Food Porn

For the hybrid body assignment, I decided to combine the human body with food – not just any food, but junk food in particular. I first wanted to focus on the objectification of the human body, and how it makes us reduce a whole person into parts. I thought of how people alter their bodies to make themselves more desirable, just like how in this day and age, the food we eat is made more sugary or more fatty to become more desirable as well. One of the main things that came to mind was the infamous Carl’s Jr ads, in which scantily clad women with large breasts and tiny waists eat cheeseburgers seductively. That nonsensical position that exists in the ads made me make the parallels between sexual objectification and the “seduction” of unhealthy food.

In the piece I have the figure of a man and a woman, their body parts in detached pieces and junk food replacing their sexual body parts. The figures are posed in very sexual positions. The male figure is extremely masculine and the female figure is ultra feminine, to emphasize the way idealized male and female bodies are portrayed in advertisements and pornography. The detachment of the body parts addresses the fact that we often focus on parts of the body rather than the entire individual. The detachment of the heads in particular is meant to show that aesthetics can often overpower our views of who a person is inside.

I haven’t done too much collage before and was unsure of how to approach it. But combining the concept of collage so closely with the concept really helped to convey the message I was trying to communicate. Turning my drawing itself into separate collage elements made me understand the message even further. The over-the-top and almost humorous nature of the piece conveys my feelings towards the ideal image of beauty. The standard of beauty has gotten to a point that is almost impossible to attain by women and men without significant body alteration. In this case I wanted to portray that these alterations cheapen the body, similar to how the unhealthy nature of most foods today cheapens our diet. The parallels between the two show how the artificial is now dominating so many aspects of human life.

It’s interesting looking at my piece now, and seeing how all these elements that are desirable on their own, become almost grotesque and strange when put together. A perfectly slim waist, cupcakes and sausages may seem tempting on their own, but when juxtaposed in the collage they take on a whole new meaning. I feel as though this emphasizes that sometimes the things we think we want only make sense in our imagination, but when brought to life, don’t make as much sense. This is a huge problem with the ideal body image and what people do to attain the perfect form. It is an unattainable goal that will ultimately leave the individual disappointed.

Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition - why is this still a thing?!
Ridiculously sexist Carl's Jr commercial
Sexual objectification
Unrealistic proportions
Objectification of Men

Rene Magritte, The Pilgrim

Wangechi Mutu, Lost in Wonderland

Sandar Reijgers

Wangechi Mutu, Uterine Catarhh

Carl's Jr Ad

Wangechi Mutu

James Rosenquist, Coenties Slip Studio

Nancy Reddin Kienholz, From Cradle to Grave

James Rosenquist, I Love you with my Ford

Vein Vanity

            For the collage assignment, I decided to visualize the act of looking in a mirror. I find that this generation in particular is quite obsessed with vanity. This is likely in part due to social media, and the constant feeling of needing to upkeep a fabricated, elevated version of oneself. We are constantly asked to evaluate ourselves, promote what things are best and hide what things are worse. We are always looking at ourselves, both internally and externally, looking for our best angles, and assuring ourselves that we are okay. My purpose with this piece was to serve as a reminder of what we each are down to our core: blood and bones, atoms and cells, colors and shapes. I hope it comes as a relief to most to be reminded of how simplified we can be. What does a blemish or scar really matter when you remember that it is just a layer over your skin, over your blood, over your muscle, over your bone?  We each have these incredibly complex bodies that keep us alive, and anything that comes after that is secondary.

            I used a fleshy, unusual color for the representation of the woman in the piece. This was largely an aesthetic choice, as I thought it would compliment the pinks and creams in the companion piece nicely. It was also my goal to make this image different from the traditional figure drawing, and changing the paper to anything but white accomplishes that. I used a shiny silver piece of paper as the mirror, as it resembles one. The collage elements I used came from old textbooks and magazines, focused mostly on body parts, cells, and plants. These to me read as he most basic elements of who and what we are as individuals. The separation of the figure from the mirror gives it a dynamic composition as well as mirroring the reality of a person viewing themselves in a mirror.

            I looked to Wangechi Mutu’s work as inspiration for the texture and the makeup of the body. She is able to so seamlessly combine different patterns and elements to form a cohesive skin, blending the edges together so as not to be so apparent. She appears to do this with a combination of light, wet, watercolor painting and collage. She depicts mostly bodies and faces and this was good inspiration for the fleshy surfaces in my piece. Though I sense her pieces deal a lot with race and identity, I can read vanity into them as well.

            I found collage to be very difficult, as the individual pieces I assembled did not seem to blend so easily together as I had imagined. Though with the addition of more and more pieces the melding did get easier, I still feel some areas are rather jarring and artificial-looking. I did enjoy being able to work with drawing outside of a rectangular dimension, and find it to be one of the strongest elements of my piece. 

