Awesome Grafitti Found in Williamsport

Winter

Proposal for Text Project

My idea for this project is to focus on verbal abuse and how compliments can help overcome all of the bad degrading comments. I want to use my hands a lot for this project instead of photoshop. I'm going to collage words around a person and underneath them to indicate the process of rising above all of the bad comments.

Bird's Eye View: Candles

A Critique on Words

Most of the feedback I got from the class about my project was very positive. My fellow students really liked and understood my message behind the project and went in depth when discussing other possible meanings. Both the students and the teacher thought that the central idea was clearly represented. Everyone asked questions that could help me further the meaning of the piece or even give it double meanings. They also pointed out different ways that the piece could be interpreted. Some of these ways were closely linked to my original goal and others were completely different. The feedback I received from both the class and the teacher really helped me understand both the good and the bad things that are a part of this project and how I could make it better.

Worm's Eye View

Personal Idea: Different ways to achieve success

I want to focus on the idea of success and how many different ways that there are to be successful. Everyone has something different that they are good at, so everyone obviously can't achieve success in the same thing. For the photo itself, I want to utilize color (probably paints) and have hands painted in different colors to show the different paths that could lead to success. The hands are going to be reaching towards something (success) to show that it is possible to be successful in your own way.

Words and Text Final

I really do love the way this project turned out. It is almost exactly what I pictured when I came up with the idea.

Some of the elements were actually pretty difficult to accomplish. Pasting the silhouette of the figure onto the poster board was a struggle because I had to be really precise to save enough room for everything on the board. Cutting out the words took a couple of days because I had so many and I wanted them to be so close to the same size. Organizing the cut out words onto the piece wasn't super difficult, I just had to be careful to make sure that each one was readable and that there weren't any colors right next to each other.

The meaning behind the overall project is simply a person overcoming bullying through the use of compliments and thinking better of themselves. A person is depicted standing triumphantly on top of a pile of degrading words and is comprised of the compliments and "good" words to show that they are protected by them.

The degrading words were made black to show that they are dark and were made with a font that is kind of rough and ruined to indicate that they don't matter to that person anymore. The compliment words are colorful to show their positivity and how they can bring happiness to any person. They were made using a curvy font for a welcoming and positive vibe. Some of the words are larger than the others and they were chosen because they are the words that could have a larger impact on a person. The larger "bad" words are the ones that could really hurt someone's self esteem the most and could be very detrimental if you were to say them to someone. The larger "good" words are the ones that could really make someone feel good about themselves. I really wanted to focus on the text since that was a requirement for this project.

I hope to do more projects with collaging in the future because I really like to work with my hands.

Power: Words and Text

Idea: Collage words to create a person standing on top of a pile of debris in a victorious pose

• Compliments/words that are uplifting make up the person

• Put-downs, insults and degrading comments make up the pile of debris

Ways to obtain the words:

• Magazines- probably too difficult and time consuming

• Online (social media)

• Make them up

I decided to use a combination of social media, other places on the internet and the minds of myself and friends in class.

Statistic and Research:

• 939 active hate groups in the US

• Hate speech: direct and serious attacks on any protected category of people

• 3.2 million students are victims of bullying each year.

• Verbal harassment is the most common form of bullying. 

• According to a study conducted in 2005, one out of ten internet users aged between 10 and 17 are victims of bullying.

• 160,000 children skip school each day just to avoid verbal abuse from bullies. 

• Amongst children, verbal assault is mainly based on the facial appearance and behavior of the victim and not religious backgrounds or racial identity.

• Verbal abuse tends to be secretive.

• 83% of bullying incidents receive no intervention and continue to happen

Sources: nobullying.com, www.hiddenhurt.co.uk, simpleacts.org

http://www.silive.com/opinion/letters/index.ssf/2009/04/verbal_bullying_can_be_just_as.html

I found a lot of articles such as this one that talk about verbal abuse which is the main theme of my project. Verbal abuse is a very traumatic thing to experience and I feel like sometimes we overlook it which can cause serious reverberations in the victim's life. It can turn a very happy person into someone who doesn't feel confident in who they are and contemplates taking their life. 

I chose this theme for my project because I believe that verbal abuse is a serious problem in society today. Using the words that are seen in verbal abuse situations make it more of a reality for me and I hope the audience will see it in the same light.

Some people don't realize that just giving simple compliments (pretty, nice, funny, etc.) instead of put downs (ugly, mean, crazy, etc.) can really influence the way a person feels and I tired to emphasize that in my project.

I was originally going to just try to create the person straight from the words but I didn't think that it would work very well because I would have to be precise. So instead I decided to take a silhouette shot and just paste my words over top of it. It will make the project look more realistic.

This is my contact sheet for the silhouette shots. It took me awhile to get the set up right so that her entire body would be in the shot so that her body would be easy to edit and cut out. 

I found an artist named Jamie Poole who uses poetry to create portraits. hee takes the words from the poems and forms people with them. This is kind of like what I want to do and I think that his techniques could help me collage the words effectively.

