Advanced Life Drawing : 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