Negotiated practice for end of year project
Negotiated Practice. March 2016 500 word My final piece for the year will be a portrait using the video tape which I have been collecting for the last few months. I have wanted to work on a portrait since last year, after all I am on a fine art degree course and I might not get the chance next year. The first image I have chosen will be a test piece on a blank wall and will be of Jessica Lange (born 1949 in the United States). In the mid 1980s I watched the 1976 version of King Kong in which she stared. I instantly fell in love. This idea of the all American beauty in the movies, the young starlet is rooted in the idea of the 'male gaze', an idea by the feminist film critic Laura Mulvey in her 1975 essay 'Visual Pleasure and narrative cinema' in which she argues that the Film industry in centered around the male viewer and ideas of masculinity and sexuality. I have decided to use Jessica Lange as it shows us the main cannon is this theory, the idea of a visual hook for the male viewer, the classical idea of female beauty. I am using video tape as it is the medium of home movies, our own personnel looking glass into a fantasy world, although home video players did not really come in force as a popular medium until the mid to late 1980s when they did they revolutionised viewing habits bringing Hollywood into our homes, we could watch far more movies when we wished rather than wait for our local cinemas to show them. I intend to Use the video tape to draw out the shape of her face on a wall using screws as pins that I can wrap the tape round, using one continues reel of tape. I have projected her screen image onto the wall using a projector (the image coming from a connected laptop), For this test piece I have chosen a size of around 5 foot. Once I had Projected the image I drew around the shadow, these lines will be where I screw the screws into the wall, once I have done this I can fill In the blacks with more screws then start to weave the tape back and forth, around and around, building up a layer of tape, I will also experiment using a heat gun in this test piece to see if the video tape will build up a more solid layer by melting or sticking to itself. The style of the piece itself is in the recent tradition of contemporary street art, using a simple black and white silhouette normally associated with spray stencils which are easy and fast to put up in the street. Once I have experimented on the test piece I will use all the same methods should they work as intended however the main piece will be directly placed onto the video tapes which will be held in place by strong adhesive/ no nails on a wall in a square pattern (I've already done this and it works). I intend to use this main piece in the end of year show (if we are indeed in this year's final show)