Traces of Nature. a tradigital work by Tara Diaz
Macy Dreizler “Yad”
The direct translation of ‘yad’ from Hebrew to English is ‘hand’ but it has another more symbolic meaning, it also translates to ‘monument’ or ‘memorial’. The collages are from images I took at the center and hands cut out of magazines. Each piece is 9″ x 12″ and can be viewed individually or how I have arranged them here. I also experimented with the short video below. I truly enjoyed making these pieces and hope to experiment some more with stop motion collage in the future.
“UNLIMITED EMPHASIS,” Don Chavez.
Neil Heacox Invasion Enlightenment
Made a larger version of my previous attempt, including hand emoji to represent our human involvement and emotions around facilitating invasive plants/animals/viruses around the world. I made it larger (its about 5 feet tall).
When revisiting the site, i saw the old practice design. When deconstructing it, i found a family of lizards living underneath, so I’m hoping they move into their much larger mansion later this week. Also saw a scrub jay, which are undeniably more beautiful than the east coast blue jays.
It was 95 degrees when in went to create this, despite being 4 pm in the afternoon. The burrs from the invasive grasses were also shedding off the plants as I walked by, and would burrow into my socks down to my skin, causing little pinpricks of pain and blood. Another complication was that the mustard flowers were starting to drop, thus the finished product was not as vibrantly yellow as I’d hoped for, as both the amount of flowers and frequency of stalks had disappeared. I collected all the mustard stalks I could still find. This is definitely a lesson that timing is crucial during site specific design.
Overall, I’m pleased with how it turned out, it’s about three times as big as the practice run. I hope it’s still there the next time I visit, whenever that might be.
Caitlin Mouri “Recollect”
Russell Maruya Connecting With the Home Environment
For this project, I asked various people whether they be other students who are not enrolled in the class, family members, or work colleagues to try out each of the different wander assignments and document their work. The overall purpose of having different people try out the different assignments is to see how people from different academic backgrounds and people from non-academic backgrounds view the concept of place making. While the activities were originally meant to be conducted at the Lyle Center, due to the current public health situation a large percentage of the participants had to perform the different wander assignments at home.
As a result, I modified the directions for the wander assignments and slightly modified the focus of the project and gave the participants different options to focus on with regards to creating pieces for the project. The pathways include focusing on the positive side of the stay at home orders such as spending time with family, cleaner air due to the decrease in the number of vehicles on the road, cheaper gas prices, etc…, what they are doing to maintain their mental health, and what they are doing to stay connected with friends and family in a time of social distancing. If the participant is an essential worker, I gave them the option in the instructions to show how the current public health situation has affected various aspects of your daily life such as your commute to work, distance between coworkers, and number of people who frequent your place of work. In order to get in touch with various people for the project, I used various forms of communication such as emails, Facebook, GroupMe, and Instagram.Shown below are the different iterations of the different wander assignments which were produced by the different participants.
Silent wander assignment
I saw people walking outside with their dogs and saw construction. I saw peacocks wandering around the neighborhood outside and I heard them making noises. As I passed by someone else’s house, the neighbor’s dog was barking until a man told his dog to be quit. I also passed by a long line of elderlies that continued until the end of the block. They were following the rules of social distancing in which they were not close to each other and wearing masks.
Since I work in the construction industry, I am still considered to be an essential worker and have to still drive out to the various job sites. I usually leave for a job site at around 5:00 or 5:30 A.M and during my commute, I am used to seeing people on their way to either work or school. However, due to the quarantine I see almost no one on the road during my commute to the job site where I am doing a safety walk. As an area safety manager with ACCO Engineered Systems, my main responsibility is to establish, manage, and monitor standards and training to ensure that there are no injury at the job site. Once I got to the job site where I was conducting a safety walk, I had to maintain six feet between myself and the nearest person and wear a face mask during work.
Rubbings and photography wanders
Pathways and performance wanders
Contour drawing wander assignment
Alondra D Delgado
An Artistic Passage
Throughout the project my focus was on transitional spaces throughout Cal Poly Pomona, all beginning at the Lyle Center. Various walkthroughs were completed throughout the Center and on campus to experience the exterior spaces and their conditions. Multiple medias played into this project as a step by step process of reaching a final focus. Photographs, sketches, mapping, and collages brought the end result of a video montage. On the video some frames were captures that mimicked the photographs taken and overall brought the idea of the Lyle Center and the Cal Poly Pomona campus together as one. One continuous pathway.
See the YouTube clip below to watch which pathway I take on campus: https://youtu.be/10ydsZqJTJA
Hannah Kaiser “Of Shadows”
LAND PIGMENTS Kathleen Blakistone
My inspiration and palette come from the land, mostly from found plants at the Lyle Center for Regenerative Studies although some particularly the turquoise result from ink making recipes. Connections to place and land are often overlooked and making materials from found plants and other materials encourages us to find materiality from the simple items before us. Some of this is prompted from an aborrhence of delivered-to-your-door shopping so prevalent in our culture today. Mostly, it comes from a love of what the land provides and an urgent need to promote an engagement with and protection of the Earth.
I have spent the last six weeks making inks – yellow, blue, green, red, purple, brown and white. It began as a simple idea for black walnut ink from a collection of nuts foraged in the fall of 2019. It led me on a path of discovery for the process of ink making and an introduction to the watercolor process.
The simple marks show how the inks interact, create new colors, and offer their own type of alchemical art. The more descriptive pieces show various angels of the Lyle Center, empty of humans during the pandemic of 2020. All of the art was photographed on site, as if our class had it’s gallery opening on campus.
Final Project: Chelsea Marks
For My final project I took a collection of this semesters work and made a collage from it. I removed all of the white space and re purposed them into a landscape scene representing the center. I used the bling contour of a main building at the center as my guiding piece. I also tried to represent the sky and the green space and path distribution in the center. The collage represents the variety of colors and textures available at the center but it also includes some of the paintings from weeks I was isolated from the center. It’s a unique collage that can only stand in this moment in time because it represents what we are all going through during the pandemic situation.
Placemaking at the Lyle Center 