Appropriation: Victoria Van Dyke

Her work focuses on ideas of cannibalism, snakes, guns, religion, sexuality and censorship. During 2006 Van Dyke started creating digital collages using vintage erotica, old postcards, pornography, photos of guns, flags, etc to create a new series called "Guns, Sex and Jesus".

I’m very interested in her religious centered work. What I found with this image titled ‘Virgin Mary, is the interesting use of placement and imagery. The naked woman being ‘watched’ by a male as she is holding onto the plant, seeming to look as if she were on a platform is very interesting. I immediately interpreted this as a symbol for pole dancers/strippers. Which I found fascinating considering the piece is tiled ‘Virgin Mary’. I think the arrangement of the pattern of crosses is very symbolic, very much reminding me of the British Flag and referencing Christianity and how it is the religion of this country. Or maybe Victoria wanted the viewers to question this particular religion. 

Appropriation: Julien Pacaud

What I love about Julien Pacaud’s work is his use of scale, textures and the surreal dream-like quality his work holds. I am a lover of vintage/retro styling, and so I was instantly captivated by his work. His images come from various areas of old-time movies and television. I feel like this gives the images the cinematic, photographic ambiance that draws in attention. Even though these images have an appealing aesthetic about them, I personally think they have some kind of denotation behind them all. Whether it be political, social or personal.

This image for instance reminds me of some sort of anxiety, such as a personal fear or nightmare. The figures represent to emotion being felt in this situation. On the other hand, it could be an expression of the fish as it is titled ‘Aquarium’. I think the use of human figures is well done in showing human emotion to express the feelings the fish have, being stuck in a glass cage

Appropriation

My next project is based on the title of Appropriation. Appropriation art is the use of pre-existing objects or images with little or no transformation applied to them. To begin my project, I began to research different areas of Appropriation art and found what other artists class as Appropriation. I found a lot of collage pieces, such as Hannah Hoch, and very subtle Appropriation such as Marcel Duchamp. Collage varied from being slightly changed from the original, to using bits and pieces from other to create a completely new work of art. Then some works were as simple as putting a mustache on the Mona Lisa, or printing someone else’s work in a new order. 

Hannah Hoch 

Marcel Duchamp

John Heartfield

Related posts to this project
Julien Pacaud
Victoria Van Dyke 
Final Images

Documentary: Finding Vivian Maier

During her lifetime, Vivian Maier took over 150,00 photographs. Thousands of rolls of film were never developed. Her work was discovered by accident after she fell behind with payments on the storage lockers where she kept the rolls of film, cine film and negatives in Chicago. Two years before she died the contents of the lockers was auctioned off to various buyers. Real estate agent John Maloof has acquired one of the larges collections of Maier’s work, and this forms the bias for the documentary Finding Vivian Maier. The film has been nominated for the best documentary feature at the 2015 academy awards. 

I think people are interested in her work first of all. She captured her day-to-day life in a very creative way and her images are very well composed. As there is such a vast amount of variety of images shot in a contemporary way, such as portraits and landscapes, I think there is something for everyone. What was even more interesting about Vivian Maier was the fact that she never showed her photographs to anyone, and yet she wouldn't be seen without her camera. Nobody had even taken interest in what she photographed. The amount of images she had taken and collected during her life was incredible, and for them to go completely unnoticed, considering they were beautiful and she was just a nanny, is a story people was to invest into.

My favourite image. Demonstrating her contemporary style and eye for detail.

During the documentary, I had the impression that Vivian was an incredibly private person and wouldn't have liked all of this notoriety her images are giving her. Some people believe that she is being exploited and that the money from her images aren't going to the right person. Especially since she never had much money herself, being a Nanny wasn't a generously paying job. However, a comment said by a women who knew her for many years stood out to me as I felt it was very true after watching and hearing about her. It was said that Vivian would not have liked all of this fame, but would have loved to know that her work was appreciated, even just by one person. You don't take photographs to never be seen, especially if you take over 150,000. You want to hear good things about your work, and so I agree that Vivian would have been happy to see her images get the praise they deserve. She also was in contact with someone who she spoke with about printing her work, exactly how she wanted it. 


