The Bad News Diner

Abstract

My thesis project will be the culmination of nearly 10 years of work; a conclusion to a project abandoned because of work responsibilities, motherhood, and Covid. This opportunity to do a graduate thesis is a moment to finish something I started, but also bring to life the one part of the project I never could figure out because of its personal nature. Time and distance has helped me think about how to move forward and I am excited to take this on. The Robot Series project was always about protection. I had often joked that I functioned in the world much like a robot, distanced from my emotions, a skill I learned through a difficult childhood. In many ways I considered it a superpower, in that it contributed my drive to succeed. I started making the robot series by replacing myself in childhood photos but never published them. It was as much a photoshop experiment as it was a personal statement. From there, a much more whimsical project took shape, and took over. I put aside some of that original intent to explore photography, photoshop and my life long love of both miniatures and dioramas. The joy of the project came as much from sourcing the miniature items as it did from the final project. The process brought such joy. I broke the robot series into different episodes. At first, for nearly two years I did an elaborate (more so as I continued) scene for every month, publishing on the first of each month on my website and then as a calendar at the end of the year. Some of those images were personal and held deeper meaning and some were just for the pure wonder of the project. This would encompass what I am calling one “set” of these images. The second set would be “Great Robots in Art History”. As I dove deeper into photoshop I decided to move back to the original intent of the project, and use the robot head to replace the heads of women in famous painting throughout history, often calling on my art history colleagues for suggestions. The results were among my favorite, and most challenging of the series. I learned so much about light and shadow in photoshop, attempting to seamlessly merge the images together. This portion of the project dovetailed into what will eventually be my final set. In each of the scenes from art history I seek to “protect” the female leads in the images with the robot heads. Some were just whimsical images and some were quite serious. There’s humor in all of it but it also was always meant to delve into trauma. The next two sets were travel, most notable the “Made in China” series. Taken over 21 days of nearly eighty thousand miles of travel in China, this series was among my most exhibited and my most professionally photographed. Another travel set was completed in Iceland and was more focused on the contrast of the robot in start natural environments. The travel set would be set three. And this is where things stopped. I had two children, became chair, and we all entered a pandemic. I did all those things nearly at the same time, and my creative process came to a halt, never making it to the final set of images and the original intent of the project: to recreate moments from the childhood that originally inspired the robot as my own protector. A new part of this project will be researching contemporary diorama makers. As I delve into some of that material I am inspired to re-enter the fray even more. For the final stage of this project I will seek inspiration from the journals I kept from around 8 years old through college. These journals both bear witness and create the narrative of these dioramas. My intent is to embed pieces of the journals into the dioramas in a collage type technique and incorporate them into scenes from those stories. I would also display the photo that is inspiring the diorama if there is one. (I think there should be). The project will be called “Bad News Diner”. While that may seem random, the origin of this name is actually what I have always called the robot project but never publicized. When I was a child I was required to go to my father’s house every weekend. Very rarely he would stop on the hour-long drive to his house at a diner. I knew if we were going to the diner he was going to tell me something he was upset about, something about me or my life with my mother. I came to associate trips to this diner with bad news and thus the name bad news diner was born. When I began the robot series I purchased the web address badnewsdiner.com and hope to roll in a web component to the project. What I like about this project is it pulls together graphic design, photography, and 3D diorama making and completes a journey. This feels like an opportune bookend for this moment. My perspective has shifted now that I am a parent myself and this journey has evolved and I seek to reflect that in this final series of images.