Hi, and welcome back to my blog. Today we. Will be talking about a project I did on conceptual art and the Manhattan project. We were tasked with creating an idea that we could express through art. This idea was based on what we learned about the Manhattan project, nuclear power and Hiroshima. All in order to answers this projects driving question:

Add driving question here

Our final product was a room filled with conceptual art that was similar in theme. My room looked at society in different ways. I was personally really proud of what we have accomplished this project. My group (Holly, Asha, Izzy, Julia, Owen, and Ciara) worked well together and were very good at building on each other’s ideas. I really liked Holly’s name for our room “a reflection on society” because we embraced that by putting mirrors up around the room. As a personal touch I also added questions around the mirrors to help provoke thought from the audience.

I felt that I met my goal of getting people to think. Everyone who stopped by my station seemed to enjoy that it was interactive and I got a routine going as well. As people asked more questions I started adding things to my initial speech and that helped to deeper my own knowledge. 

Add photos 

Something I enjoyed for my own art piece was the depth that people added to it. As people were commenting on my piece I was able to add to it and by the end of the night it seemed a lot more complete then it was at the beginning. This reinforced for me the idea of conceptual art and how the viewer is the one to complete the piece. The fact that mine was interactive helped to show how many people actually came to my piece and participated in both the silent discussion and the audible one. 

Do I like conceptual art now?

Definitely not. This exhibition, while i did enjoy it, did not help my love for conceptual art. I understand the idea behind it however it doesn’t feel genuine to me. When we first started this project we were asked the question; what is art? To which I responded “ art is anything that makes the viewer or artists feel”. After this project finished I needed to revisit that statement. Conceptual art makes me think that the effort behind the art piece and the intent are just as important. Sometimes in conceptual art the meaning is lost in the piece and I can’t enjoy it.

Welcome back to my blog! Today we are going to talk about a project I did all about music! Personally music for me is an escape from reality and an opportunity to get lost in my head for a while. So, as you can imagine I really liked this project. The final product was to make the “playlist of my life” where I put together a playlist of 5 songs that represented different aspects of my life. 

We would then take these songs and analysis them to talk about how and why they are apart of our playlist. All in order to answer our driving question:

---

How might we use music to represent ourselves and text?

---

Before we could make our playlist we needed some practice with analyzing using literary devices. What are literary devices you might ask? Well they are techniques used in literature to elevate a piece of work. These are the ones that we used:

One of the activities that we did that I personally enjoyed was poem analysis. We went around to different poems and answered questions about them in order to understand the authors intentions better. I felt like I was able to build a lot of my skills especially with analysis and questioning things that already exist. I colour coated my text to make it easy to see and worked well with my group following the read 3 times rule. The 3 time rule is where you first read something aloud, again in your head and a 3rd time aloud again.

---

MARINA and the diamonds, Oh No! Was probably the hardest analysis I had to write. Rather than having to search for meanings I found it difficult to narrow down my thoughts because there were so many things I could have focussed on. Being able to clearly express what I wanted to say was a struggle and I found myself repeating words throughout all of the analysis’s.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, SMAP’s Only Flower was the easiest analysis to write. I think the main reason for this is because I had a deeper connection to this song and was able to draw on my culture in order to elevate both the analysis and presentation of this piece. I taught people how to make origami flowers as a representation of my culture and in the song. You can see the original video below.

I feel like my analysis got better the more I did them and each one was stronger than the last because I was able to tell a story about my childhood, parents, and morals.

 

Overall I am proud of how I did considering we have 3 weeks for this project. If I were to do this project again I think that I would still choose the same 5 songs that I did but I would talk more about how the songs have influenced who I am as a person. I was able to engage my audience by giving them something to do however I felt that the time limit made it hard for them to pay attention to both the instructions and the analysis. If I were to do this again I would either sent them the instructions to making the flower or have made flowers that I could give out. Something I liked that other people did was have the lyrics out for people to look at. I think that helped me follow along and I could have done that as well. 

Finally here are some honorary mentions that didn’t make it into my playlist: 

And here are some songs from my classmates and I: