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Shawna Gubera (English major)
"Lyric in Public: Exploring Lyric Subjectivity and the Outdoor Advertisement Through Ekphrastic Poetry"
Sponsor: Cecil Giscombe, English
Project Description
Shawna will travel to New York and Los Angeles to collect her primary text, which will be an extensive photographic record of static advertisements displayed in public space. Using this index of images, along with personal interviews gathering individuals' responses to advertising, she will produce a collection of lyric poetry that investigates the boundary between the poetic arts and an image-oriented culture. By means of ekphrasis, an aesthetic technique traditionally used to mediate between two art forms, these poems will render the visual constituents of advertising imagery into the temporally distinct realities of linguistic and textual representation. Her research into picture theory, iconology and lyricism will contribute towards an intent to posit and express persuasive images' resonance within a poetic speaker's subjectivity, and address poetry's remarkable separation from public life.
Scholar's Photo
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Zoom Media practices crafty little interpolative techniques on Shawna in this Los Angeles bathroom, but does that coy smile signal towards some sort of brewing subversion? |
Scholar's Journal
I attempt a practice run at Emeryville's Bay Street and am promptly halted by the authorities for taking pictures on "private property." I'm incredulous: private? Private conspicuous consumption? Really? I give them a two-sentence spiel using positive and optimistic language devoid of critique. "Yeah, we get artists here all the time, all kinds, photographers, students, people doing research, but no." I press on, "So, I can't take a picture of that billboard right there? It's in the sky. It's not on Bay 'street.'" "No. They don't allow that." They? My further questions are referred to the management office, with forewarning that my appeal will likely be rejected as soon as possible.
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As I pursue the posters and billboards decorating Los Angeles, on foot and by bus, six to nine hours a day, I don't regret the decision to forgo car travel. The sun is overbearing and the pavement lambasting my legs and feet is merciless, but it doesn't matter. This approach prolongs and exaggerates the experience of each site, so that local particularities and subtle patterns might meet my attention from any available surface.
I also find that the daily preoccupation with snapping everything in sight before collapsing from exhaustion helps me focus on the act of seeing, without appraising the relative value of specific images for my project just yet. I want to defer judgments and critiques about the advertisements as much as possible, at least initially. I'm not here to confirm my own notions, but to learn something that I didn't know before.
One surprise regards the ample amount of time required to choose and cover just one sample street, which is three or even four days due to travel time and the desire to avoid cluttered, illegible photos. It's awkward standing in one place for up to five minutes, poised for the right moment to take several photos right inside someone's business window. Or circling 360 degrees at a busy intersection while people stare from their cars. Hopefully I'll manage to improve the pace somehow, because there is hardly any time to read the books I've brought. I'm so busy with maps!
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By now I've covered sites in Culver City, West Hollywood, Santa Monica, Venice, Hollywood, and Beverly Hills. I'm attempting to capture each ad-like image without discrimination, and as a result my "definition" of advertising has expanded to something more like a "description". What about tee shirts, stickers, mannequin dolls, graffiti art, window displays? Attending to hundreds of mannequins each day makes me feel like I'm living in some exclusive little world of dolls, projecting onto them personalities and an existence.
Melrose Avenue first impressed upon me a feeling of overwhelming sadness. And then it occurred to me that attempting to corner the word "fake" is a little problematic. Are black hair dye and tattoos more real and meaningful than white hair dye and light-damaged skin? Everything west of Fairfax seems painted white, and everything east of it painted black. Can there be a hierarchy of more and less fake? An ad design's indulgence in the make-believe, dreaming, and fantasy, can be artful as well as functional. Fake is mysterious: I'll leave it at that, for now.
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In New York I need to wait far longer for nice pictures. First of all, "lost" ought to be penciled into my daily itinerary. Everything is in constant motion, too; thus many opportunities just within reach still manage to escape. Especially with the mobile ads gracing taxi cabs, buses, and billboards which rotate one brilliantly illuminated screen after another in speedy succession, and don't always commit to a predictable pattern. In Times Square the ostentatious ads blanketing entire high-rise facades bedazzle me and then blink away before the lens can even focus. And then there's the plethora of people and traffic constantly intercepting the sight line (at least there's no shortage of interviewees). A good photograph here feels like the equivalent of a touchdown or a bingo. I guess duration doesn't matter so much as the assurance that we've seen an ad repeatedly.
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Well, the expedition draws to a close--or it begins--and I've returned home with about 5,000 photos! I'm excited to sort through these photos and dig into the research materials collected weeks ago, and to begin experimenting with the formal/conceptual elements of this project. It's nice to sit down--I can't even remember the last time I was underwhelmed.
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