It’s a Matter of Patterns

Artist’s Statement

For our video essay, we explored patterns we found both in our physical surroundings and in our everyday experience. Through our brainstorming conversations we decided to center our piece around ‘a hub’ that we all shared in common: going to school at Evergreen. We individually wrote lyric essay pieces to evoke feelings and images that arose as we contemplated our day-to-day lives here, in the end focusing on getting up and going to school, sitting at the same desk every class day, and walking along the same route home.

In our conversations, we discussed the idea that bringing personal patterns into conscious awareness is an important step in transforming them. We did some research into a variety of patterns found in nature, psychology, and myth, though this research didn’t explicitly enter the piece.

Brainstorming and writing collaboratively was challenging, so we elected to do the writing individually and then work together on making revisions. We felt that the lyric form lent itself to the inevitable fragmentation of three separately written pieces, and seemed the best vehicle for the imagistic and evocative quality we wanted to create. An open question to our audience, then, is how these pieces work together and what patterns or disruptions of patterns might be present between them. Through engaging in this process, we all discovered patterns in our lives and surroundings we hadn’t been aware of before. Perhaps you will have the same experience…

Credits

Alex Olson-Bick, Kevin Hutton, Cameron Withey