By using the medium of film, I can target visual culture in a way that is accessible and familiar to its audience. My intent is to influence and allure the viewer, like the way an advertisement does, but not with the intent to sell. Rather, I want to reveal to its audience the ritual or the process that affects them daily.
My work explores themes to do with constructed identity and idealism given to us by our consumer culture. It is a surreal aesthetic manipulation of the viewer’s perspective . It is designed to disturb the viewer’s sense of familiarity with the semiotics of a commercial authority that affects mass culture subconsciously, and inevitably impacts and controls it, by targeting the fragile anxieties of the human condition through marketing.
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 surreal 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.
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 be not compromised .
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