Project 1: Fantasy Appliance

For this project I plan on doing something that deals with a very personal topic for me. The theme of my piece will be my experience living with psychotic depression. I don’t want to focus on the depression aspect of it as much as I do the psychosis itself. The way I plan on doing this is by trying to convey how psychosis effects and warps my comprehension of reality. My psychosis heavily involves a misconception of time and my own physical presence in reality.

I’m thinking that I want to do this by having myself as the subject of the piece. I want this piece to incorporate a sense of spiraling. Spirals are a pretty accurate way of visually depicting the sense of being disconnected from reality for me so they will be a main feature of this project. I also want this piece to have some sort of transition between day and night. With my own experience with psychosis, it always seems like the day goes by a lot faster than it should and before I know it it’s night time and there’s nothing I can do -daylight savings does not help.

So far my concept pieces include one of a girl falling through the air and being drawn into the center of a spiral. The body parts closest to the center of the spiral are beginning to fade and become transparent. In the sky above her it’s daytime, but the sun and the moon are present -with the moon overlapping the sun. The spiral itself is darker in color, meant to represent night time.  I’m thinking that I want to have a small series. If I go with the piece of the girl falling into the spiral, I could have two final images. One image depicting daytime, and the other being at night.

Another concept piece I have right now is one involving a person who’s head is a metal bird cage. This person is sitting in the center of a floor, but as the piece expands outwards it’s clear that the floor the person is sitting on is the floor of another bird cage. The outer part of the piece is barely visible but it’s the bars of yet another bird cage. This, so far, is a harder concept to convey just because of the limitations of visual piece itself, so I don’t think I’ll use this concept for this project.

  The last concept I have right now is a much more complex one. It would be an image taken from the inside of a bus. In the window is a reflection of the inside of the bus but it’s warped to be more surreal than reality. I think I want to have this taking place at night. I don’t know yet though, this is the least developed out of my concepts so far.