Power of Suggestion
Janani Lakshmanan
Major: Mathematics (Astronomy minor)
Genre/Medium: digital art and Chitranatyam (dance art)
About the work: As someone who has judiciously stayed away from the visual arts for much of my life, I have been in awe of all the project submissions of the other Psyche Inspired interns over the last semester. As my tribute to the Psyche Mission and to the other Psyche Inspired interns, I was very glad to collaborate with Ral Vandenhoudt for this Chitranatyam: a dance-drawing. He provided digital line-art of the spacecraft Psyche orbiting (16) Psyche, and it was my pleasure attempting to model it using my feet. I constructed my own platform for this piece, in accordance with the structures imposed by Chitranatyam, by reusing pieces of wood used previously for cultural festivals.
I decided to keep to the traditional route and utilize sand rather than paint to produce my piece, which interacted marvelously with the desert environment I chose to perform in. Indeed, the winds of Arizona have had just as much artistic input in this piece as myself! One deliberate artistic choice I made was to search for the vivid color of the material, as this piece is in honor of my amazing fellow interns, and cobalt blue sand is best suited to represent the Cobalt Class.
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