Was really surprised to find two different books with Liberace LOL. I these books are all from the Scottish History and Food sections on the second floor. I was really curious about representation and abstraction with the books and how a lack of text can be just as powerful a tool. In trying to connect the first and last book, I worked to assemble books to tell a story of Liberace cooking, something going wrong, and then him dying and becoming a ghost.

I tried to illustrate this idea through colour and book size juxtaposition. The first is happy, floral (also about geography) as if he’s happily performing. The next two are exactly the same size but different shades and quality, as if to represent the cooking has begun but something goes sour. The large red book is much bigger and louder in my mind, representing an explosion. The black to me represents a kind of stasis..the white book following is haggard, brighter, and same length as the black, representing a kind of harmoniousness.

Looking at it a week later, I agree that the story doesn’t really come across through…However, fun warm up and I enjoyed getting to surf through the stacks!

I branched out from the second floor and looked at titles from the military, social studies, and women & gender studies stacks on the third floor.

I think at this point, I got too focused on the text and creating a poem. I was feeling reminiscent and cumbersome while making this. I was thinking about some kind of tumultuous affair between two enemies/lovers. Loved finding two different, yet connected texts that had to do with dance. I was also very curious about the use of punctuation….do you read it as the end of a sentence? or can it just be ignored. In the case, I tried to use the punctuation to illicit a break in the sentence.

Seeing how the stacks tilts from weight distribution is making me think I should look at smaller stacks.

I ran out of time at the library and sought to play around from the books in my apartment. These…don’t really have much connection to nature but I had fun coming up with different arrangements. In this stack, I was thinking of myself….First week of classes are always a bit chaotic and I was finding myself running late, having tech problems, and apologizing a lot….Feeling like Wendy Master of Art, The Disaster Artist. This to me reads like an omnipresent voice giving some kind of prophetic or spiritual advice. Not bad advice for sure. I’m curious by the shape of the stack – how it descends and returns to place at the last book.

At the top is “13 ways to kill your community” and 13 books below describing just that. I loved the mix and contrast between the fonts and subject matter. As I built this stack, I began thinking of this more from a writing perspective and less of a visual or material perspective. I used to write satire part-time and so to me, the stack took on more of a script.

While assembling the stack, I was thinking a lot about the fonts could work with and against each other . I began thinking through the voices of two characters that would be on a  “I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson” sketch. I was imagining two men filming some kind of Alex Jones-ish propaganda ad. The first guy is really mad, listing off progressive things that would contribute to a community’s decline. The camera would flip to the second guy, and carrying the same energy, he would list off things that just make him mad; “GRAPE FRUIT” “DUTY FREE AT THE AIRPORT” “LARRY GORMAN that sonofaBItch”.

I thought it would be funny to add a (fittingly New Brunswick centred) cookbook underneath a book about publicized family conflict as if to stick a quaint, nostalgic, maybe even satirical PR bandaid over them.

I also don’t consider NB as a great food hub so the idea of a New Brunswick centred cookbook from from members of a rich, white, loyalist family who probably have hired cooks is funny to me. Like something out of Succession.

Shawna Dempsey and Lori Millan Presentation

Environmental Art Video! With Lily

Bird in Hand – First attempt at making spreads

Jellied Salad Zine (Multiples project)