Refences:

Wangechi Mutu

Frances Stark

Stellarc

Nideka Akunyili Crosby

Bodies: The Exhibition

Aspartame - the marriage of nature, psychedelia and us.

When I think about humans morphing or being conjoined with another entity or object, the first thing I think about is nature. It's what we live amongst, live off of, and simultaneously destroy. It's no secret that nature is becoming something people are wanting to save due to the fact that we have slowly been chipping away at it for centuries. Now many of these things we used to take for granted are becoming precious and bordering on extinction. Nature is something that I took for granted when I grew up. I grew up on a small island on the far north coast of Washington State. Here, there is no shortage of water, evergreen trees, naturally growing weeds, bushes, fields, flowers, miles and miles of grass, fresh ocean sprayed air and beaches sprinkled with plants and weeds. Moving to Southern California changed my perspective completely, and made me appreciate nature in a new way. Because now, I realize that it is something to be honored and even worshiped. I have a very special relationship to nature, and because of this I often incorporate these feelings and ideas into my art work. In this piece, I wanted to demonstrate what it means to me to be a human being living on planet earth in a surrealistic way.

This piece is inspired by aspartame art, which is a style of art created by an artist that uses the surname "aspartame" who started a 'tumblr wide' trend in the art world of the internet. The drawings usually include pink tones, neon color schemes, semi realistic women and couples, psychedelic elements, and most importantly: a clear relationship between the figures in the drawings and nature. Because of this, I've always been entranced by these drawings. I discovered them a few years ago and I'm surprised to say that I have not yet (until now) used these pieces as inspiration in my own work. So what I chose to do was draw a figure that from the neck down appears to be fully human in the nude, and from the neck up is an extension of the natural world around us. I drew a figure sitting with their knees hugged into their chest (the figure is gender neutral) and an array of plants, leaves, stems, and flowers exploding from the neck as if it were the head of the person.

In aspartame style art, the backgrounds are usually bright hues of pink, orange, blue, or purple. I chose to use a muted light pink as the background wash because I love the feeling and mood that the color pink creates. It's very warming, happy, soft, and contrasts the green of the plants and leaves. The figure is also shaded with colors of pink, orange, blue and purple which are obviously not natural or what you would normally see on a human in real life, but I wanted to incorporate the psychedelic elements that aspartame art usually has in it's work, which also bring in connotations of meditation and mindful thinking.

http://flowwvver.tumblr.com/post/131611338344/flowwwerstorenvycom

http://www.online-instagram.com/media/1051242124113708105_1342028680

http://www.deviantart.com/art/dih-leer-ee-uhs-317605328

http://www.deviantart.com/art/blos-uhm-356592676

http://rebloggy.com/post/artists-on-tumblr-ivy-aspartamee/36967933846

Human Cyborg and Nature

For this project I chose to concentrate on the duality between natural and unnatural. In the context of the human form, the difference between nature and cyborg. I also chose to incorporate stylistically the difference between minimalism and complex detail work. Part of the piece is very minimal and simple, but another part is filled with texture and rhythm. I chose to use different mediums for the artwork. I started with pencil to create the outlines and forms. Then I chose to use ink to create the basic outlines and forms of the figure. The more cyborg parts of the figure I chose to use marker with red acrylic. I chose this medium because I feel it best embodied what the robotic and manufactured styles are. For the natural part of the composition, his arm, I chose to use green acrylic applied in a large rush in an almost haphazard manner, to encapsulate the kinetic freedom of nature. The individual leaves were created with ink. The pants he is wearing, I chose to paint it all black, so to keep with the idea of minimalism and create emphasis and weight on the bottom. Without it, the figure might seem a bit hollow. The figure is meditating, because I wanted to capture the human form in a moment of reflection and calm. Hopefully the audience may reflect as well as to what the human body may become as we approach technological advances. 

My influences for this project were, the film Metropolis by Fritz Lang, that depicts a robot and blurry the line between a robot and a human. My other big influence was the photographer Aisha Zeijpvelds, who uses surrealism to make commentaries of society and the human form. Finally, Rene Magritte was a huge influence in how he incorporated elements to the human figure to convey his opinions. 

I want to incorporate this artwork as a part of a series concerning the human form and the expression of inner life onto the body. I enjoy working with minimalism in conjunction with complex patterns in the medium of ink. I aim to create a soft of mandala experience where people may absorb the form as a whole and in combination of all elements, or step in closer and observe each little detail applied in the form. 