I think Vivian Maier's work demonstrates the kind of person she was. Even though there are so many different images to clearly pinpoint her 'style', I think overall it displays her love of life, and her way of living. I believe she was very content in her position, despite always being moved onto a new family as they began to grow 'sick' of her. She was always welcomed into a family and was given a roof over her head, and chance to explore the world. She photographed many aspects of life from the good and bad, the boring, the beautiful, her habbits and details that no other person could see.

Task: Kate Bush - Wuthering Heights

For my Visual Studies session, we were asked to show a video that had inspired our current project of Fugitive Testimony. Only one video came to mind as this was always at the back of my head during the duration of my project. As I wanted to show a lot of movement in my images, and had the styling planned out, the only way I could describe my vision was to show this video. 
It may be a little cliche to show this video however this was just a perfect match for my project.

Music: Beyoncé - 'Flawless' & Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi

For my current Appropriation project, I am creating a body of work from a Feminist point of view. As I began looking for inspiration, I came across a familiar song by Beyoncé. As I know she is a feminist, I began listening to her music. Flawless is only one of many songs speaking on the issue of feminism, and there is one point in the lyrics that really stands out to me. It is a quote from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi, a Nigerian Writer.

"We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, you can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise, you would threaten the man. Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Now marriage can be a source of joy and love and mutual support but why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don’t teach boys the same? We raise girls to see each other as competitors not for jobs or accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing, but for the attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are. Feminist: the person who believes in the social, political and economic equality of the sexes."

This quote is a very compressed version of the 30 minute speech Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi made, which I very much encourage you to watch and listen to below. This speech filled me with inspiration, and along with the powerful music of Beyoncé's Flawless, gave me a clear indication on what I wanted to portray in my work.

Music: Marina and The Diamonds - Froot

I wanted to share something on my blog as I have become completely enchanted by this music video. 

When I first watched this video, I was completely taken in with the lighting and styling. It very much reminded me of Gregory Crewdson, with the very staged and posed shots of Marina and another man. The blue, spotlighted lighting also reminds me of Gregory's images. I have always wanted to create something very Gregory Crewdson, and with the visuals from Marina's music video, it has inspired me to want to experiment further from my previous experiments with spot lights and gels, and to see what he outcome will be and the effects it can have.

Gregory Crewdson

At around 0.48 seconds, The video seems to have a Kate Bush inspired quality about it. The choreography section of the video screams Kate Bush, another inspiration of mine. Her unusual dance moves, combined with the slight haze throughout the video creates an 80s vibe, and the spotlight as the choice of lighting is very Kate Bush. Take Babooshka, Breathing and Wow for example.

This music video was directed by Chino Moya and the director of photography by Jake Scott. 

Fugitive Testimony: Dark Room Experiments & Final Images

I did some experiments in the darkroom before printing my final images to practice the method and become comfortable in the dark room. For my method of printing, I decided to go with printing with digital negatives. As I came across a few problems with my use of film, I found it much more manageable. I did the usual test strips to know what time to expose my images, and did a few practice prints and test strips. 

               I then went into the dark room the next day and had a good idea on what I was doing. I knew I had to go through the process of lightening one part of an image so I began with this. I set the bulb to a dim light as I previously learned that having it at its brightest only needed a second to expose and this wasn't helpful at all. I needed more control than this so I turned down the enlarger bulb a lot. I then proceeded to carry out a test strip with the exposure of 5 seconds.

 As you can see from the test strip, this began to look more promising near the 20 seconds mark. So I exposed the image for 20 seconds but then used the same method as before to lighten the subject.

 I then began to test strip this image, again in 5 seconds. This seemed to look correctly exposed at 20 seconds so I decided to expose this image as a print, which came out perfectly.

This particular test strip didn't give me the best results as there wasn't enough exposed strips on my subject matter. However around the 20 mark looked promising but maybe slightly too dark for my subject, so I decided to expose at 17 seconds and look at my print and go from there. However the print actually looked perfect from this so I kept it at 17 seconds.

I then did a test strip for my final print which looked well exposed 15-20 mark. 20 was too dark and 15 just wasn't dark enough. So this too was exposed at 17 seconds and I was very happy with the results.

These are the Final Images from my fugitive testimony project. Although for the final prints, they were printed in the dark room.