Booster week – 19/10

From placing the photographs I found of Medusa next to my drawings of myself, I could really see the similarities, including the angle my face had and my open mouth. I though that it was interesting how I mimicked an open mouth for something pleasurable whereas Medusa had her mouth open to scream, creating a contrast between the two as well.

I didn’t have much time to play around with the idea as much because of my essay deadline, but here is what I came up with;

I first sketched out a quick drawing of my face with snakes as hair and a mouth kissing/sucking a snake’s head. I then made a more detailed version, copying a previous drawing I had made of me eating on camera, but replacing to food/emoji with a snake to see what this created. I think it could definitely be an interesting route to take with my work in the future, but I also don’t think I’ve experimented enough with the sexual foods and camera girl aspect of my work yet. I might bring both in to my work to see if I could perhaps link the snakes with the sexual food emojis, such as the eggplant/aubergine with the snake, as they are both symbolic for the phallus.

Iris Prize Festival – LGBTQ+ films

I got the chance to visit the Iris Prize Festival this year, which is a film prize based around the LGBTQ+ community. I saw a handful of really sweet and thought-provoking films, which had a lot to do with other things such as being a young, gay artist, or being a survivor of some sort and female sexuality.

Some of the ones I watched were BACCHUS, RICK, THE THINGS YOU THINK I’M THINKING, and ZERO ONE, which were all well-made and beautiful films that I’m glad I got the chance to see. Descriptions of the films are below;

BACCHUS by the director Rikke Alma Krogshave Planeta which is about Alex, a young woman bored with modern life, is lured by the mythical deity Bacchus into a colourful and mysterious world where she can explore her deepest desires. This was probably the most beautiful in visual terms as it was a constant contrast between a wild and beautiful, circus-like sexuality and grey and dull reality.

RICK by director JP Horstmann is about a gay and deaf man called Rick, and he works as an adult porn actor. The short documentary follows a young man who has managed to overcome considerable boundaries, expressing himself through physical pursuits and finding liberation in the lights of the film studio.

THE THINGS YOU THINK I’M THINKING by director Sherren Lee and writer is Jesse Lavercombe is about Sean, a burn-survivor and amputee (Prince Amponsah) who goes on a date with Caleb, a regularly-abled man (Jesse LaVercombe). After the bar, they go back to Sean’s apartment, where he must face his personal demons as he attempts to experience intimacy for the first time since the accident that caused his injuries, ten years previously.

ZERO ONE by director Nick Neon, which follows Jimmy Park through NYC for the last 24 hours of 2013. He’s visiting home for the first time in years and has nothing to show for his time living overseas in Seoul. But old tensions come to a head when he confronts his homophobic sister over a deeply, dysfunctional family dinner. On New Year’s Day 2014, Jim will learn that the first step to finding your path is admitting you’re lost, which is a bitter-sweet yet promising ending for both artists and the gay community.

Going live on MyFreeCams for the first time to eat a banana – booster week 18/10

My experience was interesting to say the least. I was pretty nervous before hand to go live on camera on a camera girl website, and the process to become a ‘model’ for the site didn’t help with this because it was like applying for a job in the sense that I had to send a picture of my driver’s licence and of me holding it, as well as describe everything about me and what I could offer this community. When I was finally approved, I got a banana ready for the phallic symbolism/emoji link and put on red lipstick to add to me eating the banana as something sexual.

The comments I received were mostly positive, many were even saying “why am I so turned on by a banana” which re-enforced my entire idea of food as a fetish. The users were also offering me quite a bit of money for things like private calls and sexual acts, but that wasn’t why I was there so I denied all of that and kept reverting the conversation back to the banana, and they seemed happy to oblige. However, it did make me think that the fetish seems to go hand-in-hand with being very thin. I’m personally a rather slim woman, therefore to receive a comment that I should “consider going on a diet” to become more popular on the site was interesting to me. From my research, I gathered that many Asian young women are in this food fetish industry, most probably because they’re naturally very slim, and this might be why. I will go back on this site in the near future, but with a lot more food and they’ll all be sexual emoji based. I’m excited for this because it will be really interesting to find out how reactions to me will change.