This is one of his pieces. I think that his motivation behind this piece is to pick a poem that represents the person or has great meaning to them and then actually create the person from that poem. It also connects to the meaning behind my idea because it represents how important words can be to people and how much power just a few words could have on someone's life. I love the intricacy he uses when places the words next to each other to get the wonderful detail that is seen is all of his artwork. I wish I could collage words that intricately but I would definitely need more practice.

Ransom Note

I actually really liked not being able to plan out what I was doing. It actually took away some of the stress of the project. It forced me to find meaning in a photo that I really had no connection to which is difficult to do but also a refreshing twist. Appropriation isn't really a problem for me because I like trying to reflect on all of the possible meanings for a single picture. The fact that it is someone else's photo might bother other people but I don't see an issue because I am changing the meaning and adding more to it.

My message is that we become corrupted as we grow up. As a child we are so innocent and we don't see most of the bad things in this world. Unfortunately as we grow older we are exposed to the terrible things that happen. I took the picture of the little boy having fun and put this message up to represent how his perspective on life will be changed.

Expressive Words

My word was balanced. The definition of balanced is to remain in a steady position without falling.

Jenny Holzer

Before watching:

• Visual art is related to spoken and written language because they are all ways used for expression and to show emotion. Visual art is a language because it can communicate a thought or idea.
• Artists and writers reveal their authorship in their work by using a specific motif or style that is unique to them.
• Authors or artists may choose to remain anonymous when creating very controversial works, during protests involving their work or in thing like graffiti. They may also choose to remain anonymous to make the audience focus more on the meaning behind the piece than on who made the piece.
• Written and visual information are censored in places like our school or in libraries or maybe in a work facility. They are censored by authority figures such as a principal, boss or even someone in the government.

Reflection after watching:

• Truism is simply an obviously true statement that contains nothing new, but in terms of Holzer's work, truism is an obviously true statement presented in a way that makes the reader/audience think about the meaning behind it. The first person voice used in truisms reflects the meaning onto the reader and allows for thousands of different interpretations of it.
• The meaning of Holzer's truism changes with the objects they are placed on because that object was chosen to further the meaning of the truism. When outside and in public, the truism must be shorter and to the point because most people don't have time to stop and pay attention to random projections. When inside, the truism can be long and can require further thought because people who go inside to view it most likely have the time to see it in full. 
• Information concerning the government and national security are censored in the original texts because the public is not allowed to see that information. She uses numbers, arrows and uniquely painted backgrounds to draw attention the eliminated parts of these texts.
• Holzer believes that signing her work or even being near it would take away some of its effect on the audience. This makes sense because if she is there, people would be too busy asking her what it means and how she did it instead of focusing on what it means to them. Her appropriation of text serves this objective because she is using words and ideas that have been used before but leaving the interpretation up to others.

Definitions:

• appropriation- the action of taking something for one's own use, typically without the owner's permission 
• propaganda- information (usually biased and misleading) used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view
• censorship- the practice of officially examining books, movies, etc. and removing unacceptable parts
• redacted- to edit text for publication

Color and Emotion: Final

My contact sheet consists of the individual colors and emotions and the also group shots. 

My two final shots aren't really what I expected at all but I do like them. I originally planned on having all of the beakers in one shot but the lighting in the chem room wasn't the greatest for any sort of photography. I chose to do the series of all of the beakers because I thought the colors were easier to see and the words are more clear. Some of my shots could have been more focused but I was in a little bit of a rush. For the inverted image, I was trying to get the original colors but it was too hard to edit each color individually so I experimented with different effects. I really loved the way the inverted colors looked but I wanted to change the beakers back to their original colors to still get my original message across. I feel like the "fake" colors aid in the representation of how colors can be manufactured in a lab or by an outside source.

I chose the colors and emotions based on my every day life. The big emotions (happiness, sadness, love, anger and annoyed) occur in my life on a daily basis so they are "bigger" than other emotions. The smaller emotions (envy, fear, passion, confusion, and lust) only occur every once in awhile in my life so they are "smaller" than other emotions.

The individual colors were chosen based on my research and also how I personally associate colors with emotions. Yellow represent happiness because it is bright and joyful. Blue represents sadness because it tends to bring people down ("I feel so blue"). Pink represents love because everything associated with love in our society is pink. Red represents fear because it is a color associated with blood and violence and it tends to draw out an intense reaction from most people. Orange represents annoyed because I just really don't like certain colors of orange and its just a very distracting color. Green represents envy because of the saying "being green with envy". Black represents fear because when afraid, we tend to feel a sense of despair and black is just a void. Purple represents passion because it is a deep and sensual color. The multicolor represents confusion because it is crazy and chaotic which is how your life feels when you are confused. The dark pink represents lust it is darker and deeper than love.

