Site venue – generating ideas

From making the cardboard boxes, I decided to carry on with my Red Light District idea for my locker space and create a series of art work that’ll link to my subject work. I’m very interested in how the women are treated there and the constant laws that are changing to ensure their safety and respect, such as not letting tourists look and bother them for amusement. I was also keen on how an audience of people, such as my instagram following, would react if I released a series of similar scenes of the District.  As expected, I received many strange messages and lots of disgusted family members on the phone. I also specifically followed the instagram rule of no nipples, however, they were still taken down – twice! I’m also holding up one of my “vagina” pieces and photoshopped a ‘peeking Tom’ through my window to make the series of photos blatantly humerous art pieces, making the reaction I received even more interesting. Therefore, I made another page on instagram purely for these types of photographs and art, with a warning for breasts and vaginas, and I’ll keep an eye out for how that goes. This, therefore, became something like a performance piece that I’ll incorporate into my locker by printing the images and framing them inside the room.

 

Here are a few of the messages I was sent on instagram after putting a few of the images up (excluding what my family sent);

 

For my locker, I plan on creating a ‘peeping Tom’ effect by closing the red room (that’ll represent the inside of a vagina and resemble one) with black lace curtains that the spectator will have to open themselves to look into. Inside, I’ll have red neon lights to represent the Red Light District, a dressed up woman made of clay and a bedroom-type setting. Here’s my progress so far;

 

Site Venue – 27/02/18

This week, we were presented Dioramas which currently denotes a partially three-dimensional, full-size replica or scale model of a landscape typically showing historical events, nature scenes or cityscapes, for purposes of education or entertainment.

We looked into artists who all interpreted dioramas in their own unique ways, such as Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, Jean-Paul Favand, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Serena Korda, Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, etc.

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s Diorama, 2004

Blue Peter Thunderbirds Tracy Island, 1993.

We practiced the skill of Dioramas by making one with the first thing that popped into our minds. I decided to make one of a ski slope, probably because the winter olympics had only just happened and we just experienced the ‘Beast from the East”, causing huge disruption and blizzards, causing some to bring out their skiing equipment onto the streets.

I completed my Diorama by using a box (with a French food brand on the side, fittingly), and cut one end off in a diagonal line, leaving me with one open end. I then needed to create my ski slope, and decided to do so by scrunching up large pieces of paper, sticking them together and onto the closed side of the box. I made this side higher, and continuously used less and less paper as I went down to the open side of the box, giving me a base for the slope. I then used the pieces of cardboard I cut off previously and used them to put on top of the scrunched paper, giving me a smooth and flat surface, the stuck them on with tape. Using the paper mache technique, that I’ve never had the pleasure of doing before, I started to top the cardboard slope with toilet paper and PVA glue mixed with water and started to build it up. Using clumps of toilet paper, I made deeper “snow” on the sides and glazed PVA over to make it look shiny. The people I used were from the Winter Olympics, and I printed them out then cut them onto pieces of cardboard to enable them to stand up, completing the wintry scene. This was a very interesting exercise, as I’d never done paper mache before, and it proved that artist can still use “silly” or child-like techniques in their work and still end up with an exciting piece.

 

 

Site Venue – Ways of Exhibiting introduction 20/02/18

We, as a class, looked at different ways of exhibiting work and how to build art from the space you’re working with, be it large or small. We looked at artists, from our own students at Cardiff School of Art and Design like Melissa Mavroudis Stephens (L4) to those who decided to go beyond the planet, such as Forrest Myers in his ceramic chip piece to the moon, titled ‘Moon Museum’, 1969.

We all had a box each and planned out ideas on how to use them to exhibit our work, and then use them later on during this project for our locker exhibition. My immediate idea was to create a room in the red light district, since I visited last winter and have quite a few opinions on them. I really like the idea that the sex workers are genuinely cared for and have laws to protect them, and I also like how they make money from ‘playing’ the objectifying game, that’s usually against women, to make a living. I’ve started quite a few sketches and I’ve already painted the outside of my box black, and the inside red. I want the inside to look as comfortable as I can – almost like a home – to emphasise how much safer women are when sex work is legalised.

I started by making plans in my sketchbook of what I was planning on making for my “red room2, including curtains, a bed, photographs, etc. I also planned on using luxurious fabrics to add to the sexual feel of the room, including black lace and red velvet.

I started the box by making sure it was sturdy by taping all of the fragile areas, then proceeded to paint the outside black and the inside red with acrylic paint.

I began by making my framed photographs of various humorous images I found online, including a women with very large breasts, a man with “moobs”, a rat positioned as a phallus and an “I Love Penis” sign. I also decided on making the curtains out of lace, which plays with fetish, eroticism and teasing.

I hung all of the photographs on the back wall to enable them to be visible for all viewers, then created a bed out of cardboard and red velvet fabric, with red velvet and black lace pillows. I was also playing with where the mystery woman was going to stand, positioning her in various areas of the room and debating on giving her features of painting her entirely black, creating an ambiguous character.

I finally decided on painting her black, almost letting the viewer become her if they wished to, making her character relatable and fit well with how sex workers are dehumanised in countries that make them criminals. Below are images of the final display I made;

I tried taking pictures using a red light, which worked by making the inside look eerie and mysterious, but it didn’t show much of the room, leaving me undecided about how I want to exhibit the piece. I might invest in some red neon lights and take pictures with them inside, which should give a really intense look to the images.