Below is a video of me going live;

Volunteering for “Sock it to me” by Janet Blackman – booster week 18/10

For the Festival Made In Roath, Janet Blackman had organised a community art piece called ‘Sock it to me’ that I offered to volunteer for during the first Thursday it opened.

I offered to post it on both of my Instagram pages, as well as ‘my story’ on it to get the word out, with the hashtags ‘madeinroath2018’ and ‘madeinroath’ to gain some more attention and hopefully get a lot of socks up!

The purpose of the piece is to get the community together to put their socks up to symbolise loneliness. The missing pair of a sock leaves the other sock ‘lonely’ and forgotten, just like how some people in our communities might be lonely and forgotten. This is to symbolise bringing the lonely people together and make them sociable again.

I helped by putting up the washing lines, putting on the pegs, as well as pipe warmers around the trees so no damage would be caused to them, and then put up posters around the park for passers-by to know what was going on. I also took some photos of Janet for her own documentation of the work she was doing. I then chatted to walkers who were interested in getting their socks from home to put up, as well to Janet about her work, time at university and how being an artist was like in Cardiff, which was very useful. This was 11am until around 4pm, therefore it was an filled and eventful day of gathering information and helping Janet.

Medusa

I noticed that my provocative portraits of myself eating resembled Medusa and her head full of snakes, which simultaneously signifies vagina dentata and the phallus, which would be an interesting angle to take with my work. She’s also a wronged monstrous woman who was cursed out of jealousy after surviving rape, as the myth goes, by Poseidon.

Professional Development – included in the CSAD Made in Roath Festival post

I’ve been included in the CSAD article about volunteering at Made In Roath, where I’ll be volunteering again soon with Janet Blackman. I’m really pleased I got to speak about my time at university and about the opportunities that has come up for me to take part in. Imogen and I wrote for them that ‘Made in Roath is hugely beneficial for your professional development. It doesn’t feel like you’re doing work because it’s such an enjoyable festival to be a part of. This year we have personally taken part in sewing a design on a piece of bunting, to go with the 10-year anniversary theme of ‘we share the same jeans’. We have also taken part in a tie dye workshop, which was a fun way to get the volunteers to know one another as well as creating t-shirts that would show we are the volunteers at future events. We encourage everyone from all years to take part in a festival in Cardiff, especially Made in Roath, to put your foot in the door to the city’s art scene. Don’t leave it until your last year year!!!!’, which we hope will be beneficial for any younger students here at CSAD who are anxious about starting out in the art scene in Cardiff.

Link to the article;

http://csad.online/10fed-pen-blwydd-hapus-made-roath-happy-10th-birthday-made-roath/?fbclid=IwAR2aq-zFZV10EdbbCCpgA9sMs4nD79xOnEcSQ2zmDMgjyw58XmgQSiMRHJk

 

Setting up my account on MyFreeCams – Booster week 17/10

I’ve now set up an account to become a camera girl myself and experience exactly what they do and the ins and outs of the process, including the paying through coins and going live. I based my profile almost entirely around food, especially pizza and biscuits because I feel that using “bad” food might be more attractive for this fetish. I’m really excited but nervous about going live, as I’ll have an audience of strangers who might be getting aroused over something I find entirely normal. However, I might act sexually with my food, depending on what I plan on doing. I almost feel like I’m risking any future career having a profile like this on the internet, even though I’ll be doing everything fully clothed. This has made me think about why I feel like this, whether it’s because there is a lot of shame and stigma surrounding this type of work, and why is that?

