The Entrepreneurial Artist: Iman Djouini
On October 24th, I attended the artist talk of Iman Djouini. She is an incredibly talented artist. Throughout the artist talk, she showed us her art portfolio filled with various pieces. She talked about how she was experimenting with the usage of language in her artworks. She further talked about how she was incorporating vibrating borders and rhetoric that uses binary opposition. She then explained how she used the borders that existed between the colors to represent social, cultural, and psychic demarcations. Finally she talked about her project the Light Elephant and the process.
I was truly intrigued by her project the Light Elephant. I think that this whole project highlighted her abilities of entrepreneurship. Their goal for this project was to create an installation for the Baltimore’s City of Light Festival. She was then able to also form a group who helped her in both the building process and transporting the installation piece to different areas. She had decided the animal and material she wanted it to be made out of. After finalizing the designs, she sent it for production. The end result was a giant inflatable elephant that had a light in it. However, there were several aspects that weren’t planned out. Towards the end, the elephant started to deflate and looked like it was bending on its front two legs. Iman Djouini was absolutely fascinated that the installation still had a strong connection with the audience even in that form.
Personally, I love the fact that she didn’t discard her installation solely because it started deflating. In fact she was curious on how the audience would interpret it. I have a habit that if I make a small mistake in my art I typically have a hard time looking past it. I either walk away from it or keep restarting. I never thought to actually ask the audience how do they feel about it. Towards my future artistic pursuit, I’m going to ask others how they feel about my works as well. I also learned that not everything has to go according to plan and that’s ok. Iman Djouini never really planned for her installation to deflate.There are times you just need to go with the flow. The results could end up better than you imagined. I learned that towards the future I shouldn’t stress over how minor details so much that I’m unable to see the whole picture.
