Textual Poaching

Body Images

       When we analyze old sculptures and paintings, we admire the unique beauty of these normal woman. We instantly accept them for who they are and how they look. They are iconic historical celebrities that radiate confidence. Currently our celebrities that have similar bodies to the historical ones are constantly being judged and ridiculed. What I did for my textual poaching project was I used Pablo Picasso’s famous painting, “Seated Female Nude”, and added three woman, from three different eras that have unique body’s. I wanted to show how they all are beautiful because of the confidence they portray. The new image that woman feel pressured to acquire, not only denigrates confidence, it fuels insecurity. They need to be reminded that everyone is born with different body shapes. Its ironic that we admire and worship these woman in our past, and yet we subconsciously mock them with our present ongoing judgement of woman now. 

I personally struggle with many body insecurities. I also have a lot of confidence in my flaws, I see them as unique attributes that make me, me. So I am always fighting this battle of loving my body and envying others. It is hard to acknowledge that all bodies are beautiful when I am being surrounded by woman that are being praised for their unnatural thin bodies. So I thought I would remind myself and the rest of woman that suffer from body image insecurities, that all bodies are admired, by showing all the forms. Woman also need to learn that even though envy is unavoidable, we still have to power to show off what we have. 

New pop singer, Meghan Trainor, recently released a single called, “All About That Bass”. In this song she chooses to sing about how she is chooses to own her curves and extra weight. I commend Meghan for her confidence. She acknowledges that our celebrities today that are in our advertisements are artificial, when she sings, “I see the magazine workin' that Photoshop”. I know that Photoshop is real and is used in our photo world, but it happens more than I think. I easily catch myself many times envying woman with fabricated bodies. So she helps boost my confidence when she later sings, “...every inch of you is perfect, From the bottom to the top”. 

In the Velveteen Rabbit, this cherished toy is given the gift of life. He is loved unconditionally by this boy, but when he is about to be burned with the rest of his infected things, he shows true emotions. It is his emotions that grant him a second chance to see the boy that showed him a whole new world. Thus we admire the toy velveteen rabbit the way it is in his normal state. He is real in his own mind, just like how these woman are real in their’s. We as readers accept him and his lifeless existence,  until he starts to portray envious thoughts of wanting more. Woman today and even in the past constantly envy any woman that has something that they do not have. This obsession of wanting these unattainable qualities, unfold our insecurities, and allow them to take full control. It was confidence that created infectious joy from this ordinary stuffed rabbit. Even though insecurities will always be there to hold you back, you have the power to ignore it. We need to remember that woman of all body types are found beautiful. 

Olivia Taylor

Beatlemania vs. One Direction Infection

“But how can you like *insert alternative rock band that people think is obscure* if you like One Direction?"

I sit back and ponder this person’s pointed demand as they gaze witheringly at me through tortoise shell, thick rimmed glasses, bookmarking their page in their Bukowski novel. They had a point...How CAN one listen to and enjoy TWO DIFFERENT GENRES of MUSIC? It’s almost as if I have a VARIETY of tastes. That simply cannot be. I sip my kombucha and cry myself to sleep.

---

Grown, fedora-clad, neckbearded manchildren (was that a bit sharp?) are heralded as supreme connoisseurs of music and are allowed to throw literal temper tantrums when someone suggests The Beatles aren’t God’s gift to the music world but when young girls show their enthusiasm for a band they are undeserving of respect because they are too crazy, too hormonal, and too stupid to understand real music.

For this project, we really wanted to show that what The Fab Four were doing and what One Direction is doing are not all that different - instead of competing our two ideas we wanted to show how alike they really are.  Music-wise, these two bands are doing different things and it’s unfair to compare the two but to simplify the matter, they both make incredibly catchy pop songs, they’re handsome, and they’re British. The way fans (generally young girls) respond to these two bands are almost identical. ‘Beatlemania’ is no longer some unmatched force in the pop world, ‘One Direction Infection’ is just as impressive. David Bowie has a really nice yet simple quote about fangirls.

“They’re the salt of the earth, those girls. They don’t sit each night and compare notes on groups, criticising lyrics, asking if it’s valid. They just play the record… yeah, and maybe they dance. I love them. I love them dearly."

So what some of these manchildren are choosing to forget is the fact that young girls played a huge role in the The Beatles career. They are a force to be reckoned with in the music industry. Whether you think a band is talented or not doesn’t always matter because the power of young girls has proven time and time again that their enthusiasm is a driving force that propels people to success. We love The Beatles. We do recognize what they’ve done for music. And we really love One Direction. A lot. Some people want to know if it’s an ironic statement against televised talent shows. Others say this make one lose credibility on musical matters. When people discredit the things someone finds joy in, it invalidates that person’s happiness. So when old fuddy duddy purists become enraged and in hysterics over their band, why can’t young girls be taken seriously when they do too?

All the clips we chose were juxtaposed against each other in order to highlight and heighten the similarities between the two. For part of our performance we did that “Riff-Off” thing they do in Pitch Perfect (2012) where we’d match one word from a song into another (What Makes You Beautiful/Dear Prudence, Little Black Dress/Revolution, Hey Jude/Steal My Girl).  We matched the sounds of the old and the modern fans screaming. We matched what reporters were saying about the bands. Our costumes depicted a typical Beatles/1D fan. We timed our piece in a way that paralleled L-cuts. Our choreography was minimal, but effective (I’m thinking specifically about the make up). I guess you could say our driving thought or MDQ if you will was,“What’s so bad about girls getting emotional over boys?” Nothing.

