that's not my name
Title: That’s Not My Name
Size: 91.5 cm x 91.5 cm Medium: Mixed Media Date: 01/12/18 This piece took inspiration from Andy Warhol’s series of polaroids as well as a shared experience in the trans community. Using pictures of trans people when they were young, generally happy memories shown, I showed a duality of having nostalgia for good times but having them turn bad in retrospect. Wanting to disown that you but wanting to hold onto those good memories as well. I turned these photographs into polaroids to show nostalgia and burned them to show the bitterness. |
Artist Inspiration
The inspiration for this piece was Andy Warhol, with a focus on the artist's Polaroids and some of his themes in other works. It is said that Warhol took thousands of pictures over his lifetime, favoring friends, artists, and other celebrities as well as himself as the subjects of these portraits. Whether these were manufactured/posed pictures or not the obsession with documenting life in an imperative factor of these works and transfer to my own work. Warhol's other works- such as his famous paintings of soup cans- have different themes entirely; while the Polaroids were concerned with creating interesting documentation of celebrities, many of Warhol's other works were of common or uninteresting objects that could be re-purposed as a piece of art. This theme of overlooked or uninteresting objects being made the center of a piece is also used in my own work. together the intimate and immediate documentation provided by a Polaroid is paired with taking an ordinary picture and making it more meaningful simply by presenting it differently; a Polaroid that's burned in very specific places.
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Andy Warhol, Candy Darling 1969 © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.
Andy Warhol, Campbell's Soup Cans 1962. Museum of Modern Art.
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Research
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While many of the photos used were old, they weren't done with Polaroids. The effects used to create the Polaroid-look were new to me and therefore had to be researched (the type of overlay created with the gradient tool, selecting color channels in curves, etc.). This also included creating a distressed border, which wasn't as useful as it seemed. After learning how to make a picture look like a Polaroid more tutorials were used to create different burn effects; not may covered the bubbly burn intended, but a popular one was a burn in paper. This method was experimented with and ultimately scrapped, but gave some insight into the process. In the end a piece from a similar image was used and overlayed in specific places on the picture, all based on previous knowledge of photoshop.
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Process
Planning / Brainstorming
Photoshop
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Experimentation
Bibliography
Tindle, Hannah. “Andy Warhol's Polaroids of Pop Culture Icons.” AnOther, AnOther Magazine, 25 Aug. 2017, www.anothermag.com/art-photography/10098/andy-warhols-polaroids-of-pop-culture-icons.
ACT Questions
1. Clearly explain how you are able to identify the cause-effect relationships between your inspiration and its effect upon your artwork.
2. What is the overall approach (point of view) the author (from your research) has regarding the topic of your inspiration?
3. What kind of generalizations and conclusions have you discovered about people, ideas, cultures, etc. while you researched your inspiration?
4. What was the central idea or theme around your inspirational research?
5) What kind of inferences (conclusions reached on the basis of evidence and reasoning) did you make while reading your research?
2. What is the overall approach (point of view) the author (from your research) has regarding the topic of your inspiration?
3. What kind of generalizations and conclusions have you discovered about people, ideas, cultures, etc. while you researched your inspiration?
4. What was the central idea or theme around your inspirational research?
5) What kind of inferences (conclusions reached on the basis of evidence and reasoning) did you make while reading your research?