Visual Journal - Silhouette Collage

These silhouette collages have proven really really effective in my opinion. Playing around with some of the left over cut outs from previous experiments, I layered them over existing adverts that I have been working from to creates these body shaped 'windows' looking into the adverts  imagery.

I like the fact that it represents how the adverts are viewed by the audience; through the eyes of attraction and through the female form, existing as the most important aspect of the images.

Again by using several forms and imagery in one image makes for an interesting duality; the audience sometimes only focusses on the background image however on another look they then pick out the form that frames the image, changing depending on what they focus on.

I love the subtly of the forms as a result, and how clean and crisp their outlines are against the dark tones of the adverts.

COP 2 - Proposal

After looking over my work and journey throughout COP 1, I have been thinking over what I want to study next year in context of practice and how it links effectively to what I have been working on up to this point. I feel like I have now reached somewhat of a plan for my proposal.

I want to explore self publishing and zines. This is a subject I have been interested in for a long time and have done writing on in the past, and really want to invest more time and energy in. More specifically guerrilla art and political work; self publishing work that aims to make change and impact politically, socially and culturally. I want to discover and create work that shakes up our society and insights really change in people minds and actions for the betterment of everyone.

This will also tap into the DIY movement and attitude, giving me the opportunity to research into other forms of art and culture that employ similar sensibilities, from skateboarding to music to underground political groups.

There is a strong link between this topic and the one I have been exploring in cop 1. Firstly, self-publishing goes against the traditional publishing methods, such as using big companies and aiming for profit, just like the adverts I have been making which have subverted the profit driven ethics of advertising. Secondly, it explores the uses of illustration and graphic art, aiming to use them for positive and meaningful causes, which is the premise I have been working on all the way through this module. This is the main thing that the likes of Zeegen and Garland were talking about in their articles and manifestos, and I am really keen to continue making work that reflects this view and intention for the discipline. My overarching theme of politics directly relates to my subject also, and will allow me to explore this with more focus and consciousness than I have in cop 1.

Visual Journal - Collage and Drawing

Continued collage experiments, this time incorporating line drawings with cut up photos of the adverts.

Again, these aim to, and somewhat succeed at, portraying the objectifying nature of the adverts. Although the women's identities are included this time, they are still reduced down simply to their female forms.

Just as the photos worked well with textures, they also work beautifully with simple hand drawn lines. In this particular pieces the relationship between the collage and the lines is very interesting, theres a duality present, one between the human hand and the perfected photo, creating a disjointed elements where they do not perfectly align.

The bottom right image was the first in the series and is a little different than the others, I believe less successful. The line drawings are more accurate and true to the photo, meaning the overall image looses that disjointed aspect which i feel is important for the concept behind the project. Also the textures are unnecessary and make the image too busy and crowded. One of the main successes of the other 3 are their simplicity and the contrast between the cut out shapes and the empty line drawings, as well as the scruffy/messiness of said drawings.

Visual Journal - More Collage Texture Experiments, Mixed Media

I am very happy with how these ones turned out! I feel like they are more successful than the textured ladies at conveying the message and purpose of this project and visual journal.

The woman have become even more objectified, the idea of their bodies and form being their only function within the adverts. By removing their faces and identity their personalities and humanity is immediately overlooked; by replacing certain body parts with just textures emphasises the form and shape of the women being the most important feature of them, the actual flesh and substance behind their bodies irrelevant.

Visually there is also something very appealing about the mixed media element of these collages, the combination of photos and handmade textures. I guess it starts a juxtaposition regarding the clean, perfect and unrealistic images of the women and the inherently imperfect and very human marks creating the textures.

Study Task 8 - Evaluation of Synthesis, Reflections on COP 1

In order to start planning for my COP 2 proposal, it would be valuable to reflect on my visual journal work and the journey I undertook through COP 1. I need to evaluate what I have done, what I have achieved, what has been explored and how well it has been explored.

Topics Researched -

• Zeegan Quote - questions illustrations motives and functions, holds discipline accountable for it's voice and comment and substance, expresses discontent with a select trend of work today focussing on aesthetics over meaning. 
• First Things First - discontent with graphic art's sole function as advertising tactic, deems commercial means as worthless, useless and a waste, argues other more important themes and issues the disciplines should focus their energies on, challenging and contesting consumerism.
• Street Art (textures) - Creative visual work in public space other than advertising, opposes financial powers over public space, textures represent humanity and meaning. 
• Sign Painting - Advertising/Commercial but human, laborious and hand-made, contrasting advertising's throw away nature and style, craft driven but traditional and meaningful.  
• Immoralities in Advertising - Male Gaze in perfume adverts, power of advertising on subconscious level, adverts creating a norm and expectations within society.