We, as a class, looked at different ways of exhibiting work and how to build art from the space you’re working with, be it large or small. We looked at artists, from our own students at Cardiff School of Art and Design like Melissa Mavroudis Stephens (L4) to those who decided to go beyond the planet, such as Forrest Myers in his ceramic chip piece to the moon, titled ‘Moon Museum’, 1969.

We all had a box each and planned out ideas on how to use them to exhibit our work, and then use them later on during this project for our locker exhibition. My immediate idea was to create a room in the red light district, since I visited last winter and have quite a few opinions on them. I really like the idea that the sex workers are genuinely cared for and have laws to protect them, and I also like how they make money from ‘playing’ the objectifying game, that’s usually against women, to make a living. I’ve started quite a few sketches and I’ve already painted the outside of my box black, and the inside red. I want the inside to look as comfortable as I can – almost like a home – to emphasise how much safer women are when sex work is legalised.

I started by making plans in my sketchbook of what I was planning on making for my “red room2, including curtains, a bed, photographs, etc. I also planned on using luxurious fabrics to add to the sexual feel of the room, including black lace and red velvet.

I started the box by making sure it was sturdy by taping all of the fragile areas, then proceeded to paint the outside black and the inside red with acrylic paint.

I began by making my framed photographs of various humorous images I found online, including a women with very large breasts, a man with “moobs”, a rat positioned as a phallus and an “I Love Penis” sign. I also decided on making the curtains out of lace, which plays with fetish, eroticism and teasing.

I hung all of the photographs on the back wall to enable them to be visible for all viewers, then created a bed out of cardboard and red velvet fabric, with red velvet and black lace pillows. I was also playing with where the mystery woman was going to stand, positioning her in various areas of the room and debating on giving her features of painting her entirely black, creating an ambiguous character.

I finally decided on painting her black, almost letting the viewer become her if they wished to, making her character relatable and fit well with how sex workers are dehumanised in countries that make them criminals. Below are images of the final display I made;

I tried taking pictures using a red light, which worked by making the inside look eerie and mysterious, but it didn’t show much of the room, leaving me undecided about how I want to exhibit the piece. I might invest in some red neon lights and take pictures with them inside, which should give a really intense look to the images.

Critical Debates – Appropriation and The Everyday

A few important questions were asked in today’s debate, including examples from Richard Prince’s and Sherrie Levine’s work, concerning what effect blatantly copying someone else’s work has and what message it’s trying to convey.

Prince removed the text, no longer making it an advert for Marlboro, thus removing its function and ‘freeing’ the image. “Untitled (Cowboy)” is a high point of the artist’s ongoing deconstruction of an American archetype. Prince’s picture is a copy (the photograph) of a copy (the advertisement) of a myth (the cowboy). Perpetually disappearing into the sunset, this lone ranger is also a convincing stand-in for the artist himself, endlessly chasing the meaning behind surfaces. Created in the fade-out of a decade devoted to materialism and illusion, “Untitled (Cowboy)” is, in the largest sense, a meditation on an entire culture’s continuing attraction to spectacle over lived experience. It also begs the question of is any art original? Are we all just copying, most of the time with out even realising, thus making all artists ‘thieves’? Where do we draw the line? By making the copy so blatant, his idea could arguably be more original than any new artwork made in years.

“By generating what appears to be a ‘double’ (or ghost), it might be possible to represent what the original photograph or picture imagined”, Richard Prince, 1977.

 

 

Current progress in my subject area

I’m currently working on a new piece based on female genitalia. My initial idea was to look further into how women feel the need to have different, more ‘perfect’ vaginas, and even result in surgery to trim down their labia. There have been huge internet trends concerning women, and even ones that focus on vaginas, such as the trend of posting a personal picture of worn underwear, and the ones that were totally clean and looked completely unused were categorised as ‘normal’ (more information here – https://mic.com/articles/147620/the-panty-challenge-is-getting-people-all-riled-up-about-healthy-vaginas#.EOocSyOdb). These bizarre and humorous, yet totally worrying, trends got me thinking about making vaginas with the real normality of vaginas, and going a step further and making excess of what’s now considered “unhealthy” or “unattractive”, making them seem as obscene. As I was making this piece with excessive labia, I noticed that it also resembled a maze, tackling another issue of how we speak about women’s sexuality, pleasure and genitalia as a whole. The vagina holds many myths, mysteries and questions. Why? I figured my personal story of not even being allowed to say the word ‘vagina’ until I didn’t actually care, and having to use ”nicer” nicknames solves a lot of the questions. We don’t speak about it because it’s a taboo, leading onto more serious problems in adulthood, from the “orgasm gap”, to women having to endure pain during sex because we think it’s normal (More information – http://theweek.com/articles/749978/female-price-male-pleasure).

I then began taking pictures of this unfinished piece from different angles, one of which is above. I realised how much it resembled a rose, which is historically very well known to be a metaphor for love, passion, beauty, purity (if white) and something of value. I could really use this angle to my advantage, and perhaps create a series of photography pieces based off of this, some might say, overused metaphor; but instead to describe an “obscene” vagina.