NIU Theatre and Dance Studio Series
Overview
Poster as self-portrait conceptually exploring assemblage as the physical and cognitive condition that defines a graphic designer within society and culture.
Problem
As a conceptual framework and formal constraint, I use assemblage in making connections physical. I engage in the making process and prepare content for production: type selection, formal investigation, concept development, and physical output to establish a specific and distilled presentation. For content, I look to American society and culture, and typography is co-opted from mass media. A language that is battered, bruised, torn, and tormented is re-assembled in pursuit of a metaphoric and literal objective. The process observed in the making and the result.
Navigating the Realities of Marriage, Family, and Divorce
First, of the Corner Theater series, The Marriage of Bette and Boo by Christopher Durang is a satirical comedy about 1950’s American marriage and family. The story of Bette and Boo’s marriage is told through the humor found in the darkest of life’s horrors, weaving through three decades of divorce, alcoholism, madness, and fatal illness.
The poster’s conceptual image presents the farcical interpretation of the 1950’s marriage. The literal butting of heads between husband and wife is absurd and points to the obvious while ignoring the nuance found in a marriage. As the play is narrated by the son, the speech bubbles further this fallacy by highlighting the comic book quality that parents inhabit in their children’s minds. The pointed conversations that are observed and define the adult are dynamic and hero-like, yet tragically flawed. The muted color calls upon the marriage quip: something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.
Exploring Love, Sexuality, Gender, and the Lasting Impact of a Doctor’s Decision
The second in the Studio Series, Boy by Anna Ziegler, is inspired by a true story and explores the complicated terrain of finding love, sexuality, gender. The story also explores the complicated relationship between doctor and patient, when a well-intentioned doctor convinces the parents of a male infant to raise their son as a girl after a terrible circumcision accident; and, twenty years later, the repercussions of that choice continue to unfold.
The poster’s conceptual image presents a flower’s beauty and fragility. The beauty lives in the parts—not passively observed as masculine or feminine—but as a holistic identity dependent upon nature versus nurture dichotomy. Color is divided and represents a clear division of gender identity norms. Typographic qualities juxtapose our understood meaning of elementary words and classifications.
