Casey Taira | dental & art

Part of the joy of creating, I have found, is that I never know what the final product will look like. I take an idea, and work on it, and what emerges at the end is a culmination of seemingly unconnected building blocks. It’s a collage of ideas that somehow creates a coherent whole. This is the pattern I’ve observed in both last year’s honors thesis as well as this semester’s “The Commute”. Much like how I couldn’t have predicted the form my doors would take last year and how their structure would impact the viewer’s interactivity with the work, the same can be seen in this new piece. The expansive length of the work resembles a road, and the swooping nature and collection of 13 haikus on the underside make the viewer bend and crawl beneath the work to view it in its entirety. The haikus represent the weeks I drove to and from school, each its own story.

I’ve gained a stronger understanding of the necessity of flexibility and spontaneity balanced with intention. I began this piece with the intent to connect human form with abstraction, but when I hit a roadblock, flexibility led me to a new interpretation of human form, connecting myself to my work as the figure creating these whole-form markings. I was examining how the body communicates, finding a bridge between music, dance, and mark-making. My spontaneity allowed me to tap into my subconscious reactions to the music, but my intention with my mediums, time-frame, and space set healthy limitations which provided me direction in creating variation within the work.

However, despite the success in conveying music and dance visually, it felt like there was a disconnect between my medium and the form it would take. I wanted the viewers to be surrounded by the work, enclosed to experience music visually, however it was not physically feasible to carry this out considering the large paper medium. I believe I was influenced by my work last year, in which I created an enclosed space for viewers to be immersed in my work. I had limited my perception of immersion to be literally “within”.

But, the more I worked on the piece, adding a layer of color, the work began to take a new form. Stepping back, I…