Love Song

Upon being asked to make a “humanoid,” I thought of a plethora of ways to make a hybrid body: a cyborg, a mermaid, a centaur—the list goes on. While thinking about this, however, I realized that every time I incorporate the human form into my work, I am making a humanoid. After all, I am making an image that resembles a human, but I am not making a human. They have been converted into a flattened version of a human—their shape has been made two dimensional, their pigment a result of my palette, and they are not portrayed with all of their experiences because they have been frozen in a single moment. As Michel Foucault said, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe." Then, I had another realization: aren’t we essentially creating an image of someone every time we interact with them? After all, we are viewing them from a specific angle, we describe them with limited definitions that we pull from our lexicon, and we do not have a full comprehension of the totality of their experiences. One can certainly argue that we only see humanoids around us: "Ceci n'est pas une humano."

My piece is a visual representation of a love song. I chose to use images of a person that I am very intimate with and have shared many memories with. Using these memories (or at least photos from these memories), I have formed an image of a person that I will attempt to communicate to others so that they can appreciate the beauty of the person I love. Of course, this process in itself is reducing my subject: after all, she is someone beyond my experiences with her, and photographs are too two dimensional to properly express every aspect of the moment. While the piece is clean and sleek, it is also mysterious: it is difficult to see the clear-cut images of the person because they blend with the piece. Upon closer inspection, it is possible to make out details of a human body, but these details are torn away and incomplete.  The limited noir palette makes it difficult to read the details of the images; the only aspect that really differentiates one image from the other is a change in textural portrayal.  Some images are made purely with lines, some made with black organic shapes, some made with different techniques in pointillism. While these images I have gathered are very much separate from one another, they have begun to blend together, and have taken on one connected body as a piece of art. So, while this is certainly a representation of a body, it’s not a “human.” It is art inspired by a person—it contains pieces of their experience, but when it comes down to it, it’s never going to be as fully formed as they are. The product—the art, the song—is, in itself, a humanoid. It represents a person, it is polished and beautiful, but it is far too reduced to ever truly compare to its subject.

"Crowd" by Cyril Porchet

"New Glory" by Happy Red Fish

"Spirit Animal" by Christina Bothwell

"Crowd" by Cyril Porchet

"The Donner Party" by Jim Shaw

"Oh, L'Amour, 2015" by Eugenia Loli

"Pyrite Hands in Prayer" by Daniel Arsham

"True Love" by Christina Bothwell

"Dream" by Christina Bothwell

"Octopus Girl" by Christina Bothwell

https://tidsskrift.dk/index.php/KKF/article/viewFile/44377/84150

http://foucault.info/documents/foucault.thisIsNotaPipe.en.html

http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ854992.pdf

http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic920382.files/Fluidityinself.pdf

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1K8AyLFbG0U

Let Me Take a Selfie

For my collage project I struggled with creating a collage that did not resemble a fourth grader’s homework project. I still feel like my project resembles this; but since I haven’t had a chance before to use collage, I think I might continue with this technique because it allows art to take on a new meaning when pieces from different images are cut and pasted together.  For my piece I cut out distinguishable parts of men and women, such as eyes, noses, mouths, etc., and glued them to the heads of different animals over the corresponding attribute of the animal. I then pasted the mutant animals on the left side of the paper. This placement is used to simulate a selfie, a picture in which one of the people in the picture holds the camera. Behind the animals is meant to be a factory, but it can be interpreted as any man-made industry or building. This building is drawn on a brown piece of butcher paper. The reason for this is to imitate social media filters that are used to make the picture look more ‘artsy’ or beautiful. Around the entire scene, I framed the drawing with four, black-painted, pieces of drawing paper in an attempt to create a frame that would make it look more like a cherished memory that these animals have framed or posted online. With all of these elements, the piece is meant to make a statement about the unnatural or artificial, and the need the human populace has to keep upgrading themselves. Humans see themselves as the brightest and most superior species on earth and are, therefore, always attempting to change the world around them to fit the image that they believe is best. In this drawing I confront these incessant attempts humans make to improve their surface selves and to reshape everything else to their own perspective or image because they believe that is the best. Overall, the piece is meant to poke fun at the absurdity of the need people have to alter and record themselves.

One artist that interested me while creating this piece was Caitlin Hackett. I found her pieces interesting because of the way she combined humans and animals and created entirely new, horrific creatures. Even though these piece are technically not collage, the pieces take on aspects very similar to collage because of the way she stretches reality by giving the animals multiple heads, eyes, and various other body parts in order to create a gruesome but powerful statement. Her pieces also speak more towards my senior thesis because she represents these animals in such extremes to show how humans are affecting animals.

  -Wangechi Mutu

 Hannah Hoch

 Hannah Hoch

Hannah Hoch 

 Lou Beach

 Lou Beach 

http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/about/press/hannah-hoch/

http://www.loubeach.com

http://www.saatchigallery.com/artists/wangechi_mutu.htm

https://blog.lonewolfmag.com/contemporary-surrealist-collages/

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2014/10/surreal-collages-by-eugenia-loli/