These are some of collaged faces. After pillaging loads of magazines for eyeballs for the dolls house, I had a collection of faces that were missing their eyes or sometimes all their facial features but I had a feeling that the ones I kept were interesting enough to be made into collages themselves.
I love how these images are disjointed and distorted. I like the jagged lines that were created when I removed their features, not precise and not pretty. Totally different from the airbrushed images they were beforehand.
I want to make imperfect imagery from the perfect photographs from the magazines, the more bright and unusual images I can collage together to make new ones the better. Taking the familiar and the normal and turning it into something totally different.
Blind James (White) 2002. Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper mounted board.
Douglas Gordon is a Scottish artist who I had previously looked at in my first year at uni. He is mostly known for his work with video and photograph, the piece I had seen before was 24 Hour Psycho where he slowed down Hitchcock’s thriller to make it last 24 hours. I like his work as it’s source material has its roots in celebrity and the popular.
Blind Janet (White) 2002. Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper mounted board.
In his series 100 Blind Stars 2002, Gordon is looking at the ‘cult of celebrity’. The series is of 100 publicity photographs of 1950s and 60s Hollywood icons of the golden age of cinema.
The eyes are cut out and either replaced with mirror or black or white paper. By removing the eyes the image that is left is uncomfortable viewing. It steals the identity of the subject of the original photo and takes away their individuality. By removing the eyes the artist leaves the faces as nothing but masks, empty people with nothing behind the eyes.
Self Portrait of You + Me (Simone Signoret) 2008, Smoke and Mirror.
In Self Potrait of You + Me Series, Douglas Gordon again uses iconic imagery of film stars, even having a specific series dedicated to Bond Girls. He attaches the images to mirrored surfaces or black or white surfaces but instead of just removing the eyes, this time he mutilates the picture by burning it. This allows a conflict of the adoration of the images used and the mutilation. The photographs change from the familiar, recognisable icons of the silver screen, to quite scary, distorted images that have a totally difficult effect on the viewer.
Self Portrait of You + Me (James Cagney) 2006, Smoke and Mirror.
I hadn’t seen these images when I started creating my own work, they were suggested to me and I immediately fell in love with them. There is a blatant familiarity between these and my own work and I feel as though the thoughts and ideals of the artist are in line with my own.
Gordon is quoted as saying-
“I try to take something familiar and look it again and again, and again, reexamine go it and representing it…….looking at something familiar can act as a metaphor for all sorts of other things in your life. One way to look at something over and over again is to take it apart…in an analytical, structural, quite academic fashion, or we can simply put one thing beside itself and see how it compares.”
Fur Ein Fest Gemacht (Made For a Party) 1936, collage
Hannah Hoch was a German artist emerging at the beginning of the 20th century. She was one of the pioneers of photomontage and was renowned for her collages. Friends with Kurt Schwitters, Hoch was a controversial woman who liked to push the boundaries in both her lifestyle and her art. A strong participant in women’s emancipation and also having a lesbian relationship, that while it wasn’t directly defined as that, the fact was not hidden, which would have been very controversial at the time.
Kleine Sonne (Little Sun) 1969, collage
Hoch was part of the Dada movement but was more tolerated than accepted as the founding artists of the movement such as Franz Jung, were not overly impressed by a female artist. Hand Richter described her contribution to Dada as “Sandwiches, beer and coffee.”. This may have been one of the reasons she built such a good relationship with Schwitters as he was shunned by most the Dadaists as well and also had a more modern outlook on life.
Da-Dandy 1919, collage
Da-Dandy Was a reflection of the hypocrisy of Dadaism and German society of the time, apparently promoting freedom but in reality still so restricted. Hoch worked on magazines aimed at women and was fed up of the difference between the women of the media and the women in reality.
Das Schone Madchen (The Beautiful Girl) 1920, collage
She considered herself active in the women’s liberation movement in the 1920s and her work was breaking down boundaries in the traditional gender roles. The women in her work were not particularly feminine, often muscular and bordering on masculine. This was to do with her unhappiness with what women were supposed to be according to the media and also possibly a reflection of her attraction to women.
Flucht (Flight) 1931, collage
I like Hannah Hoch’s work because I can see a familiarity to how I see things and to some of what I try to reflect in my own work. She also uses images from magazines and contemporary material from her time. I find her collages interesting as well as her as a person. I think she has a dry sense of humour and a strong personality that is reflected through her work and the legacy she has left behind her.
Ohne Titel (Untitled from the series: an Ethnographic Museum) 1929, photomontage and collage.
I have been keeping all of the faces I had used the eyes from for my pieces from last year. These have been cut out a bit more delicately than the ones I have been doing recently, but I find the women without eyes quite interesting and quite imposing to look at.
It’s like they have had their identities stolen, eyes are part of what make you who you are. It’s the part of a person you look at to determine trust and honesty, when you’re a child you get told by your mother to look her straight in the eye and tell her the truth and that’s how she’d know you had lied.
By taking away the eyes it adds doubt, fear and a sense of unease. It’s not easy to read someone without being able to see someone’s full expression, like trying to judge someone’s response when they are wearing large sunglasses or have their face turned away from you.
I decided to collage the dolls house in eyes, I have had a fascination with eyes for years. My first year project looking at psychedelia used prints and paintings of eyes, as well as seeing many of the artists at that time had used illustrations of eyes as well, such as Rick Griffin and Robert Crumb.
I want to use eyes because of my feelings about image and how women inparticular are judged and scrutinised for what they look like. By using the eyes from the models and celebrities, who are the ones showing us what we should be wearing and how we should look, but at the same time are the ones who are judged the most by the media and the rest of the world.
It takes three steps to do the collaging, first of all I go through the magazines and cut out the eyes in chunks not as individual eyes. This leaves me with interesting cut outs that when laid over each other can make quite unique images themselves.
The second step is cutting out the eyeballs from the chunks I’ve taken from the magazines. This leaves what looks like mask like shapes that I can’t bring myself to through away as I feel they will come in useful for another piece of work. The third step is actually gluing the, into the house which is painstaking, time consuming and quite awkward. I have got a small amount done and hope that the end result is a bit more impressive than it is at the moment.
