Ruben Burenstein Creative Project/Essay

My creative piece focuses on the theme of society interfering with relationships by keeping the individuals apart. To portray this theme I first wanted to make a photomontage of me doing a puzzle, but that idea was scrapped as I realized it would take too long. I ended up making a collage that featured mostly people found in magazines or newspapers. The pictures from the collage were split into two categories, people that represented a relationship or togetherness and people that represented society. The people in the society pictures were almost always in a crowd or angry. I put the pictures representing society in the middle of the collage, and then cut the other pictures up and put one half on each side of the collage. This was to represent couples being split up, or kept apart because society was between them. I also included two quotes from The Scarlet Letter that I thought showed a part of how society would view Hester and Dimmesdale’s relationship. The quotes were “Upon his congregation” and “Beloved minister”. When making the collage I bolded “his” in the first quote because it shows how possessive they are of their minister and the things that he stood for. I think that this emphasis on the quote brings more meaning to how people look at Dimmesdale and how much would have gone wrong if the secret was let out. I chose the second quote because it shows how big a part of the community he is, meaning a scandal of that magnitude could really mess up the community.

As mentioned before I was going to do a photomontage based around me making a puzzle. The puzzle itself would have had a meaning towards the theme, but there would have also been creative ways of putting together, like making pieces almost connect but then being torn apart because of society or something blocking the path. I started to do the puzzle over a weekend, but I realized that it would be very hard just to complete the puzzle by itself in that time, and almost impossible to do the creative aspects of putting the pieces together. I brainstormed other ways that I could represent this theme, and came to the conclusion that a collage could represent it well.

 It took me a few days to get started on the collage because of surgery, but I started cutting out pictures of people whenever I could. I spent a lot of time cutting most of these images to make sure that there wasn’t much outside of the lines. The cutting of the pictures took the most amount of time for everything. I wish that I had spent a little extra time getting more pictures to cover every part of the background, but I think the amount that I had was pretty good. I think that my way of representing the theme with the collage was unique, having the people in relationships physically separated by society was interesting. I do wish that I had gotten more clever pictures to represent society, but I think some of the ones that I do have are good at what they’re there fore. I feel like I could have planned out exactly what pictures were going where better, because there were some that I would have liked to be seen but are instead mostly covered by others.

If I could do this project again I would try to find some way to do my first idea. I would look for puzzles that represented my theme, but were less pieces or easier to put together. I think that this idea is much more creative than a collage, and I would have enjoyed doing it more. If time was still a big issue, I would do a collage again but try to organize it in a more creative or interesting way. With more planning on the layout I could make a more though evoking piece for whoever is looking at the collage.