As this was a personal project, we were allowed to develop our own project around our own interests, in the format of either dissertation or artifact. I selected artifact, as this would allow me to explore art and photography in a practical manner, which is what I enjoy doing best. I would need to conduct all the planning and development for the project keeping to deadlines that I needed to make myself, which I was nervous about as timekeeping and organization are not my strong points. This is the first practical project that I have worked on individually with no group or clients, which was daunting but also allowed me to explore my interests without the influence of others. At the beginning of the project we had to fill out a proposal form stating what we wanted to gain from the project, materials we would need and a timescale to which we could work to. The project title had to be in the format of a question, which I struggled to produce as it was so early on in the project and I was unsure of what I wanted to explore.
I had a rough idea of the route I wanted to take in the project that was based around art and photography. I initially wanted to produce a series of portraits using both mediums but had to come up with a topic to base them on. The idea of celebrities was my initial thought, possibly recreating famous portraits of celebrities, however I thought this would be too vague and could possibly go off track. I have always been interested in cult celebrities and their deaths, so I thought I could include this in my work. The other ideas I had included product placement in either advertising campaigns or famous images. This could have included controversial links with companies such as the use of child labour or corrupt use of ingredients. I decided to take advantage of the personal project by selecting the topic of cult celebrities, as this would allow me to put my knowledge into art.
Conducting research on various artists in the pop art and dada genre gave me some inspiration for the pieces I wanted to create. Looking at Rauschenberg in particular gave me the idea for my first piece that was based on the death of John F Kennedy. I wanted to tell the story of his assassination and the events that occurred after; the arresting of the gunman Harvey Oswald, his public murder by Jack Ruby, and then his death days before his trial. There was no other pieces or art or media that covered the same topic and in the same way so I felt this to be a particularly strong idea. My interest in The Beatles was the reason for my second final piece. Along the same subject of death, I wanted to take the famous Abby Road cover and alter it in a way to covey a controversial message about John Lennon’s assassination. The band member was shot outside his hotel room by a stalker named Mark Chapman, which I wanted to state in my art piece using a graffiti style image over the top of the original, to look as If it had been defaced. The idea came from my interest in graffiti artists such as Banksy, but it has never been used as a small element within a piece before so this proved to be another strong idea. The difference in arrangement of the pieces is that my JFK composition tells a story by laying out different elements of the story in order to make it easy to understand, whereas my Abbey Road article is ore of a statement piece and would probably only be understood by people who had knowledge on Mark Chapman and Lennon.
There are many different techniques that I have covered within my two compositions. The main techniques I covered were lino and dry point printing, that involved me cutting and scratching into different materials and printing them using both oil and water based inks. I believe that these two elements of my JFK piece are strong as the prints are unique versions of existing images. The main element of my Abbey Road image is the two graffiti style silhouettes featured in the place of John Lennon. The overall look is very simple but required a lot of work both hand drawing and Photoshop. I began by finding an image of a policeman escorting a man, and by pasting Mark Chapman’s face on the body and blending it I was able to create my base image. I then removed the background and used the ‘stamp’ filter on Photoshop on the image to separate it into black and white sections. By doing this I was able to hand draw the image using the previous Photoshop image to decipher where to place the lines. A problem I found when creating both pieces of work was how to take existing images and appropriate them in a way that would not be breaching copyright rules, and editing them enough to make them my own. I think I achieved this in my JFK piece as most images have had more than more than one process done to create them, however the main base image of my Abbey Road piece is still too similar to the original. If I created this piece again I would completely recreate the background from scratch. I put both compositions together using Photoshop as I could then alter the sizes of each element and place them exactly where I wanted. If I could do my JFK piece again I would have thought more about the sizing of each element and created it all by hand as I feel the sections look more authentic as hard copies.
