Game for Change

http://philome.la/epdickerson/byu-married-life

I feel strongly about this because we, as a part of the small percentage of US college students who have married under the national average age, are objects of curiosity and almost derision:

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/02/07/tying-knot-on-campus-at-brigham-young-university-one-fourth-students-are.html

http://college.usatoday.com/2015/02/27/many-college-couples-are-receiving-a-marriage-certificate-before-a-diploma/

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/10/15/college-marriage-facebook/2989039/

The funny part to me is that BYU is the focus of two of these articles, and in the third a reader commented at their surprise that BYU wasn't mentioned. We're obviously a top school when it comes to marriages, and yet we have very few of the accommodations other schools provide for married students (click here for evidence--warning: strong language). My game works against the negative mindset against young marriage as demonstrated in these articles. I tried to write it as honestly in my own voice as I could, to recreate the engagement I feel with the situation. I hope it draws attention to the sides of married life we don't tell single students about as we push them towards marriage: financial difficulty, time management, bad housing, and social exclusion. I mention this on the "debate" page of my game, but that last factor was the biggest surprise for me. When I got married, I expected some sort of induction into the social circle of married people, which I understood from BYU culture to be a much better social circle than that of singles. But the married circle doesn't exist. It's just me and my husband in our own little circle. The act of being alienated from my single friends, especially as my husband is so often at work, has actually been a negative impact on my life. If I could correct one social misunderstanding, it's that singles believe their married friends don't need them or want to spend time with them anymore. That's just not true. I hope my game demonstrates that.

Round Robin

Textual Poaching

Source image: 

"Poached" image: 

 Artist/teacher Statement:

I'm a very pale white woman. In popular art, this gender/race combination are usually portrayed as flawless images of beauty. We still do this today in our art, especially art used to advertise: flawlessness is a great motivator to spend money and inflict unhappiness on oneself. In my particular case, I've always been especially aware of the perfect skin in paintings, such as the glowing ivory tones of The Girl with the Pearl Earring. From my childhood I've suffered from cystic acne, and as a result have been a bit of a lab rat for different acne medications, having visited dermatologists regularly from age 12. In my poached image, I attempted to recreate the same image of the painting and added in (on my face) the medications (or at least some of them) I have taken and (on my hair) the side effects caused by those medications. While I initially felt isolated from this painting and its historical moment by recalling my struggle to meet society's standard of beauty, I realized more and more that women have always been laden with unrealistic expectations of beauty. The woman in this portrait doesn't look happy at all--maybe she had her own side effects of beauty. I think that this exercise would be useful in the classroom to help students stop feeling distanced by space and time from characters in novels or plays, or even the authors of those works: the human experience is shared and similar. This assignment helped me to feel understood and connected to the woman in the painting, as well as other women throughout history. 

Process study

I enjoyed working with the time-lapse medium. In this case, I set the camera on my laptop to take a picture every two seconds, and used software called Time Lapse Tool to compress over 10,000 images into a period of just under 3 minutes. In retrospect, I could have set the camera to capture a picture every five or ten seconds, and I think that would have been better--it was impossible to comply to the 1-2 minute time limit in the assignment because I had too many exposures (originally there were nearly 12,500). But I think that the video very honestly and completely captures my process as a seamstress. 

I chose sewing because I imagined it was something I could do quickly, but I was wrong. Had I selected a different project I might have been done sooner, but the dress took nearly eight hours to complete. While I enjoy sewing, sewing under pressure is extremely stressful for me--I count myself fortunate that the medium does not allow to hear nor see well the moment that I had to unpick my zipper, because due to lack of time and sleep I became very upset at my mistake. I enjoyed this opportunity to explore the line between sewing as an entertaining and fulfilling hobby vs sewing as a frustrating and lengthy chore.