Color and Emotion: Planning

Colors and Their Emotions

BIG Emotions:                                              

• happiness- yellow                                  
• sadness- blue
• anger- red
• love- pink
• annoyed- orange 

small Emotions:

• fear- black
• confusion- multicolor
• passion-purple
• lust- dark pink 
• envy-green

Liquids To Use

• dish soap for yellow
• dark blue gatorade for blue
• red gatorade for red
• water and food coloring for pink
• orange gatorade for orange
• water and mixed food coloring for black
• water and food coloring for multicolor 
• purple gatorade for purple
• vitamin water for dark pink
• dish soap for green

Should I write out the words on the beakers or type the up in unique fonts?

• write them out because that is more personal in terms of emotions

Use different size beakers for small and BIG emotions.

• make love a big beaker but only half full of liquid because sometimes it is a fake emotion
• BIG emotions are the ones you feel on a daily basis
• small emotions are the ones you only feel occasionally 

I went shopping to search for different liquids and it was actually really difficult to find the right colors so I had to experiment with putting flour in the water with the food coloring to help develop the color. I also tried to pick different texture which is why I also used dish soap. 

I emailed a chemistry teacher in the school to ask if I could use the chem lab along with with some supplies (beakers and tape). He said that I could use anything I needed as long as I cleaned up.

I researched how emotions can be represented through color in my last project so I used some of that information do choose my colors for this project. I chose to do this in a chem lab because I feel like emotions today are sometime fake/created. Things we see in media tend to give us a certain emotion and I feel like a lot of them aren't real.

I found an article that talks about how social media can influence emotions and I thought that it related to the idea that emotions can be manufactured and aren't always how we actually feel.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/mar/12/social-network-bad-mood-friends

These are some examples of how I want to set up my beakers in the chem lab. Since my project is pretty unique, it was hard to find inspiration in other works.

Personal Piece Idea

I want to continue to experiment with the use of color and emotion but I want to step away from using people and portraiture. Instead I want to attempt to convey different emotions through object. I plan on associating certain emotions with colors that represent them. For my first piece, I want to use liquids in beakers in a chemistry lab to represent emotions. Each beaker will be labeled with its emotion.

Powder...Wait, I meant power.

My final project definitely turned out differently than I planned, but I still like the overall result. I wasn't expecting this to be so difficulty. Trying to get the flour and powder mid-air was actually pretty tricky. The people I had helping me had to experiment with different ways to throw the powder on me to see what looked best. Being able to have a long self timer with continuous shooting on my camera really made getting myself in the picture easy. I had planned to really exaggerate the colors in photoshop from the beginning, so the way the colors and contrast in each picture turned out is something I really liked. I would probably do this type of project again and just try it out different ways. Maybe I could do someone else or even an object instead of trying self-portraiture. Overall I really like the way this turned out, but I definitely think I could improve it. 

Planning for Money and Consumerism

Research:

Basic Color Theory

• The Color Wheel
• primary- red, yellow and blue
• secondary-green, orange and purple
• tertiary- yellow-orange, red-orange, red-purple, blue-purple, blue-green and yellow-green
• Color Harmony
• something that is pleasing the eye (not too bland or chaotic)
• analogous- 3 colors side by side on the wheel 
• complementary- 2 colors directly across from each other
• nature- colors found together in nature will always be harminous
• Color Context
• contrast of different colors (red on black compared to red on white)
• 3 colors can be perceived as 4

The Meanings of Colors

• Red
• the color of extremes
• powerful
• love, seduction, violence, danger, anger, and adventure
• magical and religious
• Yellow
• captures our attention
• happiness, optimism, enlightenment and creativity
• also cowardice, betrayal, egoism, and madness
• Blue
• dark- trust, dignity, intelligence and authority
• bright- cleanliness, strength, dependability and coolness
• light- peace, serenity, ethereal, spiritual, infinity
• Green
• growth, rebirth and fertility
• luck, nature, environment
• Purple
• nobility and luxury
• rare and supernatural
• magic, mystery, spirituality, creativity, dignity, royalty
• Orange
• energy, vitality, cheer, excitement, adventure, warmth and health
• Pink
• very controversial- especially in terms of boys and girls

Artists

• Kyle Thompson
• work is mostly self-portraiture
• his use of flour inspired my project
• images create a loop
• started with abandoned houses
• born in Chicago
• Keshia Anderson

• fashion photographer who really utilizes color
• a lot of portraiture 
• lives in California

My plan for this project is kind of an abstract interpretation of what I desire/consume. Most people would not think of color when asked what they desire, but my life would be extremely boring without colors. I wanted to use a type of powder so I chose flour and the color run powder. I thought doing a transition from almost no color to a lot of different colors would be a cool thing to try. I originally wanted to show more emotion, but it was really difficult to even open my eyes, let alone smile while having a whole bunch of powder thrown at my face.

Power: Money and Consumerism

My idea for this project is to showcase my desire and need for color in my life. When people look at it they aren't going to understand how it relates to consumerism or even money and that's what I want. I want it to be more about the desire than the money. I plan on using flour to showcase a lack of color with a self portrait and then use powder paint and regular face paint to show a progression from almost absence of color to full blown color. I want the final piece to be almost chaotic but not so overwhelming that people don't want to look at it. It's a rather unconventional idea but I believe it will showcase what I really want to say in terms of this project.