ilikeskiescofa1002-blog

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FINAL PIECE - Is This Your God? 

For this final piece I combined a lot of the ideas that came up in my experimentation. I had set up an altar and placed my materialistic monster and another bunch of stuff painted gold to resemble a statue idol. Below is a dish with money rolled up as incense, suggesting that all our wealth and toil is poured into our desires for material goods, pride, and funnily enough, wealth again. The background music is a 'paulstretched' version of my 10th documentation, which conveys the subliminal messaging and the subconscious idea better in my opinion. This piece as a whole suggests that the god we are really worshipping (whether we know it or not) is our pride and greed. We become the slaves of what we want, and money is a cruel master. 

Ideally in a gallery setting I would make the gold sculpture bigger, and also have a lot of these gold found objects hanging from the ceiling, as well as the music ringing throughout the room in the background to create an eerie mood. 

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Documentation #10 - You Are Obsessed With What You Really Want (uncreativity) 

I am taking words from popular songs and stringing them together to form a sentence. This conveys how popular culture sends us subliminal messages on how we should think and act. I think music is a powerful tool. 

Songs used: [YOU] - 'You Found Me' - The Fray [ARE] - 'We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together' - Taylor Swift [OBSESSED] - 'Price Tag' - Jessie J feat. B.o.B [WITH] - 'With You' - Chris Brown [WHAT] - 'What I've Done' - Linkin Park [REALLY WANT] - 'Wannabe' - Spice Girls 

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Documentation #9 - The Gold Necklace (thinking through materials) 

With this one I experimented with the gold objects and their relation to the individual. I had made a necklace out of found material goods. They represent the things we want and the things we buy. Its clumsy size and rubbish material comments on the folly and vanity of adorning ourselves with these perishable things, and questions the value of outwardly adornment. Don't let these things control our thoughts and identity. What's on the inside is far more valuable. 

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Documentation #8 - Gold in the Box (thinking through materials)

With this one I just wanted to experiment with the effect of putting all these gold objects bunched together. Initially I was carrying the objects I found in this box unsprayed, and I thought it would create quite an impacting and stimulating effect if sprayed. The sickly gold objects contrasts strongly with the plain white box, almost suggesting that the greed and obsession for material goods is the inner condition that bursts out of our facades. 

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Documentation #7 - Unnatural Re-contexualisation (alien methods)

The first thing I sprayed when I purchased the can was a leaf. I was immediately fascinated by the delicate textures of the leaf after I sprayed it, and it looked like an expensive intricately chiseled sculpture. That's when I thought about the actual and the surface values of objects. What is the relationship between what we know and what we see? Is something coated in gold more valuable? Why are our eyes drawn to gold things? Is it our culture that has brainwashed us into desiring the shiny, expensive, and the materialistic?

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Documentation #6 - Son of Materialism (uncreativity) 

This is an appropriation of the artwork "Son of Man" - a self portrait by Rene Magritte. The original image had a green apple hovering in front of the man's face, and was intended to play on the tension between the visible and hidden. By replacing the naturalistic apple with an Apple iPhone, this work makes an ironic comment about the dominance and power of these TNCs and their material goods. The face hidden with the phone illustrates how our identity in the 21st century is increasingly virtual, and there is a sense of loss of our true humanistic selves. It is also a fun play and critique on individuals being on their phones all the time - there is always a screen in our faces. 

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Documentation #5 - Adam the Human Swallows Goods and Sprouts Junk (uncreativity) 

This experimentation is inspired by John Heartfield's photomontage piece - "Adolf the Superman Swallows Gold and Sprouts Junk"(1932). I have used an x-ray of the human body to show hidden intensions and interests. By replacing the inner organs with cut out of found material goods, one questions what humanity lives on, and what we are becoming. Materialism is dehumanising. 

