images from my first print media project

Tuesday was the date to turn in our first real project in the Interactive Media Certificate Program / IMCP Print Media module! We each got to pick a sometimes cryptic phrase...from a hat? I don't know, I left class a little early for Faith, Order, Witness, so Carolyn O'Barr, our Tuesday through Friday instructor, gave me Dreams of Swans, the only one left. We could choose to design a CD, DVD or book cover; I decided on a CD. Here's the front and the back! For the CD itself, I omitted the harder-edged urban fire escape on the upper left and Rotterdam roofs lower right, faded the cannabis leaf a little more and also made the swans less opaque. In addition, I rasterized the playlist and credits so I could move them away from the CD's center hole.

from my Artists Statement:

Creative Concept

• Swans
• Images of swan pairs posed so a heart forms between their heads are common, but I chose a swan couple forming almost a heart, illustrating the often tenuous, frequently fragile, inevitably changing bonds love and relationship form.
• Dune Grass
• From summers on Cape Cod – as well as time I've spent on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and Virginia – dune grass has become one of my favorite seashore symbols. The photography I chose particularly reminds me of Nauset and Chincoteague.
• Urban Fire Escape
• The subject is dreams, and where do multitudes of dreams emerge more insistently than in the residential and commercial structures of any inner city? Escape suggests going elsewhere than the daily mundane, and I love the dual imagery of "fire" both as a danger to be quenched and a crucial aspect of creativity.
• Rotterdam Rooftops
• For me, this image is polyvalent! Rotterdam is one of my favorite cities in what's probably my favorite country. In one of my former lives, the roof of the apartment building where I lived at 39 Clark Street in Boston's North End (a block away from Old North Church, "Christ Church in the City of Boston" of Paul Revere fame) was a great place to go to dream, do homework, sunbathe, visit with friends and just plain chill. Reinforced by the song "Up on the Roof" (I consider James Taylor's the real version), rooftops evoke a cascade of nostalgic memories and the slick, contemporary ones in this photograph cleanly dovetail with my current life and style.
• Cannabis Sativa Leaf
• Pipe dreams! Not exactly renowned as a hallucinogen, nevertheless marijuana tends to induce an altered, not-quite-real state of mind and being, so I chose this image to suggest a possible new reality superimposed upon rationalized 21st-century life.