ADVANCED DRAWING

For the collage collection, I researched different artists specializing in collage work and came across one in particular whose work I really resonated with. I really appreciated the work of Bri Lamkin whose works are expressions of different topics including feminism and mental health as well as Earth conservation (https://brilamkin.format.com/about-me). She creates these collages by combining landscapes and prints with vintage photography specifically from the nineteen fifties and sixties, in order to create a light-hearted approach to these topics. I really enjoyed her minimalistic approach to collage and tried to mimic that aesthetic in my own pieces. I really love how she uses a combination of black and white and colored photographs and plays around with the depth of the collage as a whole. I think that this technique works well with the concepts she is trying to portray in her art. In class, we discussed some of Martha Rosler’s work with collage and I really felt that the message she was portraying was strong and I wanted to try to create pieces that carried a powerful message about the society that we live in. Many of her creations revolve around the narcissistic tendencies of today’s youth in relation to real-world problems such as poverty, hunger, and war. I think that her combination of elements in her pieces really shows the ugly side of the world but in a beautiful and thoughtful way as if not to criticize but to point out humanity’s negative characteristics. With my collage pieces, I wanted to take inspiration from these two artists and create pieces that utilized black and white as well as colored fashion photography and landscapes to illustrate the oppression of women specifically of women’s bodies in the advertising industry and within social media. I wanted to showcase the way that women presently and, in the past, have been treated as objects in order to sell products or just for entertainment purposes. For the execution of my collage pieces, I started by looking at different fashion and art magazines for black and white photographs of women looking at both vintage and contemporary photographs. Then I started looking for different colored landscapes and interesting prints of or related to water and/or the movement of water. I also wanted to include gold foil to help extenuate the parts of the body that I was cutting away. On some of the pieces, I cut away the women’s faces and replaced it with the gold foil in order to stress the individuality that is taken away when women are objectified in the media. I also wanted to use the prints that I found to replace other parts of the body or clothing to add some depth to the collage. Another aspect that I wanted to convey was the idea of serenity to combat the issues such as the ones that were discussed by mixing landscapes and adding photos to it. I added it as a way to portray a sort of hope and also to sort of combine the new and the old and show their pros and cons.