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New blog for BFA Honours

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pitchr. Creative is owned by man named Hayden Burgess, Andrew at Depot Artspace who works in the creative mentoring program recommended I get in contact with Hayden.

I believe Hayden does mentoring for creative people looking for advice on selling work, marketing and creating a professional brand. He also works on his own projects, doing illustration works for brands and designing and creating his own resin-cast art toys (hit the jackpot !!) I have booked in a meeting with him on the 30th Jan at 3pm, will take many notes and write them below.

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Depot Artspace

Got to talk to Becks Ireland and Caitlin Manning while they were exhibiting at Depot. I am looking forward to this year because I have already read all the 2023 proposals, there are many really exciting exhibitions and I look forward to asking the artists loads of questions (:

Becks’ is influenced by the aesthetics of digital culture, so when I talked to her about my practice she had some things to recommend I look at:

Dimension 20- a tabletop roleplaying game show, where participants engage in matches of DND. Gives an insight in tabletop gaming communities and culture

Critical Role- DND game done through voice acting

Fantasy High modernized- same premise as above

Crowd of Candy- take off of Game of Thrones?

There’s a dulling cringiness to these titles so I’m not sure if I’ll be able to last long checking them out, but there’s also a lot of charm in things that are cringeworthy, like how cuteness can exist in things that are deformed. 

I think it’s interesting to note that these cultures and communities I’m looking at (video-games, geek and anime expos, tabletop gaming and fandoms) aren’t actually things that I’ve actively participated in myself. I grew up watching friends and our international students engaging in these things, but I never joined them myself. I’m more interested in the communities (and their loyal/ undying engagement) and cultures (it’s almost like a religious practice, where they attend gameplays weekly and immerse themselves fully into that world) than the actual game/ fandom itself.

I used to obsessively collect MTG cards and Dragon Ball or Pokemon toys, but I only enjoyed them for their aesthetic value, I never understood that they actually had their own functions and existence in a world beyond their physical selves. With my current projects I’m interested in creating my own functioning, developed world, but I definitely still hold the visual aesthetics of gaming paraphernalia (game board, dice, currency, game pieces and characters) and packaging as a driving force for the works I want to create.

She also mentioned to use pearlescent pigment nail polish for creating texture on works, I told her about my MTG cards and how I wanted to create limited ‘gold leaf’ editions. It’s nice to hear suggestions on how to customize my cards 

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Alice in Borderland quote

Alice in Borderland Season 2 Episode 2

King of Clubs game:

“If we clear all the games, can we return to the real world?”

KOC: “First of all, what is the ‘real world’? This ‘real world’ you want to return to... It seems that you believe it is the true world.”

“What do you mean?”

KOC: “When you were there, how many people could you talk to honestly and deal with truthfully? Vanity and deception. Shit like that falls away quickly here.

When faced with death, that’s when you see the true nature of people. This word is the real world. Games are true conversations.”

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List

List of extremely popular Dystopian ‘Death-Game’ genre of TV shows/ books/ films and franchises:

The Hunger Games series: districts as archetypes, hierarchies (districts, peacekeepers, the capital), games, watchers vs players, sponsors. Televised

Divergent series (not exactly death game but part of this genre?): factions (dauntless, amity, erudite, abnegation, candor) as archetypes

The Maze Runner series: systematic games, the maze, monsters

Netflix Shows

Squid Game series: different levels, games, systematic games. VIPS. Masks to represent power

Alice in Borderland: reference to Alice in Wonderland, deck of cards, archetypes of the King, Queen, Jack. Suit cards as themes, clubs, diamonds, hearts, and spades. Difficulty levels 1-10. Levels of games. Game-makers and players

....

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Georgia Carr, David Cowlard, Chirag Jindal, Xi Li and Warisara Thomson

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Need to watch this, Junji Ito!

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Japan’s culture of cute library book, second post of selected images

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Kawaii! Japan’s culture of cute- Library Book

Placeholder for notes

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Takato Yamamoto and Heisei Aestheticism  !!

Discovered Yamamoto’s work in high school and still remain a huge fan of his work, I love love him 😊 He will remain as one of my most influential artists

“Influence of ukiyo-e with Japanese pop art and Western gothic art. Yamamoto coined the term “Heisei Estheticism” to define a style of art encompassing themes of darkness, bondage, metamorphosis, love and death. The dark, brutal narratives within Yamamoto's paintings never reveal acts of violence.”

Takato Yamamoto – Exploring the Erotic World of Takato Yamamoto’s Art

Yamamoto’s art is replete with recurring themes such as adolescence and deterioration, purity and devastation, gloom and brightness, terror and attraction. He combines the bizarre and the sexual.

Yamamoto’s subjects are frequently confrontational, capturing your attention with their striking look. Pain and joy, life and death, enslavement and surrender—all of these are frequently intertwined. 

