Thesis Focus.

I am interested in the ways in which visual work can activate the viewer to fill in something that is not provided, by drawing the viewer’s attention to minor details, or absences in the design. By just providing a slight amount of information to the viewer, it is interesting to see the conceptual bounds they endure to fill in the information that is not provided.

The work of John Baldessari is interesting because “he upends the commonly held expectations of how an image is supposed to function.” In many of Baldessari’s works, he eliminates much of the information in the painting or photo, forcing the viewer to fill in what is missing. In some instances he places colorful dots over the faces of his subjects or he will completely remove a portion of the subject (a leg or arm) and replace it with a flat color but still maintaining the structure of the segment he removed. This ambiguous space that he creates forces the viewer to fill in what he or she thinks is missing. A lot of the time Baldessari will combine the subject with the background and foreground so it is difficult to distinguish one from the other.

Daniella Spinat from the Yale graphic design MFA thesis program had an interesting image on her page; it was a billboard with an image of a bed that was slept in, with the two indentations in the pillows where the head of a person would have been laying. The photograph is by Felix Gonzalez-Torres called Untitled 1991. The caption underneath the billboard is “Anybody would probably recognize the image on this billboard as familiar. It shows hopefulness and sadness, presence and absence, at once. The potential simultaneity of the two opposites, the intimacy and emptiness, private and public, is self-reflexive. Like a giant mirror, the image suggests that each viewer fill in the space with their own bodies.” What is so great about Torres’ work is that it is suggestive in a way that the viewer can make up his or her own story to the image. Due to the absence in the photograph, we are able to fill in the space with our own perception of what should be laying in that bed. The image provokes many emotions in the viewer, but more importantly from a design standpoint it asks the simple question of, “What should be in that space?” This question activates the viewer in a way that straight forward design concepts cannot.

The work of Paul Sahre is metaphorical and suggestive to the viewer. For example, Sahre designed the cover for the Ernest Hemmingway novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” The image on the cover is of pine needles and pine cones. The limited amount of information provided to the viewer forces him or her to fill in what is missing. For those who have read the novel, the book begins and ends with the same scene. At the end of the novel, character Robert Jordan is lying in wait on the forest floor to die in glory. A quote from the novel, “He was waiting until the officer reached the sunlit place where the first trees of the pine forest joined the green slope of the meadow. He could feel his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest. (43.402)” In this case, the subject Robert Jordan is missing leaving the pine needles as the only indicative piece of information.

Hi Gerry or Megan,
Would either of you be able to give me some feedback on my focus statement? This is obviously just part of my proposal,I just want to know if I'm going in the right direction. If you could give me some feedback before Friday's class I would really appreciate it. Thank you.