The Idea:
Seminar Topic: In todays contemporary society artists show that there is relationship between art and advertising in which advertising can transform into art. What is the relationship between fine art and advertising and how can they spark an emotional reaction in the viewer?
Bridge: For my final project I wanted to defamiliarize beauty in advertisements and fine art through the portraits and characteristics of an individual.
How can words define a person that is portrayed through photos, literature or media? They lose the mystery of all that they are and can be. My goal in my studio project is to defamiliarize the face and our perception of faces in ads and art. By putting words around and on top of parts of the face we see that we label others and in reality people are complex and are not solely defined by the words we give them. We can be all the things people say we are, but we are constrained by just those characteristics. In advertising, people are put on to the covers and labeled “beautiful, smart, funny” but there is much more to the person that just those words. I want to show that the phrases in media and art mask our true selves but not completely hide us.
Inspiration:
- These works and images influenced my final piece because I wanted to use “photorealism” technique in my drawing so that when combined with the words the viewer could not tell but closely could find the details in one over the other and see the physical aspects and personal aspect to an individual.
The Process:
I then went back out and asked people about themselves, what were their favorite characteristics? I began to draw images and combine them with photographs of people in the world that were on covers magazines, celebrities, even business moguls but I saw that they were meaningless. I went back to an exercise we had done in Seminar where we described authors with good and bad characteristics, this exercise inspired the final step of my project. From artists like Chuck Close to Annie Leibovitz I was inspired to combine fine art and media through photography to represent beauty of an individual. My piece would ideally be located in a gallery or windows of galleries so that you could see the pieces and allow them evoke a certain emotion within.
After researching my topic for seminar I wanted to explore fine art in media. To understand this topic I realized that both art and media create an emotional connection to the viewer through the face. I began to ask myself questions and research where faces were apparent and important.
“How is the face important in the emotional reaction?’
“How do words change that reaction or perception of that person?”
“Can putting words on an image change the judgement made by the viewer?”
“Without the words can there be this feeling of openness?”
“Can there be a meaning/connection between the words and the face?”
“How are we defined or how do we define ourselves?”
After asking myself these questions and doing observations and interviews with people I then realized what I wanted to depict. But before I got to this point I started with ads and how words played a role there and realized I wasn’t creating anything meaningful.
First Ideas:
How can we change ordinary images in the media and make them fine art to evoke emotion?
First Draft:
Taking something that is powerful to the person being depicted and making it unfamiliar to the viewer. Here I combined a half drawn/half photo of Emma Watson with a powerful quote that is important to her. My thought with this draft was to evoke emotion through the words. But after my critique I realized I wanted more meaning and it was not about the formal elements of the magazine but rather the subject. I understood that viewers resonate with the image rather than the text and the text just labels rather than uncovers the true person within.
Draft 2:
Through my observational research I realized there is so much to a human beings than what they themselves as well as others label them as. I asked each person what they like and dislike about themselves, quotes they feel connected with and literature they read. By just those few things I was able to uncover things I would have never known through just knowing them.
My goal with this draft was to defamiliarize the face and our perception of faces in ads and art. By putting words on the face eating away at parts of it we see that we label others and in reality people are complex and are not solely defined by the words we give them. In advertising people are put on to the covers and labeled “beautiful, smart, funny” but there is so much more to the person that just those words. I want to show that the words in media and in art mask our true selves but no completely hide us.
Final Draft:
This is my final project a triptych of portraits and words. As you can see where I started is drastically different from where I ended. Through inspiration, research and critique I was able to challenge myself and produce a more meaningful and stronger version of my idea.
Links to progress:
Installation:
I see my work in the Whitney Museum next to portraits and photorealistic work such as Chuck Close.