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Documentation #4 - "I AM" (thinking through media) 

Inspired by the image I came across on Google - "I Shop, Therefore I Am" which is a clever parody of the famous quote by Congito Ergo Sum - "I think, therefore I Am". This shows society's shift in values towards materialism and consumerism.

The term 'I AM" is also a biblical allusion - it is the response God used when Moses asked for his name (Exodus 3:14) "I Am who I Am" So by using these found objects as materials to spell out the words I AM also suggests that mankind is worshipping material goods or themselves as God. 

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Documentation #3 - Golden Milk Bottle (thinking through media)  By coating rubbish in gold, the found object material creates dialogue with it's appearance, questioning the notion of value, especially the value contemporary society places on materialistic goods. 

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Documentation #2 - Materialistic Monster (thinking through media) 

By combining all these found objects to resemble human features, one questions what values contemporary society hold, and what a monster we've become. The materials themselves bring meaning to the work. They speak of consumerism (coke bottle), overload of wealth (jewellery), vanity (fake eyelashes), and ephemerality of material goods (banana soon to rot). 

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Documentation #1 - Concept Map no. 2 (Divergent Thinking)

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Recreating film stills 

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Object portrait of Lucy

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Object portrait of Mandy

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Audio portrait of Mandy

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CONCEPT MAP - How Can Found Objects in Art Aid in Confronting Contemporary Issues? 

Assessment 1

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COFA 1002 - 500 words MAPPING

A concept map is a diagram that shows relationships between concepts. It is a tool people use to organize and structure knowledge. It is different from a mind map in that the latter reflects what you think about a single topic, while a concept map can be an organized view of a system or set of concepts. It usually has a central topic or central question which is investigated by branching out into major areas of exploration, then asking and answering questions, then asking again, and so on. A concept map typically represents ideas and information as boxes or circles, which connects with labeled arrows. The relationship between concepts can be articulated in linking phrases such as causes, requires, or contributes to. However, concept maps don’t have to be graphical. It could also be video, audio, sculptural, and any form that shows connections between knowledge.

In engaging with a topic through the process of making a concept map, one ends up with a thorough view/exploration of all the possible aspects of a topic or question. It helps with focusing in on new concepts, while keeping it in context with the whole picture. It also helps linking different ideas together that you may not have realised before, and this process could help you narrow down and decide on what is really important in your map, and what doesn’t matter.

I began by thinking through what I was interested in as a person, and what the artworks I created so far were about. I realised that my artworks fall into two categories - escapist or confrontational. I was concerned with the foundational issues of the world and humanity, and I was interested in making people aware of them and changing how people perceived these issues and the world in general.

So I started off with a general question - "How can art change people's perception of the world?" I recall artists like Goya who used etching as a medium for social satire. Although the themes of Goya still apply to us, how can I make artworks that really engage and challenge and my contemporary society? I searched up artists who challenge contemporary issues, and most of them really used found objects or a hybrid of materials to create or enhance the meanings of their artworks. That was when I decided to focus in my question on –“How can found objects in art aid in confronting contemporary issues?”

            Creating a graphical concept map on the topic really helped me to brain storm all the possible issues and materials - their conceptual strengths/ways of construction, and the linkages/dialogues between the two. It had also helped me organize and situate many relevant contemporary artists into my system of investigation, which also greatly informed my own ideas.

            However, I did encounter difficulty in linking all my ideas together on a piece of paper as some corresponding ideas would be too far away from each other, and making a link was like travelling through a maze. The page ended up looking very complex and messy, and  wasn’t the best for communicating my ideas clearly. So I decided to do a video of my ideas running along in a linear form.

            It was the planning process for this video presentation that really allowed me to consolidate my ideas, as I had to travel along the ideas and linkages on my map to make sense of what I wrote and make other linear links to different artists and concepts. It also helped me categorise my information into groups and summarise them at the end. It was a process of curating my own information.

If I were to summarise the most important point I had gained through this research process, it would be that - materials create dialogue with it's imagery or form, which in turn creates dialogue between the viewer and the artwork.