My Responses - 

• Textures - Time-consuming process opposing throw away nature of adverts, visually aesthetic outcomes with meaning, inspired by street artists researched (Blaqk, Siekon etc).
• Typography - Employing more labour intensive processes to convey meaning, taking slogans and perfume names out of context highlighting their absurdity and negativity, nod to sign painting and more traditional advertising techniques combined with modern advertising.
• Fake Adverts - Creating similar influx of slogans and imperatives adverts use but to sell nothing, creating visual noise but also aesthetically pleasing work to bring to light the bombardment of actual advertising on our daily lives.
• Line Drawings - Taking perfume advertising's imagery out of context to highlight it's nature, creating slightly dystopian feeling to images, taking out identity and facial expressions/features to highlight objectifying, breaking down adverts to their separate elements and portraying them in their bare bones.
• Textured Ladies - Combines labour intensive processes and out of context explorations, creates energetic and interesting images based on glamorous and polished adverts, puts humanity back into adverts and makes them almost more elegant, further attempting to break apart adverts and the images they portray.
• Textured Photos - More directly using adverts, combining elements into one, taking out identity for objectification, more dystopian as uses actual adverts but subverted. 

Reviewing the work i have done, I am slightly struggling to weave the links and relevance of the separate explorations into one coherent and effective theme and thread for the hole project. To me at least, it all seems a bit disjointed and unconscious, each stage and exploration almost separate from the last, even if there is some relevance there. I don't think this is  abad thing, as it shows I have been considering several things and once and have been trying to explore different avenues, but I feel like while I was doing this I should have been more conscious of its relevance and relationship with the previous work and theme that I was trying to explore. This is something I can do more of in COP 2 though; it is a lesson learnt in project management. Always refer back to the theme and purpose of the project and reflect on whether the work is actually succeeding to live up to this or push it or explore it further. 

Theory - Mulvey's Male Gaze

Laura Mulvey's male gaze theory directly links and applies to the perfume adverts I have been working with, as well as the majority of media we consume on a daily basis, from cinema to TV and as mentioned, adverts.

Mulvey argues that women are used and included in images, whether moving or still, for the sole purpose of being looked at and therefore desired by male viewers. They are thus controlled by the gaze, fulfilling gazer's voyueristic, sexual needs. The women become objects, their personalities and humility cast as irrelevant, the viewers subjects who dominate over the objects as a result.

In the adverts this idea is explicitly apparent. The women depicted are nothing more than sources of pleasure and objects of desire, to be looked at and lusted over and nothing more. Even though the products are for women, and the adverts exist to persuade a female audience to buy them, the pictures are still there to appeal to the male gaze. Scopophilia is the sexual pleasure from looking, voyeurism, and also acknowledges the pleasure of being looked at; the female audience is supposed to desire to become the women depicted in the adverts, so that they as a result become the objects of said male gaze.

Many have argued that we are so conditioned as a society and so frequently and constantly exposed to the male gaze concept that we rarely if ever notice it's existence or really consider it's implications. Often times we won't think twice about a sexy female form being shown on screen or on a billboard or in a magazine, we won't see it as anything out of the ordinary or inherently negative. I hope that by taking the images out of context, working into them with textures and rehashing them into other mediums and forms of visual imagery, an audience will be more aware of the male gaze and the nature of the images we so commonly consume. Even if my work isn't necessarily commenting directly on the concept or the imagery I am working with, I hope that it at least brings the images into the light out of the dark of familiarity and cultural and social conditioning.

Visual Journal - Textured Ladies

Combining my previous experiments with texture and line/shape, specifically in response to perfume adverts, I have found a slightly new aesthetic direction for my work.

I absolutely love these textured lady images, based off existing adverts, but subverting them into anonymous, slightly animated versions of the models depicted. I am aiming to keep a degree of elegance with these images, still taking them out of context but by using textures they almost become pieces of art rather than the raunchy and sexualised images they start as. For some reason they take on a different quality, one that is perhaps less objectifying and more respectful and appreciative...whether this is true or not I am unsure.

Again it is still about deconstructing the images we are force fed on a daily basis via advertising, seeing how their messages and interpretations change and alter with the context and the medium used to create them.