For my second assessment task, the collage and the monogram which was converted into a 6 page booklet. The collage included a quote from Irma Bloom "I Like Ugly, Raw Work" which for the lettering I used a variation of letters cut out from magazines to form the letters and I had placed them in a regular fashion but I put the second half of the quote on the other side of the page. For the images my process was the same. In choosing images I decided to go with the idea that since the quote was "I Like Ugly, Raw Work" to include images that blended both nice things and ugly things this would involved images of flowers and beautiful vintage post stamps as the nice things and the photos of "ugly" things such as the rugby union poster and the photo of the advertisement saying "On This Day" displaying news of a bushfire. By using this theme I wanted to emphasise the idea that these relate to gender or more specifically the gender binaries that are often present in our society. From my own perspective as a woman I find that there are certain ideas that are fed as a narrative to myself and other young women that this is the way women should be and if you act or dress in a way that is outside of this binary then you are looked at as "weird" or even worse "not a proper lady". I showed this idea through other pictures such as women surfing since I had watched a movie recently "Puberty Blues" which links a lot of these ideas of the ways women should act which includes not partaking in activities the same ways as men do and simply watching from the side lines as if to reinforce the idea to just "sit and look pretty". But I wanted to include the pictures of these women surfing showing my own moral and political ideas as a female artist.
In terms of challenges, it was difficult for me to link the themes in my booklet and in terms of the collage to specific characteristics of design movements such as in the Constructivist movement there is a very distinctive style due to the black, white and red colour palette and the underlying political messaging that is blatant in the design movement. In my opinion, you could loosely link my work to movements such as Pop Art or more Modernist eras as it's ideas revolve around the left spectrum of politics and focus on the challenging of gender norms. However, in my poster the ideas to challenge these ideas comes from a more serious angle then an artist like Roy Lichtenstein who uses the theme of parody to communicate his message. I also found it challenging to become comfortable with keeping my work simple, especially in terms of the monogram and the fonts in the booklet to ensure that they could be seen by the person viewing the book I often had to resist temptation to make the fonts and the way that sentences and paragraphs look unique and interesting and just stick to something more toned down and simple of a design. Luckily I didn't have many challenges with monogram once I had made a decision on the logo. However, the process of designing the logo I was quite indecisive and wasn't sure whether I wanted a logo that was quite sleek and lowkey or one that looked more interesting and modern and more colour. My first conceptual breakthrough was similar to an idea that I have discussed previously to stick with a design that is simple and more lowkey as opposed to one that is more unique and interesting in the format of the design and more specifically the choice of colours, fonts and backgrounds in the collage, this idea came from a discussion I had with my lecturer who said that there would be no need to go to over the top with the idea. However, I had also gathered the idea of simpler designs are sometimes better and this would be true in the example of luxury designer company's logo Chanel, as this is a logo that has been around for over 100 years and is one of the most easily recognisable logos other than McDonalds and although the brand has a controversial history the ideas of simplicity still remain. my second conceptual breakthrough came through the design concept of challenging social ideas. This theme would be prevalent through eras like Pop Art as artists such as Andy Warhol and his famous work "Campbell's Soup" (1967) and challenged ideas from using commercialised products like these, he showcases the economic norms of capitalism that these products have become such as prominent part of daily life for him as an American and is further linked to the idea that in our western society it is difficult for capitalism to be avoided.
In conclusion, in my second assessment task I was successful in linking the associations in design movements and more specifically their concepts such as in Pop Art using art to challenge social norms. In my piece, I believe I could improve on providing more clear understanding of communicating the visual communication such as using a clearer colour palette to indicate different design movements I drew inspiration from. I believe I was successful in achieving the final outcome for this assessment that I had communicated the idea of the difference between "Ugly and Raw" and contrasting this with both images of flowers as pretty things and things that would be considered "ugly" through the image of rugby union and how I interpreted this to show how gender roles applied to my assessment and I believe I was successful in submitting an assessment that communicated this message in a clean and effective way.
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