While I have been researching in the more traditional way for my RIPU unit I felt the need to be creating, to play but I didn't know where to start. As I was defining my question for this unit I felt that the idea of playing with collages could inform my question and area of interest. This has yet to be confirmed but it has certainly given me creative food for thought.
Before I had the confirmed question I had started to look at 'Ageing, Beauty and Vanity' and to support this thinking I started to play with the sort of high end images in magazines that are created as aspirational lifestyle advertising or fashion shoots looking to sell exclusive jewellery, watches, perfume, clothes and accessories as well as cars and other highly expensive products.
These first experiments were very much based on disrupting the images. I din't know where they were going to take me or even what I could do with them. I was hoping that they may inform me about further exploration and lead me into maybe a form of print or painting, as I had put this in my manifesto at the beginning of the unit. (https://carldurban.wixsite.com/website/post/masters-a-manifesto).
The resulting images have been described as 'quite disturbing'. This wasn't the intention but as I was playing with the various resources I had at hand I could see that by cutting, inserting and rotating certain elements I was using to reform the facial features the recorded images, shown above, were starting to ask questions. I decided to leave these were they were and to look to continue to create other conjunctions of images.
For the next set of images I decided to keep the amount of elements to a minimum, I still wanted to make them question the viewer and was looking at the negative space left if you started taking out eyes and mouths. These images were still just something to play with, they weren't intended to be finished items, however, if they were seen as that then that was also fine.
From the initial image where I had replaced the mouth and eyes I then put together a series of images where I just replaced the eyes. Eyes being not just one of the most fundamental of the facial features but also brings into question the female gaze, the connection between the model and the viewer. In these cases I had only explored the female figure which was only due to the available resources.
By just replacing the eyes with jewels the stare was still there but replaced with one of the consumable items that is most commonly used in the magazines I was looking through. Although these were just two-dimensional images I do wonder what they would look like if I could use actual jewels placed onto the images. Maybe this is something that needs exploring further.
While I have been playing with these images I have also refined my question for this unit, which is now: Can the disruption of codes in advertising and branding create new readings and undermine the identities of the brands?
This brings together my background as an Art Director with over 30 years in advertising and my explorations into coding, networks and non-verbal language that has recently been part of my undergraduate thinking. It feels as though the two elements that I have striven to keep apart are actually coming together. What I am very conscious of is that I want this to be a Fine Art exploration, not an Art Direction one. Can I keep the two things separate or will there be overlapping and blurring?
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