"Mighty Morphing Power Presidents"
well, with a few hours to spare…i found time to finish the final project for the digital media class. time, however, was not easy to make room for. i am pleased with the finished result but still don’t know if it is as good as it canbe-considering my lack of knowledge of the medium i used and what it can do. make no mistake though, i worked ferociously and intensely on this project to make it work-visually and conceptually. in hindsight, taking 3 classes this summer was ambitious and time consuming (as i am currently enrolled in another class) but i am glad i did it. it felt good to make such a wide variety of art and to learn so much about new media art. for information regarding this final piece, please continue to read the ”paper” i have written regarding it and my experience. *you’ll be able to tell when the “paper” part of this blog begins when i begin using proper punctuation, etc.
My final piece entitled “Mighty Morphing Power Presidents” is meant to be political, humorous, and ambigious (and possibly disturbing). Although I despise telling people what my artwork is about (I feel it is up to each person to interpret my art and all art for that matter, anyway they want) and don’t enjoy spoon feeding the viewer what to look for, I understand it is a requirement of the project and class to do so. However, my philosophies on creating art is to search for and to create the “new” and by “new” I simply mean to progress art forward through invention, interpretation, and imagination. To me, landscapes and portraits or anything done in direct observation or mimicry of the natural world does nothing for art-it is just a hobby being practiced by those who are bored and appear to have a skill. But to create something new from ones mind that makes people question and wonder about the concept or image itself and not question and wonder how the skill transferred on paper, is art. So I attempted to create “new” in this final piece with the direction of my own ambition and assistance of a digital medium.
As I have stated in previous blogs, this piece has traveled many avenues to get where it is now. But where it is relates back to my own philosophies and style regarding art. “Heads” seem to always pop up as the main focus or drive for my artwork. The fact that the final project guidelines were fairly open made it an obvious choice and challenge to create a piece related to my on going theme of heads but with this new medium. Although I truly did want to create something completely “new,” as in not combine images but create my own (like David Ho) I suppose I did accomplish this by definitely creating a new image that no one has ever seen before.
When looking at the piece, hopefully the viewer is confused. Confusion in art is something that should be embraced more and sucked in as a friendly emotion and not a repulsive reaction. The confusion will be “who to focus on?” I have layered an image of George W. Bush with Abraham Lincoln. The opacity makes it so the viewer can see both at the same time but can only focus on one. I did a lot of work with placement so the features line up exactly and work with the beard on Lincoln to also line up with the different angle Bush is facing. I took great care in the faces…hopefully it goes unnoticed by it being so seamless. Again, I would rather people not question how I did it but why I did it. The craftsmanship and technical aspect is just a nice bonus in a work of art.
The reason why I chose Presidents as my theme goes back to my “head” theme but this time I wanted a head that everyone could recognize so that confusion would play a more important role. I presume people will see this however they want and literally they can see it however they want but if you want to dig deep you can guess that I am showing an overlapping of a “good” President with a “bad” president or that politicians in general are “monsters” (which may be a reason I added the animal eyes) or President Bush loves money so much he foresees himself on an American bill. But in looking deeper to the piece the viewer will see that the background is divided into 2 sections. The right side of the image is Bush themed with a map of Kuwait oil fields and an image of actual oil fields while the left side is Lincoln themed with a map of Gettysburg and an actual image of a scene from the Civil War. So I was also interpreting these Presidencies on war and what makes a war worthwhile-whose war was better? This piece is going to be really, really deep to some and to others it will be offensive and yet to others it will be satirical and to me…all answers are right. If a person got an emotion, thought, or feeling when looking at it, then I did my job.
