Aedan Price Final Major Project Track

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Whilst at the ‘Masculinities’ Exhibition at the Barbican (Featured in early 2020) I came across the work of Hal Fischer, or more specifically the collection of work titled ‘Gay Semiotics’. The collection features a set of photographs taken by Fischer in the Castro and Haight-Ashbury districts of San Francisco (known for being popular with the gay community). The photographs recall the ‘‘ ‘Signalling Devices’ and visual iconography’’ used by many at the time in the Gay Community. The ‘Castro Clones’ as they became nicknamed duplicated the look and aesthetics of different stereotypes, hence the reference to clones. Fischer has supplied a satirical commentary with the photos, through the addition of labels  to highlight the main aspects of each ‘look’, for what is duplicated and adopted by the clones. In an interview with ‘Another Man Magazine he told the interviewer that his work as a product of the trends of the time, and wouldn’t work in todays fast moving world. Fisc...

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...

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...