Crying Kim is a meme that became significantly popular a few months after its original source – a close-up shot from her show “Keeping Up with the Kardashians”. Just like with most memes, the average audience does not care so much about the original context or source, as much as they do about the subject and emotion portrayed. In this case, a typical viewer is aware of Kim K and her pop culture reputation. The fact that such a perfect, image-obsessed celebrity is caught in a moment of vulnerability is something our culture enjoys mocking and making fun of. In fact, this is an ongoing trend in the meme world with numerous other celebrities captured expressing a very human emotion turned into the butt of a joke. From Crying Jordan to Dawson Creek, perhaps it’s an expression of our innate nature to see those we adore just like us – emotional, sensitive, imperfect (Source).
I wanted to go deeper into this emotion. Explore it, with the context of Kim’s reputation in mind. To recreate this meme, I used pages from two magazines: The New Yorker and National Geographic and create a collage. As I was looking through to find parts that would fit the face aesthetically (color, shape, size, etc.), I was also cognizant of the sources which I used to get these from. Often times, I would prioritize the source rather than the aesthetic to create meaning and build my message. An example of this was choosing space for the hair/head, signifying the “air-headedness” of Kim and ironically, at the same time, the curiosity and intelligence of humans. Or taking the nose of a woman who spent decades exploring the most effective ways to bring modern medicine to South Sedan for the nose of Kim, who most likely spent thousands on plastic surgeries.
Other such sources came from: a classic oil painting of a woman, a sick refugee girl, a black adventurer man, a tribal woman, and other artistic sources and stories showing a variety of the human experience.
After cutting and arranging the collage, I placed it on a canvas and took a photo of it. Then, I uploaded it into Illustrator where I used a few different tools to replicate the collage. My focus was not to make it identical, but to use only a few tools, purposefully limiting myself. I did this because there are “tricks” which would only take a few seconds to create an almost identical digital version. It felt like cheating to me. This is why I primarily used the Pen Tool (to trace the details and create shapes), a few photos found on google (which I cropped or masked), and the shadow affect (to illustrate the separate collage parts). In turn, I ended up with another “hand-produced” version which contributes to the simplicity, imperfection and creativity of a human creation, rather than a computer one.
My goal was not to shame or mock Kim and her lifestyle through revealing and expressing broader her vanity and shallowness. But rather show the vast differences of the human experience. The “parts” come together into one human, from very different areas of life, most opposing Kim’s. Is one lifestyle better than another? I leave that for the viewer to decide and to draw conclusions from.
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