“Takato Yamamoto is drawn to depicting renowned Western stories such as Salome and Saint Sebastian. His vivid representations of sex and death are reminiscent of the works of Aubrey Beardsley, an English illustrator who was one of the most controversial artists of the Art Nouveau era. 

Saint Sebastian was a religious martyr and saint who is supposed to have been murdered during the oppression of Christians by Roman Emperor Diocletian. In literature and art, he is frequently shown bound to a pillar and slain with arrows. He is considered a martyred saint by the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the Oriental Orthodox Church. Since the Renaissance, painters have found the picture of the martyr Sebastian to be a popular topic.”

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Sympoiesis

Ouroboros?

Meaning “making- with”. Nothing makes itself, nothing is really autopoietic or self- organizing.

“Perhaps as sensual molecular curiosity and definitely as insatiable hunger, irresistible attraction toward enfolding each other is the vital motor of living and dying on earth. Critters interpenetrate one another, loop around and through one another, eat each other, get indigestion, and partially digest and partially assimilate with one another, and thereby establish sympoietic arrangements that are otherwise known as cells, organisms, and ecological assemblages.

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Europe’s Wild Men:

“A primal heart still beats in Europe... rituals that hark back to harvests and solstices and fear of the winter dark. Monsters loom in this shadowy heart, but so does the promise of spring’s rebirth and fertile crops.

This connection is rekindled during festivals that occur across the continent from the beginning of December until Easter. The celebrations correspond to Christian holidays, but the rituals themselves often predate Christianity.

Men don costumes that hide their faces and conceal their true forms. They take to the streets, where their disguises allow them to cross the line between human and animal, real and spiritual, civilization and wilderness, death and rebirth. Assuming a dual personality.”

Bear as the wild man’s closest counterpart- in some legends the bear is his father. A beast that walks upright, the bear also hibernates in winter. The symbolic death and rebirth of hibernation herald the arrival of spring with all its plenty. “Becoming a bear is a way to express the beast and a way to control the beast.”

Traditionally the festivals are also a rite of passage for young men. Dressing in the garb of a bear or wild man is a way of “showing your power”

Heavy bells hang from costumes to signal virility- the quality of having strength, energy, and a strong sex drive; manliness.

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KAWS Installation ideas

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KAWS Products

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KAWS library book notes, it was really nice to read this book. All notes are above but will bullet point the highlighted bits here:

OriginalFake fashion boutique, opened in 2006, Aoyama District in Tokyo, Japan

“Skull symbol is usually associated with death, so I tried to make it as friendly and approachable as possible.”

HECTI, 1998 shop in Japan produced KAWS’s first toy edition, fabricated by BountyHunter

His characters described as “awfully cute, yet bittersweet, psychologically charged, sometimes even somewhat sadistic.”

Oversized physical proportions maintain some hint of fictitious origins while standing in reality (about KAWS toys enlarged into sculptures)

Flat colouring, glossy surfaces, round shapes: high-spirited, joyous, inoffensive, infantile and approachable invented characters.

Allows viewers the pleasure of fantasizing and daydreaming, and assert the liberation of the repressed child in all of us

All characters interact with one another, made in response to each other, holds their own conversation. Insight into their world

According to Deborah Soloman, pop artists were praised for “refusing to make art about their feelings”, she argues that Pop Art has been described as ironic, impersonal, and emotionally cool.

Work has a sense of self containment, or emotional distance.

X-ed (crossed-out) eyes prohibit an emotional exchange with the viewer

Soft vinyl plastic material- the smell of plastic is charming.

Function of toys. Dog toys are made to be destroyed and thrown away

KAWS ‘Package Paintings’- hybrid artworks that incorporate design/ package and art/ canvas into a body of work that both serves and criticizes contemporary consumer culture

Die-cut shapes at the back of package paintings that echo the canvas frame- a sort of take on the ‘squeeze me!’ you find in the packaging of a toy

Collaging/ merging process of different characters and images

Draft process is done as a paint-by-numbers activity

OriginalFake concept of duality. Appropriations and tergiversations. Pointing to the fact that we live in a fake world, plagued with contradictions, and that our original creations contribute to that world.

Trapped between two worlds- company/ brand or artist? Navigating this juxtaposition

“I treat T-Shirts like a sketchbook.”

Reception of the work: comparing body postures and assertiveness (or lack of). An excuse to see ourselves. A mirror reflection of the human condition. Interaction with the sculpture becomes social, a conversation

Our desire turns objects into fetishes (discussed by Marx), based not upon by their usefulness, but on the fact that they are sensuous, and ultimately, social.

In our culture, being viewed validates us as the visual subject

Repetition and permutation (changing the order of something)

Power of visual images: domination, seduction, persuasion, and deception. Conveying contradictions of contemporary lifestyle.

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Library books, unfortunately most aren’t what I expected, will still read anyway and make notes