Distance, 2020
digital spread for a collaborative magazine
Distance is a part of a larger digital publication created by my classmates and I in response to the coronavirus pandemic. We created it in the context of our class on Everyday Objects. Distance is a reflection not only on the theme of distance as we are experiencing it now, but also on larger themes of being and existing. As a human, I am always oscillating between two polls: movement and staticity, stability and imbalance, comfort and discomfort, sadness and joy. I live in a dichotomous world where the built environment encompasses both my physical surroundings – manmade or natural – and my psych. The magazine incorporates the forms I am most comfortable with – photography, writing, and movement – in a way that I hope invites those who read it to feel inspired to contemplate and reflect. My design aesthetic is minimalist, therefore I have kept the graphics minimal and left negative space as visual breathing room, in order to translate this sensibility.
The pictures I used are a mix of unedited and edited. In addition, I layered geometric shapes over some of them, at first simply because I liked it, but then it became an exploration of how to visually represent distance: playing with how far or close apart the shapes were, how they interacted, and connected - or didn’t. All of the writing is original; it mostly consists of poems I wrote in quarantine, as well as longer reflections spurred by class discussions. The element of movement is brought into the piece through the series of stills that I captured from a video of myself dancing; I omitted my body - thus leaving a white space - in order to place the emphasis on the shape of my body rather than the image. I also speak of movement - and my relationship to it - in one of the writing pieces.