(This is not my egg; it's the type of egg that inspired my choice of vessel.)
Here's the project-description I ended up posting to our class blog:
. . . My site is underground Chinatown and I've been thinking about various ways to represent its invisibility and to raise the question of what we miss when we choose not to see a community or when we choose not to inquire into one (as seems to have been the case with the Chinese immigrants of that era: the legends persisted for years but clues were ignored or vanished from public memory).
I hate to be too literal or too obvious, but I'm leaning toward using an egg as my vessel and modeling the project roughly after those sugared Victorian-era diorama eggs. To follow this path I'd make a rather large egg--probably balloon size--from papier mache. There'd be a peephole with a door that opens and closes. (Some newspaper accounts of the Chinese underground mention a door (blue or green) marking one entrance to it.) The exterior of the egg would have the appearance of concrete--making it invisible all but for the discrete door.
The interior walls of the egg would be red tissue paper--glued shreds of firecracker paper (remnants of the recent lunar new year celebrations here).
My diorama would be bits of Chinese immigrant culture: photocopied artifacts from the one (ONLY ONE!) box archived at the History Center belonging to a Chinese merchant of that era. I can't confirm whether this man actually occupied one of the storefronts or residences connected to the underground, but then again that's part of what makes this project so revealing to me as I work on it. The artifacts I photocopied were: a photo (probably of his wife), a couple of personal letters, an envelope, and a deed to some land in Texas.
I'm sort of tempted to also include a miniature statue of a Chinese longevity god because it relates to one of the other nearly invisible Chinese immigrant communities reported in the Daily Oklahoman in Luther, OK (the statue was found buried there).
The symbolism of the egg--again, too obvious?--relates to its fragility and stability, also of course its fertility-symbolism (less interesting to me but arguably interesting given the fertile contributions made by Chinese immigrants to Oklahoma. Honestly, what I like best about the egg is a personal connection: as a very little girl I had three or so of those Victorian eggs in my nursery and they were a source of wonder. They seemed like gateways to another world, which is what that doorway to underground Chinatown could have been to more people, and was to some. (For my future project I'd like to research Mayor Shirk's journals to glimpse his inner struggle with the decision to neglect preservation of that area. So, admittedly, one of the people implied by the egg's peephole is Shirk himself.)
As for assembly: I figured a balloon and mod podge would enable me to make the egg. Then I'd need to slice it open discreetly with an exacto-knife to give me access to the interior. Perhaps I'd make a second layer of mod podge after completing the interior in order to re-seal the outside. I could use something like drywall spackle to give the exterior a concrete texture or maybe just spray it with a can of that fleckstone paint in a grayish hue. Not sure how to affix a door. I'd like it to be hinged, though, so when the piece is displayed it can be partially open, giving the viewer the option of ignoring it or looking inside.
Of all of the above I'm perhaps least sure of the diorama. My desire is not to make the interior as literal as it is currently described. I'm still pondering the kinds of images or objects to include there.
. . .
--> Then I revised the concept a bit:
I'm thinking that inside the egg the 'diorama' shouldn't be lots of things but instead maybe just one thing: a simple wooden box, perhaps with an open lid. I might write the Mandarin character for "remember" or "memory" on the front of the box. (I'm a novice student of oriental brush-block painting so the character wouldn't be perfectly shaped but at least I have the tools and the basic knowledge to make it.)
Inside the box I could still place a few of the photocopied objects from the lone archival box belonging to the Chinese merchant. But the viewer could neither see nor access these objects because the peephole would be too small and distant.
This would be a more accurate representation of my perspective, and it would still (to me, anyway) imply both Shirk and the OKC public as viewers of that distant and somewhat inaccessible history.
* * *
Yesterday was our workshop on the piece, under the generous mentorship of assemblage artist Sunni Mercer in her amazing studio. One interesting outcome was that my co-teacher and I had a little clash over whether my project was an appropriate model for the students because it didn't fully realize the criteria in our carefully composed rubric for evaluating the artworks. (I had deliberately hidden my researched artifacts in an inaccessible part of the egg which, obviously, means that anyone viewing my piece would not be able to see evidence of that research in the piece--and the visibility of the research was an important component of our rubric. By ignoring that criterion I was holding myself to a different standard than the students, which was inappropriate and yet I felt my piece needed to keep things hidden because that was the central message of my piece. Clearly Julie was right. And I knew she was right. But I also believed that I was right too! Though my case was not helped any by the fact that throughout our discussion the loftily conceived abstract artwork in question still took the form of a pre-decoupaged football pinata.)
I call it a "clash" only because we both became pretty passionate, and I worried that it sounded like an argument to the class, but it was one of the most important outcomes of the workshop, I think, because it caused us both to confront the fact that we're asking our students to make ART despite the fact that we've tried so hard to treat the artworks as something other than standalone art.
I need to explain this: our vision of the artworks is that they are being produced as a visual demonstration of learning, one that challenges our students to do the same level of research and thinking as they would for a conventional academic paper, but one that additionally challenges them to slow down and operate in an alternative medium that can, ideally, help them incorporate additional dimensions of understanding.
That's a tall order, yes?
But we both passionately believe in it. And we have both committed to plunge into this emergent teaching and learning process with the goal of figuring out how to DO this sort of pedagogy in a way that is fair to our students while also maintaining an appropriate level of intellectual and academic rigor (there's that word again).
I can't speak for Julie, but one of the revelations I experienced during the discussion was my own inadvertent oversimplification of the assessment process: during class the night before I stood at the board rationalized the use of the rubric for evaluating the artwork. Much of the rubric I still feel good about, and I believe it was a valuable process to discuss and co-create that rubric as a whole-class enterprise. But relying solely on the artwork to communicate "research" can result in a bureaucratized artform--an aesthetically unsatisfying pastiche.
Long story short, we're now modifying the assessment to emphasize the oral defense as well as the artwork itself. (We'd planned for an oral defense all along but were continuing to rely on the artwork itself to communicate identifiable research.) We haven't yet modified the rubric to reflect this, but I'm optimistic.
Image source for the Victorian sugar egg w/diorama: ebay
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