Exhibit Catalogue Entry

This exhibit is presented by Jaichan Kirty. Jaichan Kirty was born and raised in Guyana, then moved to New York where he now lives and studies. Gathering inspiration from Tom Phillips’s altered text, A Humument, Kirty curate a project that integrates both words and visuals. Like Phillips, Kirty found an inexpensive used book entitled Portrait of Ivan. The Portrait of Ivan is about a young boy coming of age while he is also discovering himself. Kirty transformed this book into new artistic creations both in appearance, using ink, paint, pencil, cut-outs, and folding. Kirty also created a new title and theme for Portrait of Ivan. He had many ideas into the new title but finally decided on one, which is Portrait Van. The idea behind this new title came from the new juxtaposition theme for Portrait of Ivan, which is mysterious and creepy. This is a juxtaposition of Portrait of Ivan because a boy be coming of age is supposed to be nice and pleasant. The opposite of that is mysterious and creepy. In order for Kirty to create these compositions and start changing Portrait of Ivan into Portrait Van, Kirty blocked out a huge amount of the pages and selected words and phrases to emphasize. He then created images using those words and phrases he wanted to emphasize in that page of the book. The first piece of this exhibit is called “So that’s what it looks like”. Kirty has created a new window (a new view) into this book by using over-lapping to create an illusion of a boy, (Ivan) looking through a new page by cutting a square on the next page in the book. Kirty uses an X-Acto knife to carefully cut this square out of the page. Also Kirty uses sharpie markers to cover up a huge amount of the pages leaving out a few words that create its own new story. These words creates a whole new meaning of this page. “So that’s what it looks like”. The second piece is called “inside the house”. Kirty blocked out a huge amount of the page and selected words and phrases to emphasize. “Opening her eyes” and “Photograph of the house when it’s winter”, which he used to create images. The first image is an eye-opening and then he uses white computer paper to cut out the shape of a house to emphasize the “Photography of the house when it’s winter”. Kirty then used the cut out of the house and glued it on the previous page and used sharpie to create what it seems to be the inside of the house. The third and last piece of this exhibit is called “Blue Print”. “Blueprint” was created when Kirty painted over a picture with saturated primary colors. Kirty painted a blue box and inside that box is a print of a foot-step, hence the title Blue Print. After painting over the picture, Kirty then closed the book allowing the paint to print over on the other page creating a paint splatter effect. The resulting work merges image and text for each new project or concept in both courses he was taking COMD 1100 and English 1101.