Olivia Taylor & Morgan Akana

Medium Specificity

Hidden Beauty 

Artist Statement:

      Photography is meant be untouched and unprocessed. Even though today we have so many ways that we are able to positively alter our pictures with filters and and photoshop, Polaroids are different. They are basic images that emphasis the honesty in photography.  The whole idea of taking a picture, is you have the capability of capturing a moment in time.  I thought that if I could change a picture after it’s taken, in an artistic way, then it can be noticed as something abstract rather than something basic. I wanted to prove how a moment that is still and plain can be given an illusion of texture and color. I used my Polaroid Camera 300 to take 4 ordinary stills of a girl. Just as the image began to show, I went over them and drew harsh lines and circles. I also  When the picture finally developed, the lines dramatically popped and they smeared the hidden colors within the Polaroid. I wanted to explore the different ways these pictures could be manipulated. To see if the emotion and reaction of the still image is altered. So I created a whole new image out of an existing image. 

Scott McCloud uses the medium of comic books, to explain the importance of comic books. He goes onto convince his readers of how his creation that mocks the itself ultimately becomes an art. So I wanted to be able to show that something as simple as a polaroid can be made into an separate art that obtains a whole different style. I look at the polaroids when they are fully developed, and I find myself distracted by the lines and colors, more than the girl herself. I felt that my art shared McCloud’s choice of emphasis in where it slightly mocks the choice of taking a still photo and giving it a whole new message. 
Andy Warhol used Elvis as subject matter, for his “Eight Elvis's” Silkscreen creation. He almost enjoyed seeing a form of simplicity and using it as motivation to adapt it into something complex. I too liked using the uncomplicated tactics in the medium of my photography to encourage my wonder of how it can be transformed into something more iconic and intriguing. Unlike Warhol and his distortion of the characters he chose to wield, I wanted to encourage the the lack of color and action. The lines that I drew out the internal colors of the photo. Warhol’s repetition in his silk screen, allowed him to extract action as well. I was motivated by his adaptation of Elvis, I used it to employ my photo’s with a whole new definition. 
I consider my medium specificity as a form of photo manipulation, in a way that both McCloud and Warhol achieved in theirs. One other artist that influenced my choice of transforming simplicity into mosaic is the photographer Christophe Gilbert. He believes in finding the small details in his photos and reconstructing them into his focal point. He does this by reshaping the paints and colors. I too saw that my photos lacked excitement. So I used a sharp point to extract texture. As I did this, more colors began to appear. Gilbert is known for his clever style, so I to demonstrated something that is not done commonly. My end product became more appealing to me.

I chose to explore the lack of texture in a still shot, by adding lines and circles that would give them an illusion of motion. I wanted the ink to spread through the lines, so more colors could also be presented. Overall I wanted to use these plain photos and convert them into interesting examples of abstract art that can be recognized by their texture and movement additions, rather than the the raw untouched photo it started out as. 

Historical Story

Death of Innocence

Title Page:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8E-5fFmh26hSlloNWhTaXpSR2tmdjFway1NdHR1YWxYYzRF/view?usp=sharing

Script:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8E-5fFmh26hM3BTNXZ6MzVhRFVZOExGaGQ2V3FIS0JPSTJn/view?usp=sharing

Artist Statement:

Our story is similar to Satrapi’s “The Veil” in that it is about a child who is affected by a great national crisis and doesn’t understand. Some of us were very young on September 11, 2001, and like Jimmy, we didn’t understand what was going on; what everyone was so panicked about. We didn’t understand why what was happening to the buildings on TV could affect our parents so emotionally. We were soon forced to discover the sad reality that sometimes exists in the world: that there are bad people who will stop at nothing to carry out their evil intentions. It is these experiences that inspired this story. It is interesting to explore mature concepts like violence or death through the eyes of a child who has had no experience with them and has yet to even think about them.

James Cameron’s Titanic is another work of historical fiction that tells a similar story. Cameron decided to tell the story of the sinking of the Titanic through the eyes of a fictional romance. It also was a very intense natural crisis that many people had to go through. Cameron utilized a very traumatizing historical event and produced a story that we can either relate to, or even just admire. He portrayed a way of telling this story through the perspective of a young couple.  So when we decided to create a story around the Kennedy assassination, we chose the perspective of a small family. We wanted to provide a vision of how an ordinary family would be affected by such a world wide crisis.

Sometimes we forget that the stories of people who lived through major historical events can be so much more personal than any news source or article we may come across. These sources tend to overlook the feelings that the average citizen felt as it was happening, and instead focus on facts and statistics. This is why it is often more interesting to focus on an average person or family when writing a historical story than the historical figures themselves, because you get that “first-hand” kind of feeling.

And of course, we tried to make our representation of the assassination as true to life as possible, and made sure to get all the little details correct. For instance, according to the site “Dealey Plaza Earwitnesses” (http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/shots.htm) the majority of witnesses heard three shots fired, and as seen in “Fifty-one Witnesses: The Grassy Knoll” (http://spot.acorn.net/jfkplace/09/fp.back_issues/12th_Issue/51_wits.html) some thought the first shot sounded like a firecracker or a “cannon at a football game” (http://spot.acorn.net/jfkplace/09/fp.back_issues/12th_Issue/51_wits.html), The National Archives site (http://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/warren-commission-report/chapter-5.html#chronology) states that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t formally arraigned for President Kennedy’s murder until 1:30 in the morning the next day, leading to the father’s line about them not knowing who did it yet. It is small facts like this that influenced various lines and details in the script.

Olivia Taylor, Taylor Davis