Niara Knox
All At Once
Prompt: All at Once builds on the visualization of time that we started in the Buzzer exercise. However, you will move away from the NOW and focus instead on longer periods of time, bringing them together into a series of three images.This is about capturing a story in a series of panels designed that are designed to be seen at the same time rather than a sequential medium like a book, or a moving sequence of images like video and film.
In my All At Once project, I depicted three African-American artists from New York who changed their field of art as well as the culture as a whole through the work they created. I attempted to enhance each portrait by adding symbolism from the artist’s lives as well as aspects of the artist’s style to make each one unique while simultaneously making them all cohesive. My intention behind this work was to reflect time through the idea of legacy. Legacy, passing something on from one generation to the next and one person’s life impacting another are all substantial aspects of time. I wanted to show that although these artists were decades apart from each other through time and the work they’ve done they are all connected being a somewhat continuation of the person who came before them. I made the choice to put articles behind them because another way time is shown, as explored on our map, is through written media. Each article is dated and you can see the evolution of time through the way the articles look and how Virgil’s it’s magazines instead of articles. That wasn’t an intentional choice. I couldn’t find newspapers about Virgil. I was only able to find web articles which said something about the advancement of technology reflecting the passage of time.