For my final project for Integrative Studio this semester, I decided to base my work around censorship, women, and genitalia in our current society. My studio project ties in perfectly with my research paper in Seminar about censorship of female genitalia in our society today. The project is called “F” is For Fruits and below are the different versions of the project proposals I made for this project (from the initial project proposal, left, to the final project proposal, right).
Right from the beginning, I knew I wanted to create a painting and a series of photographs for my project. For my first round of experimentation, I took photos of fruits inspired my Stephanie Sarley and Maisie Cousins in order to explore the idea of using fruits as a visual metaphor for the female genitalia. Below are some of the photos I had taken and process pictures of me working on my painting.
As I continued working on my painting, I decided to re-shoot the photos to add a more alluring element to the photographs in order to make the over-sexualization of fruits more apparent. At this point in my process, I began to think about how I would visually include the idea of censorship in my collection of artworks and how the pieces would look like in the exhibition space at MoMA.
To tackle all of these problems, I made a collage which utilizes humor to prompt the viewers to think about how censorship of women is used in ads today. I then made a photoshop mockup of what my hypothetical exhibit would look like at MoMA. Below are the works I presented during my first round of critiques.
After my critique, I was able to see my body of work together as a whole and realized that the pieces did not look cohesive. Through the help of the feedback I was given, I realized that although the message and concept behind the pieces worked together, the color schemes and representation did not look whole. The most successful work in the collection was the collage. With this in mind, I decided to reshoot the photography series, photoshop them to include “censorship” and work to add more fruits to the painting. Below are the images from my final exhibition:
