Hi Im phoebe
my final project as you can see is a film, and because its duration is a 5minute loop, I’m hoping you’ll be able to listen to my presentation as you watch the film.
In a visual media saturated society we are easily manipulated unknowingly. This inspires me to take the familiar out of context and exaggerate it to force us to look at our consumer capitalist society in a more critical way.
My work explores themes to do with constructed identity and idealism projected on to us by our consumer culture.
The film is a surreal aesthetic manipulation of the viewer’s perspective . It is designed to disturb the viewer’s sense of familiarity through semiotics and visual representation of a commercial authority. The intention is to disorientate and encourage them to look critically at a system that affects our society constantly on a subconscious level inevitably impacting and controlling it.
What we are familiar with we cease to see, and what I wanted to do in my film was to shake up the familiar scene and display it in a more surrealist way and in a new context, in order to symbolically reveal to the audience a system that is market driven and targets our anxieties concerning appearance, and identity, promoting us to conform.
I'm exploring these themes because I find it interesting to see how society’s ideas of what is 'normal' have evolved and how our 'natural selves' have become exploited commodities. Parts of our bodies are marketed, like our eyelashes, lips, skin and hair. One thing I like to do in my film is accentuate these 'consumer laws of attractiveness' to counter this myth of what is ‘supposedly’ beautiful. I try and do this by exaggerating these conditions, and having my clone like cosmetic counter ladies’ make up applied so heavily that it is falling off their faces; with eyelashes as long as daddy long leg’s legs, and lips where lipstick over rides their natural lip lines becoming almost clown like. I even cover their eye brows giving them an unnatural expression. Basically, I try to pile as many products on them as possible to get my point across.
The film is all played in reverse to unwind back the time and break down the layers of how we are manipulated and oppressed. The film is meant to have no end or starting point and is a continuous symbolic cycle. The peeling back of the clothes represents the stripping back of the heavy layers of media influence that we subconsciously absorb daily. When I developed my concept for my film, Sue suggests I turned it into a short story. This process was very helpful in making me focus on every detail and ensuring it had purpose.
There’s a deliberately very powerful female semiotic in my film (the clothes mound can even be interpreted as looking quite vaginal). I focused on a female bias because we come from a society that has predominantly patriarchal roots, and the exploitation of women as a commodity is more extensive than for men. It is important that we should continue to challenge this subconscious language in our culture today so that our sense of self is not
compromised .
As part of my research I went to Arthur Barnett's to document the cosmetic store, the place is all designed to manipulate and allure the individual consumer, there is a huge sense of hierarchy and authority there that creates a feeling of corporate intimidation which either makes you feel obliged to buy or leave. Their cosmetic counter consultants (all Female) are dressed like scientists in white lab coats giving them a pretence of medical importance and superiority. I took photographs of its aesthetic presence so I could replicate a similar style in my film analyzing its lighting and colour scheme. I also collected sound scapes of the department store and shopping mall. The sound scape is reminiscent of the familiar environment of department store, but by having it in this new context, we see its impact symbolically through visual representation. The sound is in two layers, real time and reversed time. As cliched as it is to have sound in reverse to create a surreal effect, I actually really like it and It is relevant to my film because it is shot deliberately in reverse.
I have been highly influenced and inspired by Matthew Barney during my time at art school. His films have very strong unique aesthetics with minimal sound. His Cremaster films themselves are a grand mixture of history, autobiography, and mythology and present an intensely private universe in which symbols and images are densely layered and interconnected .
My project has changed dramatically over the year. I was originally planing to using immersive techniques of embodiment. I researched lots of immersion artists such as Bill Viola and AnthonyMc Call and I experimented with old methods of illusion art and 3d forms trying different ways to manipulate the perspective and to reflect society's contemporary issues to do with identity, narcissism and ideology. I then moved on to theories more to do with the gaze, playing more with the themes of identity memory and time. I came up with the idea of a thought tank, which was meant to be a pitch black dark space full of thoughts and memories, collected bits of emotive word,s quotes, and fragmented bits of photos all made up of phosphors the chemical that would react to UV black light. I played with the space inside a pitch black cylinder to give it this effect and so encapsulate the individual in a 360 degree space. Critically, I realised this idea was a failure when I had a sudden hideous revelation that this project was just a recreation of the negative head space I was in at the time and I started to feel sorry for the poor viewer who would have to be immersed in it. I changed my project dramatically and started to brainstorm ideas for a film still working with similar themes, but with a focus on consumerism and oppression.
When I was working on changing my first Idea I researched a lot of female artists such as Sophie Cale Tracy Emin and Piplotte Rist who use themselves and their private lives as subjects for their works. They deal with themes of privacy, human vulnerability,gender and identity.
Pipilottes stood out the most for me as she uses a more fun approach to challenge current issues to do with society and the portrayal of women within visual culture. I think looking at these artists helped me process a negative time, and made me clear in the direction I wanted to take my current project.
When I was thinking of ways of going about exhibiting this work, I still wanted to use some of the old immersion techniques I had originally thought of using. I still liked the idea of involving the cylinder as a tool to embody the viewer individually and get them to focus on my work. This idea turned out to be a bigger struggle than I had ever imagined. The resolution of the HD footage would have had to be reduced highly to be viewed on the tiny steady cam screen, that was meant to some how perch inside there. And, the monitor battery life time was also debatable. The rotating cylinder door would have interfered with the cords of the DVD player that was also some how meant to fit inside there, with the person viewing it. The whole thing just became nightmarish and I just didn’t have the budget or technical help to fix this, so I chose a more simplistic stylized approach with the space I was given. Using the HD projector I could make the most of my HD footage and, even though I prefer it on a tiny screen, this was probably the best option in using this space to its full potential as it should, in theory, have more impact. However, this compromise has meant that I now see every technical floor, which to me, takes away from what I was trying to create. Hopefully the viewers will be less judgmental. I’ve tried to make the space as sterile looking as possible to create a vague corporate aesthetic, reminiscent of the department store.
