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Valaria Tatera documents cultural, ancestral, and personal trauma in her work Kill the Indian Save the Man: Legacy of Residential Schools  (2021) .  She explores the impact of colonialism on indigenous peoples in textile, specifically the "cultural genocide" (timestamp 1:06 of the interview) of boarding schools. She wants to represent statistics of the lives ended and otherwise affected by the schools in an impactful and personal way. In her work, the commodity of ribbon stands in for commodified native bodies, and those people that white Americans' history has tried to forget. A documentary on Tatera's subject, particularly for the purposes of representing statistics as real people, could be a very effective way to communicate her meaning. But she is referencing the history of trade between indigenous communities and white settlers via her use of textiles, which is an economic and cultural impact of colonialism.  Perhaps she doesn't want to digitize her work beca...

Opus One was a learning experience, to say the least. I was stuck on this one for a long time. Figures I would try to go as traditional-art as possible on this, my first ever artistic venture in a video medium, but I did try to come up with a legitimate concept that was at least tangentially related to the prompt.  The line from our textbook that informed my process the most was "our official culture is striving to force the new media to do the work of the old." (McLuhan 94) This idea of "misusing" the tools we've invented is the basics of what I tried to convey. In my brainstorming stage, I also came across a quote from a reading in one of my other classes (Queer and Feminist Pop Music) which I immediately knew I wanted to use, because to me it echoes McLuhan's point exquisitely. But then I got stuck for quite some time, until I turned to the idea of speedpaints - videos of art in the process of being made. I like to watch them because they help me learn an...

I have limited practice writing personal mission statements. I also hate talking about the future. I don't mean talking about the future like this: "Hey mom, wouldn't it be cool if someday I went abroad to work on a farm in Germany?"  I mean when someone asks me a question commonly asked of young adults. It goes: "Where do you see yourself in [x] years?" I don't know. I don't think I'll have it figured out for a while. I'm entering my third year of college and I'm still not sure majoring in music was a good idea. Once, I received scholarship money for writing an essay about how much I hate that question.  I find it challenging, as many my age do, to see my future place in the world as anything particularly concrete. I have ideas for myself, I have wants and hopes and dreams, but my plans take significantly longer to solidify. In a similar vein, when I think about what art I want to make, I feel I don't know myself or the world or the...