Victoria Gendreau - artist's statement | Springfield College

Hello and welcome to the art show! I’m a digital web and multimedia design major. I work with the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite but my main focus is in Photoshop. Finding different ways to create an image is something I aspire to do. This freedom series is about what the meaning of freedom is and defining it throughout the artwork. I used the technique of having a starting place and just building off of what comes to mind. The one thing that I used in this series that is new to me is collaboration throughout the community and that is what brought my artwork to life.

The process I used for these pieces was to come up with a common theme and something that would make the piece flow. The theme is freedom and I asked people of different ages and from different areas of the United States what freedom meant to them and what they thought of when they heard the word freedom. Then I decided that these words were going to be the  common factor in all of my pieces. I started off by making the flag because it was one of the most common thing people thought of when they were asked for what they thought of when they hear the word freedom. Another common answer was United States of America. That is where the map came in. The words and colors come together to create the map image. Each state is a different color, designing each state’s outline. The last series piece was more personal. When I think of freedom I relate it to liberty and justice and that’s why my last design I did was the Statue of Liberty.

The reason for creating these pieces was to create something meaningful to me. A lot of the time we wonder do we have full freedom to do whatever we want? But the real question is how do you view freedom and do you have the freedom to do what you need? The process became more community based when I couldn’t think of enough words by myself and I realized other people will have different viewpoints than myself. In the future I can see myself doing more text art pieces because of the challenge and how the result could come out to be many different things depending on the font you use, the scale of the font and the colors used.