pistache.

mon coeur.

polaroid.

exploring consciousness.

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/102

3.d

For the three-dimensional project I would like to create a three-dimensional effect on a two-dimensional plane by using Photoshop. With inspiration from “The Yellow Wallpaper” I want to use an already existing image of the female photo subject and make it appear to be trapped by an overlay of floral pattern. I hope just to create an image of just an outline of the female’s face, visually emerging from the paper plane. I want this to further the concept of entrapment: in/by consciousness, perspective, expectations, and external perceptions.

Camp, 2003: Banksy.

For our second image analysis I was considering using installation art from Dash Snow or collages from Hannah Hoch, but I settled on Banksy’s Turf War exhibition focusing on “Camp.” The photograph is by a reporter of sorts for the website Art Of The State that collects images of urban London, but also includes photographs from and of elsewhere (as seen in the Banksy collection. I decided to use this instead of a photograph of the installation on the Banksy official site because I think photos taken by the audience because it presents a more accurate or realistic interpretation of the art. Also, much of Banksy’s work is meant to be part of a spontaneous venue in order to create street-art.

The image is of five concentration camp victims with painted faces and in prisoner uniform. Four of the figures are huddled to the left and one figure is slightly disconnected to the right. They are spray painted onto a cement wall that has been painted shades of gray. The figures do not have bottom-half of their legs, nor do they have feet. From this image their mouths are slightly open: the one to the right with a slight grin. Below the figures on the wall is a bale of hay and a couple of live sheep. These sheep are painted with the same stripes the figures on the wall are wearing. Because the artist has little control over the movement of the animals in the exhibition, it is hard to presume that the image captured in this photograph is supposed to interpreted one way or the other. However, in this photograph the sheep’s mouth is also opened slightly with a similar sort of grin that the figure on the right displays.

There are a great many things to discuss, especially because of the exhibition’s three-dimensional feature. In an installation piece the physical world becomes the canvas, the tools and materials, and the subject. The manipulation of what already exists is the technique. Banksy paints a darker gray on the already grey wall. The color and tonality of the exhibition is relatively dark (with the exception of the paint on the faces of the figures, though these colors indicate a dark humor. The image is broken up by lines vertical on the figures and animals, horizontal on the wall, the hay, and the fence that confines the exhibition. The vertical lines of the uniforms impersonate the bars of a jail and the shadows mimic the darkness behind them. The two-dimensional figures on the wall seem to be frozen in time while the one sheep (in this photograph) is moving out from this time-space and into the present that makes her/him three-dimensional.

The plane and the frame are interesting components of this piece to discuss. As we’ve discussed in other image critiques, understanding the relationships between images (in any visual art) can be done through trying to examine the juxtaposition of them and the position of the images on the plane. While the animals and the human figures on the wall wear the same uniform and are confined to the same space, the figures appear to be onlookers, or perhaps looking onward (referring back to the idea of movement in time). Also, since the animal is three-dimensional and does not offer a flat plane for painting, the stripes on the sheep are less linear, less deliberate, and less symmetrical: there is life. There is an obvious lack of control over the sheep as a subject but this delivers an organic contrast to the bleak desolation of the two-dimensional wall art.

This is not saying that the animal necessarily represents hope or life as anything other than nerves and energy. In fact, the use of the sheep (a herd animal and show animal), the containment of the animals, and the mimicked uniform does not seem offer a different future or state of desperation than the figures on the wall suffer. The animals seem to compliment the painted faces in suggesting this notion of the humanimal: loss of identity, prisoner, and “inhumane” (or unfair and unjust) treatment. The exhibition stirs controversy as it tackles issues of animal and human rights in the way we treat humans like animals and animals like the non-living.

iskape.

1.2.3. sigmar polke:

dream-like. technique. object placement.

4. john baldessari:

fashion art. color. figure distortion. the extraordinary.