3D Texture Final and Texture Book Critique

During this critique students were told to mix it up a bit and join other tables to critique their work instead of critiquing your normal group.  I joined Marissa's group at Table 5.  The "critiquers" were pleased with how far my piece came off of the wall and how varying depths existed in my piece.  The group stated that the piece was only able to be viewed from the front (which was my intention) because I had purposefully left out the sides to my 3-D objects.  Some felt that this was a bad decision due to the fact that it took away from the piece through the conflict between my intentions and the viewer's intentions of the piece.  Others felt that the open sides gave the piece a duality of being a both 2-D and 3-D, depending on the angle the viewer is perceiving the piece from.  My group also felt that the newspaper was too flat and was only an important factor to my piece when viewed from the side as a 2-D piece, suggesting to give the piece more texture.  Some felt the choice of using yellow to shadow my 3-D objects was distracting and clashed with the black and white sections, a few were actually attracted to the use of yellow.  Since I had chosen to eliminate the "walls" or "sides" for my 3-D object, I created support beams out of black foam to suspend the 3-D elements of the piece.  Two different methods were used in this pursuit of suspension, one being I chose to outline the shape/form of the bottom square using black foam support beams placed at intervals along the edge of the shape.  Viewers felt that this defined the shape and allowed them to mentally "see" the "walls" of my 3-D objects and though they failed to state what principle of Gestalt was used in my piece I felt the above statement concluded that closure existed through my suspension system.  The other, less successful method I chose to utilize required simply creating a line of black foam support beams down the middle of the square, causing the "walls" to not exist.  So technically, my piece displayed closure and a lack of closure.  My accordion texture book was reviewed as not having a lot of variety, requiring more strategic placement of shapes/textures, but was well crafted.

3-D piece

Accordion Book