Erin Wakeland (Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design)
“What are you Looking at?” is a series of public, performance-based social experiments that aim to bring attention to the systems we involuntarily participate in without understanding their implications. I reframe everyday activities like shopping, online dating, attending college, and throwing trash away. I will complete six social experiments that include acts such as en plein air painting in ordinary places like the grocery store, hanging hand stitched banners containing aphorisms in places of commerce, matchmaking college students in an analog fashion, and publicly placing postcards with a prompt to be returned to me, and mending and returning red solo cups from a fraternity’s yard. The final form will be a book that includes a variety of media used to document and disseminate each scenario through photography, painting, writing, and interviews.
