Scraps of the Process: Chicago in Conversation
With any project that has as many moving parts as a pop-up museum, there are going to be a slew of processes going on at a given time. I’m still contemplating the content of my final exhibit, but I think I found a good direction while brainstorming with some friends from out of town. A group of friends was coming to Chicago for the first time, so I was able to gather an outsider perspective of the city I know so well.
We were talking about icons of Chicago, and who came to mind for them when they thought of legendary people from the city. This got me thinking about how I could create a visual conversation between recognizable figures to convey the rhetorical message of the museum itself. When I work on a new project, I tend to just drag and drop images onto my desktop and coincidentally, my desktop background is the skyline view from my apartment in Garfield Park. I pulled all of the images, which included filenames that indicated the content around the iconic skyline to show all of the pieces of the flyer separated, but connected by their geographic roots.
After finishing the flyer, I got to thinking about my exhibit. I knew that I wanted my portion to focus on the idea of public marginalia and the public comments of real Chicagoans. Some of my past ideas were probably a little too militant to actually paste around the city, so I tried to distill the ideological content to something less politically pointed. As much as I would like to wheatpaste Rahm Emanual as a marionette doll being controlled by a sterling bay logo on one of their development sites, it would probably result in me getting arrested and fined. So, instead of making Rahm the subject of my visuals, I decided to draw a more ambiguous skull. I put one simple word that I think everyone forgets to do sometimes contoured around its head: “THINK!” I drew a gold dollar sign in its throat to insinuate that the consumption of capital is linked to the death and agony expressed by the skull. Given that this drawing could have so many meanings attached to it (versus the astute commentary in the marionette Rahm), I think that posting up a series of this style of images would be less directly adverse to the city administration.
After I finished the “THINK!” drawing, I started thinking about how to expand on the idea. I looked up synonyms for the word on thesaurus.com, and plan to make 3–4 more drawings that each somehow ties to the theme of critical thought, rejection of subservience, and deliberate action. I posted a screenshot on my Instagram story not only to remind my followers to think but to remind them of all the ways they can think.
