ROY LICHTENSTEINS REMAKE
For this project, we remade another artist’s work. We chose to focus on Roy Lichtenstein and his two famous pieces of work: The Mirror series and The Drowning Girl. The Mirror series is where our concept began. The piece evoked thoughts surrounding self-image. Thanks to the other piece: The Drowning girl, we were able to physically show the thought behind our concept. This is a very relevant project for both of us since we have both dealt with lack of self-confidence in the past and it is evident to us that we are not the only ones having these feelings.
Our installation is meant for you to be immersed in it. It is important that the viewer stands in front of the mirror to have the full effect of the piece. The reflection will be on the viewer’s face as if they are a part of the installation.
The work relates to the project as we have taken two pieces from Lichtenstein’s vast amounts of artwork and created new context behind them while still keeping the integrity of his art.
While the viewer is immersed in the piece, we want to induce their own personal feelings and connections to our work. We know everyone has had a lack of self-confidence at one point or another in their lives. We want to make the viewer feel less alone, providing them with space where what their feeling is okay sometimes. That is why we have added personal quotes we collected in a survey. Quotes people have anonymously written.
Through our research, we found many artists that have been inspired by Roy Lichtenstein’s work. One artist we looked at was Tunisian woman who remade Lichtenstein’s work but gave it her own context by adding headscarves to the women. By adding the hijab, this challenges pop culture and pushes it to a new subject that may be overlooked by society. This woman wanted to use her art to fight Islamaphobia in a way of making the image normalized. This connects to our work as we are giving Lichtenstein’s work a new meaning that is relevant to us. Another artist that remade Lichtenstein’s work was Jonathan Horowitz. He remade his Mirror series which was relevant to our project. He appropriated his work by giving it a new meaning. While Lichtenstein´s intention was to solely show how mirrors are drawn in comics, Horowitz decided that those non-reflective mirrors would be self-portraits of him.
PROCESS PICTURES:
At first, we thought of recreating Lichtensteins work of art by repainting it using his technique on a mirror. We would project the image on the mirror and use Ben-Day dots to recreate his process. However, this idea was lacking many things and we did not feel very enthusiastic about it so we went on and continued thinking.
We then came up with our final idea. We would still project the image on a mirror but we would not repaint it. We would have it reflect on the wall with the personalized quotes.
These are the pictures we used to create the video. The speech bubbles are edited according to the responses we got from the survey as mentioned before. These images were mirrored in the video:
FINAL PIECE:
We included images of a person using it (me in this case). We thought that making the person sit down would make them think more and take more time to digest the final piece.
ARTISTIC RESEARCH:
During this project we met JR thanks to our teacher Rachel Marks. We learnt how art can truly change the world and make it be a better place. JR has truly made a difference and is a true artist that values his work and won’t let thinks like money get in the way. His work was truly inspiring.
It was key in our project to do artistic research on the artist we chose for the remake. It was crucial to understand Lichtenstein, Pop art and his art.
Learning of a remake of Lichtensteins work was very interesting. As I mentioned before Horrowitz remade his Mirror series. He appropriated his work by giving it a new meaning. While Lichtenstein´s intention was to solely show how mirrors are drawn in comics, Horowitz decided that those non-reflective mirrors would be self-portraits of him.
Finally, I researched about “drawing in space”. David Oliveira was a great example. He took wire and used it to recreate sketches he had make. He drew his sketches in 3D with wire. This was very interesting because it could also be thought of as a remake. Rachel Marks also said that this kind of work is my style. This make me think about how I am starting to research about art I truly like and admire.
