Within the Confines of a Car

Music and art have a long history together. Look at Kandinsky, with his studies of synesthesia where the viewer sees movement of visual representations of what he saw when he heard. But we can go back even before Kandinsky where we find dancers. Degas’ Blue Dancers was one of the first paintings I had instantly related to. I grew up in a house full of dancers (none of us were good, but we did still enjoy it). While this piece isn’t directly about music, it also is directly about music. In his fleeting impressionist expression, we can almost hear the music that was about to be played for those ballerinas. In the midst of abstraction in both artists, we find music, but also find memories.

Within the Confines of a Car is my visual representation of my memories. The mind map that brought me to this project is quite long. I started with a portrait project, which turned into an experimental water project, which turned into a conversation on the National Park Histories that aren’t spoken of, and then I found music. On a 13-day long road trip, I realized that we were changing our music depending on our landscape. We didn’t necessarily know the songs, but the feelings they evoked made sense.

As I continued to think of this notion I realized that I did this with my whole life. Whether it was waking up early on Saturday mornings to clean with my family to Gloria Estefan’s Congo, or realizing I was being broken up with to The Black Key’s Turn Blue album. These pitches and notes are forever ingrained into my brain, tied to the emotions I was feeling during these moments. Once I realized that this concept takes up most of my brain, for my thesis I needed a way to bring it down and simplify the amount of music I wanted to speak toward. So, I looked to where music has arguably affected me the most, within a car. Our brain will inevitably fail us with the details, but songs will forever hold the emotion.