Olson, Jessica - Mug Shot / Assignment #1

        Hello, I am Jessica Olson. 2nd year BFA: Art Studio. Nice to meet you.

        For this first assignment I was thinking about what to work with as my base Item. I couldn't think of anything for a while, until I thought about how it seems many of the things that I have been drawing and making the past year and a half don't go anywhere afterwards. So I wondered who I could/ wanted to make something for (outside of my family where things would add to the clutter of my house), and I chose my mandolin teacher.

        I considered making a guitar, since he mostly teaches guitar, but he has lots of guitar nick-nacks in the studio already and mandolin makes it more personal for me.

        I enjoyed messing around with the 8-tracks during the materials study, and in the Christian Marclay book that Denton loaned me there was a picture of cassettes that had been melted down and squished into cube shapes (they were satisfying to look at).

        This is how I came up with the idea to melt cassettes into the shape of a mandolin. So a mandolin is made of wood and used to make music, my re-creation would result in a mandolin that can't make music, but is made of music. And the cassettes, would be horribly mangled in the process.

        I knew that the melted cassette mandolin would look like a heap of garbage, but actually seeing it made me laugh at just how awful it looks, And yet I still find it curiously marvelous.

        The original idea was that I changed "the mandolin is made for music" to "the mandolin is made of music." But I realized that my mandolin is precious to me, and while this is its own kind of precious, it can never measure up to my mandolin, it is simply an ode (this is not the greatest mandolin in the world, no. this is just a tribute).

        Here is a recording of me (mandolin) and Mr. Christman (guitar) playing "Edelweiss" from The Sound of Music.

Lost Kelpie · Edelweiss