From Genevieve Cossette

Moving from a photo investigation of my ideas to a printed book was an exciting follow up after a narrative emerged while organizing the initial album. Incorporating text in this step of project development offered so many different avenues of approaching the layout. Throughout the semester, I’ve realized I struggle with prompted projects, as I’ve always been pretty strictly process based. The challenge of responding to the prompt, while not creating something inauthentic to fit the boundaries or making something that feels more representational than an artistic response, was an engaging way to begin to explore new approaches to my creation process.  I knew I wanted to use text to reinforce the narrative of the photos themselves, but didn’t necessarily want to present a fully explained project. With my focus on encouraging viewers to consider themselves and the world around them, I don’t want them to just read a message and move on to the next part of their day. Studies on viewers ...

"We approach the new with the psychological conditioning and sensory responses of the old. This clash naturally occurs in transitional periods. In late medieval art, for instance, we saw the fear of the new print technology expressed in the theme The Dance of Death. Today, similar fears are expressed in the Theater of the Absurd. Both represent a common failure: the attempt to do a job demanded by the new environment with the tools of the old." (McLuhan, pgs 94-95) The social world becomes increasingly less atmospheric the further into the Digital Age we get. The cacophony of of information constructing the world we live and interact in conflictingly becomes oversaturated while dulling to a white noise. As the social world continues to entangle further into our lives, we’re threatened with dissipating, and meet this with the time-honored practice of holding true to our values, our belief, our idea of Self as rooted in our Western, individuality-centered culture; we feverishly...

    With an assignment asked to respond to the notion of time becoming the new space, and of a society where we “march backwards to our own death” (McLuhan 63), it was inevitable I present a video portraying a fragmented journey.      I was fascinated by what McLuhan was saying, and just how well it holds up to this day. What we as a global society face, the consequences of our own actions—it’s doomed to implode through our self-designed, structural failures. We can’t build more with fixed materials available while remaining sturdy. We began as tribal worlds established from the here and now, to the fixed individual developed through printed literature and the vanishing point of visual representations. We’re facing a global return to a tribal culture, and the interaction of human-created media upon the discord of this transition is something that fascinates me personally. Modern media has erased the vanishing point that furthered the perspective of the...

  Introductions in a Western civilization centered so intensely around individuality and identity carry a sense of foreboding. On one hand, I’m Genevieve Cossette Frank (legally), I’ve been breathing on this planet for almost 25 years now, I have a cat, partner, a number of interests (mixed media art, cooking, exploring the outdoors, reading), and a few goals (education, financial stability, a future in arts-based, research--the usual). On the other hand, I have a very complicated relationship with identity that begs me not to degrade my identity to a few words.   aforementioned cat and partner Self-identity and the exploration isn’t always easy, as most know. I struggled to points that brought me to (successful!) treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder— not to ascribe this as an aspect of my identity, but rather to make real the impact a lack of self-identity brought and depth to your view of my perspective. That being said, moving towards life beyond BPD-turmoil was pos...