This is my “model” application being sent to actually be able to go live and even collect money;

I had help editing a video to put onto my profile ready for when I’m able to go live, as well as a few images I’ve already edited. Here’s the link below;

I had it edited into a pink tint, zooming into the “sexual” eating bits, and also had some of the clips slowed down for a more sensual effect for the fetish aspect. I think it worked pretty well, considering how sexual but humorous it turned out, which is what I’m looking for while I’m experimenting with this subject.

Maria Lassnig

Influenced at an early stage by art movements that celebrate gestural, informal and spontaneous practice such as art informel, tachisme and surrealism, Lassnig developed a singular body of work, making boldly expressive, brightly coloured oil paintings with the human figure at the centre of her compositions. Using herself as the subject of her paintings, they address the fragility of the body, the ageing process and the passing of time.

In 1948 Lassnig coined the term “body consciousness” to describe her practice. In this style, Lassnig only depicted the parts of her body that she actually felt as she worked. As such, many of her self-portraits depict figures that are missing body parts or use unnatural colours. By the 1960s Lassnig turned away from abstract painting altogether and began to focus more wholly on the human body and psyche. Since that time she created hundreds of self-portraits. Most of her work in the 1970s and 1980s paired her own image with objects, animals or other people, frequently with a blocked out or averted gaze, suggesting inferiority.

I’m intrigued most by her paintings that resemble fetishes and obscure sexual references and bodies. Some look like older, bigger men with what appears to be female children, which is controversial but really pushes the boundaries of what we can express and what we can’t, questioning if having fantasies like this is innocent if they’re only in their heads, or if they’re bad and should be shunned. This could also be said for the fetish with animals. Even though the fetish of food seems extremely innocent in comparison to these, I still find them useful in my research.

Julie Doucet

Doucet is a Canadian underground cartoonist and artist, best known for her autobiographical works such as Dirty Plotte and My New York Diary. Her work is concerned with such topics as “sex, violence, menstruation and male/female issues.

Doucet’s work initially stood out by providing a rare female voice in a scene and medium that was dominated by male artists. Where cartoonists like Seth, Brown, and Matt produced work that depicted their relatively mundane lives in great and often painful detail, Doucet’s work is delightfully surrealist in its playful obsession with female sexuality, desire, and bodily fluids.

Her obsession with desire and even bodily fluids works for me because of how it appears “gross” for most, just as watching someone eat an excessive amount would. I think the popularity with this comic might indicate that perhaps people realise they enjoy gross things too, and that everyone has a desire or an ‘odd fetish’.

Lee Godie

Godie’s paintings were created in a variety of mediums which included watercolour, pencil, tempera, ballpoint pen, and crayon and on a number of surfaces such as canvas, poster board, sheets of paper and discarded window blinds. Some of her works were several pieces stitched together in the fashion of a triptych or book. Godie most often painted female busts, which she felt were “an expression of beauty.” Her portraits were often personal: she drew herself, friends, passersby and famous individuals. She also created “archetypal characters… part cultural icon, part personal symbolism.” Artist and design editor at the Chicago Tribune, David Syrek says, “Lee’s painting have an intensity that is not found in a great deal of outsider art.” Art critic, Dennis Adrian called her work bold and strong.

Also included in the array of art works Godie created are the black-and-white snapshots from photo booths she took of herself dressed up in different personae. Godie started working on these in the 1970s. She would take these photos and embellish certain parts of them, adding color to her lips or nails or painting on darker eyebrows. Her photographs are often considered her most “highly regarded, inventive work”. She would dress differently for each photo and add color, words or erase parts of the photos. Of her photographs, Ralph Rugoff, director of the Hayward Gallery in London, says: “These images are very powerful on a number of levels. They’re as gripping as works by any trained photographer.’

These images are helpful for me because of how Godie used portrait throughout her entire art, which is something I’m looking into myself. However, instead of taking pictures of myself through a photobooth, I take pictures of myself through a webcam to mimic being a fetishised camgirl. The way she edits herself for these ‘selfies’ is also important to me because of how I’m now digitally editing myself by adding emojis and figuring out what effect does doing this exactly have on my work.