Conextual Studies:
This week, for contextual studies, we were assigned to watch a documentary about the life and times of Salvador Dali. Below are my notes.
The Canadian Artist Cassils’ uses their own body as their canvas, examining and critiquing concept of gender, and its limitations. In the work named ‘Time-lapse’, Cassils undergoes extreme physical change, as they work through a muscle building transformation. This transformation is documented a collage of 25 images, showing the start, middle and end of the transformation. There are four of these collages, one for the front, one for the back, and one for each side. The inspiration for this piece came from another artist; Eleanor Antin. More specifically, Antin’s piece ‘Carving: A traditional Sculpture’, which shows the progression of Antins body as she crash dieted for 45 days to reach “a point of aesthetic satisfaction’’, demonstrating the extremes of body image, and how unnatural what society deems to be ‘good’ can be. Cassils’ work however, focus’ on the gender based boundaries, as they build and shape their body to a masculine ideal, the antethsis of Antin’s work. The simple bla...
In the process of developing this piece I discovered Audrey Jones’ Tinder Diaries, in which she similarly collected many chat conversations she had had on the app Tinder, and used them to create cartoons, which satire the way that men communicated through the online dating medium. The ‘Tinder Diaries’ consist of a series of small single-image cartoons, in a style heavily inspired by the political cartoons found in many newspapers or online. They feature a simplistic usage of colour and line, with minimal shading. The cartoons usually consist of two figures, always with a rendition of the profile picture of the other user, (Bottom left in example no.1, Above) and another figure to represent Jones. The Figure that represents Jones’s side of the conversation is often heavily exaggerated, and devoid of gender, instead favouring to depict an almost inhuman creature. This inhumanity could be self expression of how distant the version of ourselves we portray online is from ‘the real vers...
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