I had been excited for this Current Perspectives lecture for a few weeks. When I first heard that she extends a lot of her design into the physical realm and does some more non-traditional design work I was immediately interested. When I heard her lecture I was just blown away. Three points made during her lecture really grabbed me. They were more like working methods for her, but I'll sum it up into three points.
First, her work with layering I found very interesting. It seemed to me that she brought up the idea of layering a few times. She didn't just layer physically, but conceptually as well. Her I've Been Thinking of You For a While really impressed me. The physical layering of wax she created was beautiful, and the most interesting thing about the whole piece was that she thought it was going to go horribly wrong at one point. However, she just kept layering and the piece turned out pretty amazing in my opinion. Both words she used for this series of pieces ("Become" and "Throughout") I felt like had conceptual ties to the idea of layering and growing that occurred in the process of the project. These pieces were then used at the presidential inauguration (I believe Keetra was commissioned to do the Become piece after she had done the Throughout piece as an experiment). So the commissioned piece then had a conceptual tie to its application through the layering, the word used, and the growth that occurred in the process of making it.
Speaking of words brings up the second point I would like to note. Keetra used words a lot in her pieces. DIVIDEDs, Half Wishing, Half Lying, and Embrace the Amazing Mistake are all just a few examples of her work with words. Looking at her portfolio, I would say that the majority of her work makes use of words, and largely through wordplay of some kind. Embrace the Amazing Mistake uses the letters of the word "mistake" to created the letters for the word "amazing". As one can see, the two words have a conceptual play with each other and furthermore both have the same number of letters, which allowed Keetra to take advantage of their spelling to use in a conceptual word play piece. DIVIDEDs and Half Wishing, Half Lying both really take advantage of wordplay and the serendipitous events that we created in words over time. Serendipity occurs in the words "lies" and "wishes". She takes advantage of a few similar letters between the two words to create her piece Half Wishing, Half Lying which, again, has a conceptual pun on wordplay. The DIVIDEDs are the same way. She takes ordinary words and divides them into two words (sometimes a word and prefix/suffix). When she does this she creates a new meaning between the two created words and the parent word. When these words were first conceived of hundreds of years ago for the English language, they would have never been looked at the way that Keetra divides them and analyzes these these words and creates layers of meaning and examines the connotations that exist in words.
Finally, my last point to mention is Keetra's embrace of serendipity and what I like to think of as chaos theory. In her commissioned piece Swatch Keetra was asked to design for a watch called Swatch. She had recently seen her husband creating typography using Adobe Illustrator and Javascript coding. She then applied the idea of controlling patterns using coding to make unique designs for these watches. In a way she controls the final outcome of the design of these watches, but in another way she really has no idea how any of these will look when they're done (the design at least, not the actual watch). She takes a pattern and messes with the coding in a way that gives her the desired aesthetic. She does not actively design the layout of the watch, she lets the coding do it for her. She then finds moments in the rewritten coding and applies them to the watches. F'in magic!
For me personally, all three of these points find special places in my heart. I have been interested in what I think of Chaos Theory. In the design world though, I might call it serendipity. Looking back to my dot book, this idea of Chaos Theory/serendipity was employed in the gridded vectors and planes I used as backgrounds for each page. These gridded planes spun in space and time as they stretched through the book and interacted with the layers of dots and words that I could have never planned. I set the gridded planes up because I knew that serendipitous moments would occur. And occur they did just as Chaos Theory would suggest. Also the use of the idea of Chaos Theory in the context of Physics had a nice conceptual tie that I am only just now realizing. So, I embrace the serendipitous and Chaos Theory. I embrace how these occur through layering.
Words and letters have had a special place with me since my calligraphy workshop in the spring semester of 2010. My ability to perceive what I was trying to replicate increased ten fold under the wings of Carl Kurtz (and was then taken even further with Richard Mattson immediately afterward). The nuances of lettering drew me in originally. Then I started getting into rap and hip-hop and became fascinated with the wordplay I found there. Then from there I began to think of how all these moments of wordplay and instances of rhyme are all serendipitous moments. Being able to tell a story through rhyme isn't easy and couldn't be done the same way if the words in the English language were different. Right now, at this point in my life, these moments of serendipity in rap and and language are just way too cool to be ignored.
Here's a link to her website. With her portfolio!
