s geopolitical rival. Many Armenians share this view that Turkish-originated things should not be associated with Armenia but I disagree and so the pattern is in full view prior in the first instance of it, and in its “censored”, rolled up form here to include both points of view. If you try to live by that second view, the majority of iconic Armenian things will be pulled away contorting it’s cultural face and I find it quite foolish to treat everything coming from a rival country as a pure negative.
16. - The biggest structure photo cutout - near the church was standing this... I do not know... set of generators or something. Idk why but I got the same monumental feeling out of it as I did with the church and it also was very close to it so I decided to make it a part of the work in the end. Provides a good compositional value with also giving tamer color to the upper parts of the final outcome.
17. - Cross with an infinity symbol inside - outside of obvious religious weight, there is also a symbol inside of the cross. It is one of the representations of the Sun and it was my goal from the very start to include this spiral into the work. Fun fact but the same symbol is also placed in the cutout of the town’s big key. Just below the obscured the other things part of it.
18. - A bunch of big beads - beads do portray lots of kids in the fertility part of the pomegranate symbolism (this sentence makes no fucking sense if you haven’t read what I wrote prior lmao) but who said that they cannot also portray lots of similar people, one people, people of Armenia. Them also stationed on top of the segment of the work made exclusively out of rock and volcanic glass (literally Armenian’s soil) make it fit really well in my opinion - Armenians standing on the very top of the rocky land, high as mountains and firm as ancient temple pillars. Also the darker shade of the beads can be tied to Armenians having a usually darker shade of skin, similar to some native Indians in tone...
19. - Obsidian slab - you can literally dig into cement and find large pools of obsidian anywhere here, of course I would use it in the work. Also obsidian is very pretty, I wanna find a really big piece myself and keep it near my drawing desk. This one has a somewhat funny story behind it. I bought it at Vernisazh too and when I asked why it had a corner part of it broken, the owner told me that it was “abstract”. Then I flipped the slab around and asked why it also had a huge hit mark of the same size and complexity as that one “abstract” bit on the side no person is supposed to see. That is how I bargained the price down 2k drams lmao (dram is the currency here).
20. - Big bright beads - ...together with darker skinned folk, there are tons of lighter brown and white Armenians. Brighter beads represent the lighter skinned people of Armenia and the placement in the work is just to show how easily visible they are in Yerevan’s darker population haha (placed em on dark spots on purpose). Actually very happy to see that despite this country being quite ultra traditionalist, no matter your skin color, there is not much adversity.
21. - Sponge stone (with a few of the smaller beads in it) - and for the rock representation I went with this sponge stone, no particular reason as to why it is this type of stone rather than for it’s pretty texture and the story behind how it was implemented into the work in the end. Turns out it is incredibly hard to get such a stone out of glued into it parts, oh yeah right, it was not just a stone when I bought it. It had a whole large wooden handle prior and I needed to get rid of it... ..by ehh.. ...using a knife. Of course the brittle sponge stone was demolished by the time I peeled it off the hot glued handle. Tho, not losing hope and being too lazy to find a new stone, I decided to combine it back like a puzzle glueing the pieces into shape. A new problem arose, some pieces crumbled too hard and had deep cracks and chunks of the stone outright dusted or missing. Having nothing better to do I decided to fill the cracks with smaller leftover beads and damn it looked good. Cracks still visible, it seemed as those tiny beads plundered the stone cracking it under their might. That is when I realised what I just did. The beads represent the people, right? Well, the stone surface they are on can represent Armenia as a whole and the beads filling up the cracks - people of Armenia holding it in one piece. I know that this is grasping at straws but wow, there is A LOT of accidental meaning in how this element of the work turned out. The stone crumbling after separating from its stable wooden handle and losing it, loosing a big part of itself, can symbolise the ancient Great Armenia being destabilised due to countless wars and losing most of its land in the process. The stone being put back together with the beads covering the cracks shows the determination of Armenia and its people to survive and rebuild what they still have. The fact that the beads are small can represent the children of Armenia, it’s new generation destined to push the country’s culture further while keeping it united despite the deep cracks. The bits of stone which were dusted away represent what is lost after any country goes through what Armenia suffered - important but lost forever, erased from history knowledge and people, events and dreams. Like, damn, ya gotta love it when a project’s development envelops you to the point of having epiphanies about a country’s great and turbulent history and about the might of its people just cause some rock broke. Need I say more why I decided to make this segment of the work to be one of the most pronounced?
22. - Second big leather chunk - the collage my new leather artist buddy made was cut into two just for compositional purposes, it looked cool this way, that is all. Oh but the way it was cut is a whole another story. I won’t force some deep meaning about the might of people or persevering in the face of adversity here but just know that I spend 3 hours cutting this layered leather with simple scissors. My hands were HURTING by the end but it was the right way of doing it. During the history of me learning in my, now past, University, I was taught many times that sometimes having trouble during working on a project is a benefit rather than a problem, it makes you stronger and more durable as an artist. That is why I went through with it and cut the whole thing straight through. Oh and yes, I am indeed stronger now, I now can cut tough fabric with simple scissors with... a tad bit less trouble. Very pog.
23. - Photo cutouts of lower city parts - and here we go, the last segment. Nothing too interesting here but just some representation of areas of the town which are not too promenade but do represent its general atmosphere - a very pretty painted over in copious layers of gravity barrier for cars, large pipes poking everywhere in the streets and a shelf with brightly colored but very cold and almost medically clean buckets for sale. All three stick out the work’s format cause I like it.The work was exhibited in the streets of the city settled on a stone wall, it suited the work the best. After it was photoshot and stayed there for long enough I donated it as decoration for an art cafe literally called an Art caffe. A very chill and cozy apartment made cafe where they surf delicious burgers and rose pallet tea(((((not an add))))).
There is.. like.. A FUCKING LOT of individual content archived before it was cut, combined or changed somehow to use in the work. If this post gets traction and people would be interested enough, I will make all of the additional content, also including 2 other photos of the final outcome, public here.
Thank you for listening to my ted-talk :v~
Category Artwork (Traditional) / Scenery
Species Unspecified / Any
Size 1280 x 900px
File Size 702.8 kB
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