Red meat on blue plates with yellow highlights

Red meat on blue plates with yellow highlights
1 Year Project Proposal
June 2025-June 2026
byadiah.com

Now that college ended and I am back home, I will finish my memoir that I find exhilarating for how uncomfortably honest it is. On the surface, this book is about my pursuit of drama, secrets, and adrenaline once I left my cookie cutter hometown. By chasing these things, I subconsciously built a persona that accumulated a cycle of these three things. Included in the book will be my raw and manic journal entries that I religiously hid from anyone in my hometown. I’m thinking about the fact that recording and editing conversations that I have with my community feels very similar to how I’m writing my book. My writing involves taking the journal entries from the time that it happened and the commentary that I wrote a couple months after each semester. I cut and paste to have the hindsight and the current journal entries to have them talk together. It’s a similar cutting and pasting to how I am cutting and pasting community conversations that I’m having with my community.
I am interested in reclaiming this thrill seeker persona. The thought of telling anyone in my town knowing that I am releasing a memoir about my time in a provocative environment such as art school as well as my obsessive secret pursuit of Hot People feels like a similar type of adrenaline that I was seeking throughout college. I am interested in talking to the people who would least likely read my book from my hometown. These conversations will be posted publicly by anonymizing the guest unless otherwise requested. This will draw in the people that were most similar to me before college. I am interested in talking to close minded neighbors, frat boys, hot people (who don’t read) at bars, and more. I am interested in reconnecting with my hometown. The change that occurred from being apart from my hometown during college inspired so much change for my identity. But I still value the time I will spend here before I move out for good, so I am interested in searching for pockets of relatability in this time.
By taking a public facing approach, building a presence online is a personal reclamation for the hidden beauties/evils of my college experience. (The online personas are my best attempt to be the person I was during my time in college, as well as questioning how much of these personas are my true self.) But it also turns my image into something that is almost displayed, decorated, and sold. Like a chunk of meat on a beautiful plate. This leads me to begin the painting series that is tentatively titled “Red meat on blue plates with yellow highlights”. I am also inspired by the idea of being considerate of what I put in my "plate".
The meat is originally inspired by my love for the bodybuilding diet. I find the root of artistic and fitness pursuits to be very similar. Both push the mind’s limits to grow from pain. This is my ultimate intention behind releasing my college lore. "Red meat on blue plates with yellow highlights” will address tensions between these limits. The color palette will be the primary colors; Red Yellow Blue. By using the three colors that can be used to create the entire rainbow, I confirm the intention to push both my physical limits in the gym and my vulnerability in the book’s editing process.
I am interested in how personal belief shapes our character. Beautiful cutlery, plastic silverware, and the absence of silverware tell different narratives of this idea. Questioning what difference does it make to use different forms of utensil or no utensil at all. The tension between flatness and dimensionality will also tell these narratives.