Saturday, July 28, 2012

Shifting Perspectives: Let Them Eat Cake.


Fast forwarding a whole semester now, having finished the Diploma in Visual Art. Not without difficulty though. I struggled pretty much from beginning to end and while I managed to get my ideas across and was ultimately satisfied with the concept, I never felt confident with the execution, consistently feeling on the back foot the whole semester. It wasn't even till the end I really understood what I was trying to achieve. And that goes for the course too - what it's systematic process was aiming at. Generally just a difficult semester to gain any objectivity. But success in the end I guess you could say - I learnt a lot. Which is how I would describe my whole CIT education experience - learning a lot in a short space of time: intense.
The diploma brief Shifting Perspectives required the creation of body of work which aimed to shift the viewers preconcieved beliefs on a particular topic. My work was inspired by by a comment by Chanel fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld that went something like.... "This is how to spend your money, but spend it in style. There has never been so much money around here as there is at the moment" which had me wondering at the insensitivity of a comment like that when half of Europe is beleaguered in debt crisis. And thats to say nothing of the millions in the developing world just struggling for subsistence. It put me immediately in mind of Marie Antoinette's infamously insensitive line "Let Them Eat Cake" which set me off on this path of taking a fashion magazine focused on luxury and then satirising both it's text and imagery. Fashion shoots set in a Darfur refugee camp featuring military chic for example. $48,000 Dior bags juxtaposed with sweatshop districts. You get the idea...



A couple of nights before I was ready to present I was all photoshopped out and desperate to use my hands making something so I used one of the cover posters to make a basic zine which I then stitched bits of satirised text and imagery, also from the magazine, into and slipped in between the pages of the main magazine as one of those annoying extras that fall out of a magazine when you open it up . It ended up being my favourite part of the work.....which just goes to show what happens when you finally relax....



PS Sorry for the dodgy grainy photos!

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