Overview:
The purpose of this project was to find a topic that was personally important and challenging for us. However, the topic needed to build a relation to our understanding of Visual Culture. We were also required to create a printed matter like a zine or poster in relation to our studio work.
Context:
On March 30th 2017 students at the New school protested for a safe space for students of colour (SOC). The safe space was to place in which students of colour had jurisdiction over a largely white populated gaze. Now being a student of colour I could recognise how apparent the issue is and that there needs to be some sort of affirmative action to be taken place. However, in my opinion having a space only for students colour may not necessarily be the right path of addressing the issue. With this in mind I decided to focus on the portrayal of minority ethnic groups.
Going to a school like Parsons that is quite art driven and has an emphasis in fashion I wanted to create an illustration of people of colour walking the runway. This is because diversity in fashion is tremendously, critically important. Whitewashing in industries like the fashion world extends far beyond the runway as it plays a critical role in on society at how we see things. If we all become inclusive, we start seeing things in a different way, and it’s actually a better feeling. According to https://jezebel.com/new-york-fashion-week-diversity-talks-but-white-faces-1522416724 a online blog Unfortunately, the comparison too the number of white models on a runway show to that of coloured is quite distinct, there hasn’t been a drastic difference on the runways.
Hence I decided to create a piece that showcases people of colour from different cultural backgrounds who have walked the runway with pride. For which I create a hologram in which we could see models of colour walking. The purpose of creating an transparent glass hologram is used to symbolise that of the space protested in the university for students of colour. Juxtaposing this idea that the glass model encompasses the people from breaking boundaries and stepping outside of this safe space and also is a form of self segregation. In the background I also had the song “Imagine” by John Legend. The hologram was also placed in top of three drawing books, this stood as a metaphor for using ones artistic nature to bing about change societies perception through design.
Materials:
- Plexi Glass
- Glue
- Adobe photoshop
- Primier Pro
- Cardboard box
- Adobe illustrator
- Paper
- Laser printer
- Black ink pen
- Blanket
- Books
Process:
I first began by watching runway clips of famous brands and looking for models in their show that had models of colour, A lot of these clips were from youtube as seen in the image below.
Interestingly, there were very few models of colours from bigger brands and their appearance on screen was shorter compared to their colleges. I then started looking into smaller designers this step was also a bit difficult because I had to select images from the same angle and size. When I finally found a couple videos that I knew I could use I then took a screenshot of every step.
Once I was able to collect a set of images the next step was to crop out the background using the pen tool on adobe photoshop and then saving it as a PNG, this step helped in having the just the figure appear as visible in the images below.
This step was repeated with several times
Using these images wit photoshop I created a GIF form the images in order to illustrate the models moving.
I then focused on building the hologram using plexi glass. As I planned on using an Ipad to illustrate the figures I was able to calculate the exact size of how big I wanted to make my hologram by using the template as seen in the image below.
Each of the sides were converted into inches and the dimensions were remeasured accordingly to the size of the IPad.
I then created the final video using Primier Pro in order to merge and edit the videos as a video for creating a hologram is also quite different as it requires the image to be placed in all four sides. Hence, this required a lot of touch up in order to get the final video as portrayed below.
Final project:
As the project was to be showcased in a park outside I had to figure a way to showcase my piece. This pushed me to make the piece more interactive, where I put together a cardboard box and individual how to climb into the box and cover the portion of their body in order to create a dark room. This step also stood as a symbol and means for everyone to recognise the suffocation that causes in creating a segregated space. The following link illustrates what the final project looked like.
In terms of the zine I took a different approach in support on the topic of the portrayal of minority groups. Through this part of the project I wanted to showcase that women from minority groups do not need to change themselves in order to meet social standards rather they should embrace their ethnic beauty. Hence, I created the titled “You are who you are” that sketched out fashion figure drawings of women from different ethnic backgrounds wearing their traditional clothes with positive writings in different scriptures. Several of the sentences are repeated in order to emphasise on the idea of how important it is to love oneself and their culture. I also kept my focus on women since we are often targets that are criticised in terms of beauty standards.
I also used different shades of paper to represent people of all colour.
Reflection:
With this project I was able to push my boundaries in terms of working with digital media. It give me a platform to explore a new medium and how two mediums could be manipulated to create one piece. This was something that I worked with that was out of comfort zone as the topic that I focused on is quite controversial.