→BRDD BFA PRINT 2027
Look
Look in
Look-ing through
Looking at
Look up!
Last week, the moon looked like a paper cutout pasted onto the sky. I could just imagine someone with a piece of printer paper: folding it in half, scissors slowly cutting out a hemisphere, unfolding it to reveal a complete shape. The moon. It loses its balance. It recovers its balance. Happy to do so again.
Look around.
Stars as points in the sky. The tip of a pencil striking the page once, decidedly once. Dotting, marking, pointing. Do it once, do it again. The stars ring around me and I wonder what it’s like to be the same on all sides.
Don’t look up.
Look at the signs. My black curls feel hot to the touch, sweat drips from my body, the sun burns at its core and the rays travel lifetimes to lay on my skin.
Look down,
I first noticed circles in the morning. Cocoa Puffs swirled in the milk, entrancing me as they moved from bowl to spoon to mouth. Yes in my cereal, then in the ladybugs, next on my foot when I stepped in a puddle of rainwater. My dad and I both have a dark brown freckle on our left knee. Loose leaf paper, pennies, MTA signs, two hoops on each of my mom’s ears. The imagined circle marking the crown of my head. “Circle up!” Now we can all see each other.
Imperfect circles, gestures that suggest a circle, they too point to the circle’s power. Power in parts, or slices, or arcs, or motion. The rings of a tree mark time and motion. The rings on my fingers mark nothing. They’re just circles that I use to decorate my body. The circle can grow in size, without changing in shape, yet shifting in scope.
Screws, hold things down.
Mugs, hold things inside.
Slides, hold bodies in motion
Drains and grates, hold things back.
Containers.
Contained in
a circle.
Forgive my circular logic
Listen.
I like hearing circles in Words
Grow
Long
On
Our
Tongue.
Ouch! Ow! Oh!
So
I chose the circle as my symbol. Noticing turned to discovering turned to seeking.
The circle is my symbol for symbol’s sake. When and where I find it, I am surprised by its versatility. I am attracted to its ability to divide itself or grow, its balance or tessellations or derivatives. I love how the outline of a circle can suggest emptiness and fullness. I love its utility and sense of adornment, the way our clothes place our bodies inside of circles, how the simple smiley face summarizes happiness and humanness. With each iteration of the circle, or cylinder, or sphere, I could never explain its totality. The symbol eludes me even as I locate it within and without myself. In those locations, the symbol punctuates my life. It helps me remember my mother’s face. Rain and sun on my skin. CDs playing in my dad’s car. Stretching my body from sun to ground.
For a time, the circle also gave me an enemy. I have to concede that rectangles are efficient, they don’t mind touching each other. Circles tend to demand a little space around them or else risk losing something in the overlap. And, yes, my favorite routes and routines fit neatly inside the rectangular city block, lines guiding me from one swift point to the next. The logic of the rectangle is strict, utterly utilitarian and defined. Making art on rectangles, designing cities in grid formations, that metaphorical box we all do or do not want to fit into, would these things strike me as different if I wasn’t thinking in terms of circles?
I see how the circular tunnel accommodates the long rectangle of the train
How the hexagon approximates a circle with straight lines
Periods signal the end of a thought
Pillars keep things from collapse
Sound waves move and stretch circles in the air
Our profile pictures are cropped into circles and fit into rectangular screens
Our world is held together by screws and thread.
It’s difficult to find materials with a relationship to the circle. I am often drawing and cutting individual circles out of individual pieces of paper. Yet, I do find that some human experiences are defined solely within the circle. Clocks portray time just as the phrase “do a 180” describes radical change or how the wheel inspires us to move great distances. I would like to adopt the circle’s attitude, that ability to turn to a rhythm or spin out of control. The space left behind a circle is a sort of curved triangle. In its absence, I can see how much space the circle takes up. Or how much space you need to create a circle: spin around on a dance floor with your arms outstretched and you will find that people quickly back away.
I can take my hands, shape them into Cs or semi circles, put them together, and hold them up to one eye. Looking through the frame of a circle, the world appears clipped on all sides, focusing on a few points defined in the present. I think of how to breathe through circles, see through them, speak through them, touch things with the little tubes we call fingers. Oh, the circle. I see the possibility of it when and where I choose to look, creating a world of soft edges and bodily suggestions.
Daniella Pozo wants to see reams of circular paper.