For this assignment, you will explore the process of creating art by using digital photo editing software as tool to manipulate images for exploring “personally and politically charged themes engaging displacement and transformation.”
I’m pretty certain that we can all agree that we’re now all living through an incredibly unprecedented and challenging time. Some of the social, epidemiological and environmental issues that perpetually come up in the media include a pandemic, economic collapse, fracturing of educational institutions, climate change, political chaos/confusion, alienated social spaces, race and gender injustice and imploded legal systems.I’m therefore calling upon you to be visual social commentators and create a collage/photomontage where you try to bridge the personal and the political.
Whether you perceive that you are personally being/have been affected by the issues presented above, I would argue that you have! You students!! being the beacons of the future, I am asking you to find relationships between our current situations and the historically articulated situations that influenced Kurt Schwitters, Hannah Höch and John Heartfield. You can draw inspirations from contemporary artists like Barbara Kruger, Kara Walker, Hank Willis Thomas, Annu Palakunnathu Matthew and others to use art to critique and question our culture, society , and how we fit in as sensitive and creative individuals (YOU). The personal is political, so see your life as being a mirror and fulcrum of the greater world that can be represented through photomontage!
Part #1
Assignment: make a photomontage based on: Personally and Politically charged themes engaging Displacement and Transformation. You are free to interpret this in any manner that you feel is relevant to your life/concerns/beliefs!
Include the following:
1) Use a minimum of 15 documented visual sources ( but you can use many more if you wish) for your piece.
2) At least 5 images must be photographed by you (i.e. original photos). These should be new photographs taken by you exclusively for this assignment. Take photographs of texture, architecture, extreme close-ups, merz, nature, Covid-19 signs, re-photographing cropped images from a comic book, text from a poetry book, and many other possibilities!!
3) Images from the internet (Document all non/copyrighted sources). You may use copyrighted images if they are transformed and cited. Be aware of the overdetermined meaning of brands and logos and how you can subvert (remember text /subtext/context) as opposed to reinforce the meaning they already have in culture. Please don’t do a photomontage of all of your “favorite things”!
4) Use Photoshop to manipulate your source material and to combine them into your collage.
5) You must export your Photoshop file as a .jpg and it MUST be smaller than 2MB in size.
Photoshop is probably the most full-featured visual editing environment for this assignment. However, there are free and open source options, most notably GIMP (http://www.gimp.org/).
Important:
To turn in, you will submit a .jpg file to me via D2L Assignment dropbox. Use the following naming convention:
Photomontage_lastname_firstname.jpg
SOME RANDOM IDEAS TO THINK ABOUT:
scale making small things large or visa versa
crop things out
composition of images as juxtaposition vs blending
find meaning
find non-meaning
thinking about the blending or framing of images
using text or not, to what end, choices of font, color, design
find visual merz on the internet and slice it into little sections
maybe what you are trying to say in your photomontage will come from playing with images
have fun with the process
be critical and questioning
who is your audience
Part #2
Also, submit a Word document listing your visual source material (bibliography), and from whence it came. In addition, title your artwork, and write an Artist Statement about your piece in a Word document. Your artist statements should be 150-250 words in length. Please include your photomontage image in your Word doc above your Artist Statement (in addition to submitting the higher res .jpg as a separate file in the assignment dropbox)—-> Like this example below:
WHAT IS AN ARTIST STATEMENT?
I have included two complete A+ student examples of this project that include the photomontage, artist statement and source bibliography. Formats are variable for this writing component, but both of these examples demonstrate a deep commitment to the process of making and presenting their photomontage artwork! Click below for the folder that includes these and more examples!
Below is a link to a more professional presentation of how and why an Artist Statement is important, and may also give you some ideas. You are by no means responsible to an Artist Statement as detailed as is presented here. https://www.gyst-ink.com/artist-statement-guidelines
Name Your File
Statement-photomontage_lastname_firstname.docx or PDF
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