design, etc

// click on the links below to sort by project \\ click mouse to advance photoset // click permalink icon to view images outside of the gallery format \\ posts are in reverse chronological order; for coherence in the reflective narrative, it is...

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Fourteen:

This is the last series that I shot for inclusion in my final project for Design Studio. This series has a title: “Self portraits wearing acid face mask.”  It revisits the themes of pain and feminine labor. The adage “beauty is pain” comes to mind — initially, the idea of putting acid on one’s face sounds like a terrible, painful, disfigurative idea, but it’s actually something included all the time in facial anti-aging/resurfacing treatments targeted towards women. The first image is one of the eight images I chose to make into a primary large print for the final presentation, and it asks questions about skin as separate from oneself, about disassociation from one’s body in general. The saturation of the red skin addresses the idea of pain as sacrifice to beauty. It is also an instance of cathartic documentation of the hidden, private moments of feminine labor that one is not supposed to admit to.

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Thirteen:

This image is the only one from a two hour long shoot and two hour long setup process that worked in a narrative way. This image is also the one that will become the start of a new photo project for me — in my mind, it’s the first of many in a series that performs and documents the concept of the “fantasy woman/dream girl” of the male gaze. 

From a very, very young age, women are taught how to become other women. This is done through dress-up games, playing Barbie, even through role-play video games online. Through adolescence we’re inundated with images of the teenage “dream girl” where in one she plays video games and drinks 40s with the boys and in the next is the height of high school femininity and elegance, crowned prom queen. She should be able to do both. We are conditioned to be able to perform different women for different people and different scenarios, dependent upon what’s most appropriate, what others desire most, or (from a certain feminist perspective) what will most efficiently get us what we want. For young adult women, this expresses itself most in presentation for one’s career and in presentation/visual performance for potential romantic partners (especially in the age of Tinder and Instagram). So often in popular music we hear female voices telling their romantic interests that they can “be whoever you want me to be.” This sounds pathetic, and in some ways, maybe it is — but some women use this concept as a weapon, some as a tool, and I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing. This is a topic I intend to explore further.

This image is also the clearest demonstration of what it means to be object and author. This theme is probably the most important out of all the ones present in this project. To author your own objectification is a powerful act that women do every day; when stating this I consider specifically Instagram and Tumblr (not to mention the world of online sex work, where a lot of feminist theory related to self objectification — not always negative, not always positive — comes from). These are online spaces where women consciously curate their personas and create and make use of their own image in a way that they know will cause it to be objectified and commodified, and as a result of this effort, gain power and influence. This is a direct subversion of what objectification for the male gaze has meant and lead to in the past, with few historical exceptions. Women who act as both object and author are almost entirely a modern phenomena, learning and growing with the rise of social media; Kim Kardashian is the ultimate contemporary example of someone who has mastered self objectification for personal gain.

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Twelve:

These images were taken on my iPhone after I taped it to the ceiling so that I could take pictures from above my bed. I had noticed that most of my previous self portraits were framed in a set of recurring ways, so I wanted to try and break out of those habits. I really liked some of the results, because the photographs were kind of inherently voyeuristic, and using that as a narrative device was very fun. The files from my iPhone were so small compared to my webcam and DSLR that what I could do with them was kind of limited, and I don’t like grain, so these are the images that I used the content-aware tool on the most. I think the top image is one of the most narrative and layered in my entire project. I was interested in the idea of a woman who dissolves into her environment, and in ambiguously presenting traditional feminine signifiers.

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Eleven:

This series was in response to the surprise Unit requirement that we involve a sponge in our process for that week somehow. When I think of a sponge, I think of cleansing and removal, which naturally led me to think about what it’s like to take off a ton of makeup and see it all on the surface of the material you’re wiping it off with.

Men on the internet love to make fun of women whose makeup comes off, i.e. the meme “take her swimming on the first date” (so you ‘know what she really looks like’), of women who wear “too much” makeup, and of women who don’t wear enough. There’s an entire article listing moments where men have commented on images of women online saying “Wow, she looks so amazing *without* makeup on! Girls shouldn’t hide their natural beauty with tons of makeup!” while not realizing that in fact the woman in question was wearing a LOT of makeup just to look “natural.” These internet themes bring to light the issue of feminine labor — labor, such as the application of makeup, that goes unnoticed or is belittled when it is discussed. People who engage in feminine labor can easily tell the difference between “natural” makeup and a true #nomakeup selfie, because these are actions that are intimate to us, and because the information that allows one to tell the difference between *no makeup* and *makeup that looks like it’s not there* is only circulated within the feminine sphere. Basically, makeup is (in terms of heteronormativity and traditional gender binaries) a form of feminine performance for the male gaze, and the application and removal of it is strictly hidden in order to preserve the illusion of having #wokeuplikedis. 

