Project 4

Project #4
Elizabeth Shores
I struggled with the A/V project, mostly in coming up with an inspiration or a strong concept to base the project on. It was an evolving project, which I will describe here.
I had recently watched a documentary about what happens to people in the US who die without families. It covered the steps taken by law enforcement to locate families, the search for cemetery plots, and the eventual cremation of the individual. Eventually, if there was not enough money, the cremated remains were poured into a mass grave for all those who had died the previous year and were the final descendents of their family lineage. Such a fate was terrible, and made me think a lot about the idea of a sense of purpose in life as well as in death. I am not particularly interested in producing a depressing or ennui-inspiring art piece, so I eventually chose to avoid the topic of death itself. However, I eventually came to be interested in the idea that the things you do have far-reaching effects and consequences that inevitably reach beyond your lifetime, often without your knowledge.
I used a train to symbolize forward motion and movement through space and time. I chose to focus on the idea of American women cutting their hair during the twenties and thirties, a time when the only discussion of feminism was seen in the treatment of haircutting by major women’s beauty & lifestyle magazines. This new trendy ‘do spurred changes beyond anyone’s expectations. Like trains on a track, we leave dissent, then order for those we don’t see. The order that comes about from the chaos of our lives lives on for future generations.
So, the dissent is all the hustle and noise we get while the train is at the station and is also the act by the women of cutting their hair. The order is the nice neatness of a train once it is underway on the tracks out in the country, and is the new normal that has been established by those women cutting their hair; it is now normal for a woman to have short hair.
Our lives seem like meaningless chaos, but we create the world the next generation lives in, no matter what we do.