In this piece, I wanted to produce a sense of surface (stained-glass) and depth (scenes, textures, tastes, experiences). Among other visual sources (the circular window in Notre Dame Cathedral, for example) I found inspiration for this piece in a few brief passages from Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, in which he constitutes the Impressionist's "distictive individual brush stroke" as a symbol of mechanical reproduction, as the closed-off "monadlike container" of the subject, as containing within it a subject's entire expressive "universe in which pain itself now speaks and vibrates through material sunset and landscape." The distinctive individual brushstroke is here translated as distinctive piece of glass. I wanted to give the impressionthat an entire world (or, at the very least, an experience, a memory perhaps) inhabited each glass pane, with Van Gogh's magical eye gazing out of the center.
Describing Vincent Van Gogh's work, Jameson observes "that the willed and violent transformation of a drab peasant object world ino the most glorious materialization of pure color in oil paint is to be seen as a Utopian gesture." In many ways, a travel poster is also a Utopian gesture.
Alongside the Freshman Seminar poster, I made a little promotional "carte postale" to be given out to interested students. Ideally, both pieces would include more information about the course, and how to sign up for it--I thought about including a course description on the left side of the postcard, but chose not to because I liked the idea of the cards as functional adverts. A student would recieve one at a school event, and realize that they can't really use it unless they take the course and go on the trip!