Showing the hidden part of this process almost always creates a very weird space, probably because it signifies so much. A classic example: to show a woman at her most emotionally vulnerable, show her with mascara running down her face. For this series, I wanted to take all of these ideas and make what is essentially a caricature of them. Show a woman whose makeup has been applied haphazardly and obviously, to the point it’s almost comedic, and show her reveling in and slowing down the moment of taking it off, the moment that shouldn’t be told. This is one of two series in this project that are highly performative, as opposed to the others, which are confessional.

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Ten:

These are pattern and texture explorations that I did during the first two or three weeks of Unit 17. I didn’t end up using them in the final output, because my interest in these lies along a different path than the one I felt like focusing on most. Every element in these collages is original, nothing was appropriated from another source. I liked playing with using super saturated color and tools in photoshop I was previously unfamiliar with.

[risdmuseumarchiveofwomen-blog]

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Seven:

Video of the 3D model moving in digital space. I decided to animate it because movement makes an on-screen experience more interactive, and because movement is something the screen can do that the page can’t.

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Six:

This is the final render of my 3D model of a bust found in the RISD museum. This was done in Autodesk Catch, Maya, and Photoshop, prior to animating the model’s movement through 3D digital space. The aesthetic derives from my interest in cybertwee, a movement a lot of my friends are involved in pioneering. I think it’s one of the most contemporary forms of feminine artistic expression, and one I’d like to involve myself in further. https://newhive.com/cybertwee/what-is-cybertwee

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Five: 

One half of my final project for DS4 Unit 16.

The idea behind this animation was to highlight the similarities between different representations of women in sculpture I found in the museum. I learned a new animation program in order to facilitate the morphing effect. I liked the default yellow background because it reminds me of RISD’s recent branding campaign and because it seems to me like such a contemporary color in graphic design right now (in contrast to the RISD museum’s historical art collection.)

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Four:

While reflecting on my project for Unit 16 during Spring Break, I realized that I didn’t really care about the subjects I had been exploring or the tools I had been using. I am interested in type, yes; but I’m more interested in type design and lettering, and I couldn’t think of a way to make a project around that that was also based upon the museum. In retrospect, I could have tried developing a typeface for the museum to theoretically use as a cohesive system to replace the current lack of type cohesion, but this is something I don’t currently have the type drawing skills for. I’m learning about and practicing type design on my own, but this project was not the place to explore that for me. I decided to completely re-approach the RISD museum and the project, and went back in with a camera and no expectations of what I was looking for. Once I was there, I decided on a whim to start photographing every face of a woman I could find. It’s a well known fact that women are severely underrepresented as artists within museum contexts and within the broader arts community. What I realized is that while underrepresented as artists and makers, women are over-represented as subject and object. What these two facts translate to is that women in art history are represented only as objects of the male gaze. I decided I wanted to use that fact and turn it back on itself; as a female artist, by documenting and altering historical representations of women made by male artists, I take the male gaze and translate it back through the feminine. I think this creates an interesting dialogue appropriate for the postmodern digital sphere. Issues of accessibility were also consistently highlighted during the class discussions around this unit. Are museums classist spaces? How can one create a socioeconomically accessible art history or arts experience? In response to these questions, I decided to host my project online, where it’s accessible by computer or smartphone and not limited by location or time. Because I knew I wanted to work digitally, and because I knew I needed to use a process I was interested in, I decided to learn basic Maya and Autodesk Catch 3D modeling programs, which I was completely unfamiliar with. A lot of my friends make compelling postmodern/post internet work using 3D modeling so I wanted to try it and see how that language felt to use. I tried changing the surface of the 3D mesh in tons of ways, and stumbled upon Clement Valla’s texture mapping made by unrolling the mesh and presenting it as a piece on its own (last image is directly inspired by that work, but while Valla’s surface maps were unaltered, I replaced mine with a pink glitter texture that seemed to me inherently ‘girly’). 

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Three:

Another thing I noticed while at the museum was the variety of shades of blue throughout the exhibitions and the museum’s walls themselves. I started thinking about the color blue, its history, connotations, and personal meanings — I was thinking about making a book combining all these thoughts and research results with a palette of blues taken from the museum itself. This grid is the beginning of that collection, but I decided not to pursue it.

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Two:

Continuation of documentation of the museum’s type in use.

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One:

For our first project in DS4, the museum exploration, the first thing I was drawn to within the museum was the wide variety of type present within the space. One of the first things that comes to mind when considering contemporary museum curation is the existence and use of a strict system of typography, which is consistently updated as the museum “ages.” The interesting thing I noticed about the RISD museum is that there isn’t really any clear system in place — the type in use has not been updated along with the museum (just see the different examples of Exit signs in this post and the next, for example) and so becomes an interesting record of the museum’s age and development.