Dawn to Dusk
Associate Professor in the Department of Fashion Design, Kristin Caskey, is one of the five finalists in the Second American Batik Design Competition. The three winners of the first prize will win $7,000 and a two week trip to Indonesia to participate in and see Batik in five different locations.
Kristin’s Batik design, entitled Dawn to Dusk, illustrates an urban and rural landscape in night (silhouette) and day (full color). The goal of Dawn to Dusk is to create a beautiful and complex illustration of disparate ways in which Americans live. Symbols and pictograms are utilized to create a universal visual language. Because of its vast scale and economic breadth, people in the United States live very different lifestyles in vastly differing geographic landscapes. The largest populations in the US are in cities. As city life becomes crowded, expensive and full of stress, and pollution, many people dream of moving back to the land. The country life, of growing your own food, raising animals and working on the land is idealized in our culture where few people farm.