Week Ten...

23/11/2015 - 27/11/2015...

I have been to look at the work of Claude Cahun within the NUA East Gallery, which I found really exciting and this has encouraged me to get back in tune with my own creative practice.

























It was interesting for me to see some earlier examples of women exploring identity and the confines of gender. I can clearly see distinct similarities between the works of Cahun and Sherman, with the Black-and-White self-portraits and the performance aspect of 'dressing up' and playing characters, although Shermans work was closely related to the female stereotypes of the time, whereas Cahuns' removes gender barriers to explore identity.

I want to use myself in my work, create contemporary self-portraiture through the use of the 'selfie', however, I don't want the work to focus on my own identity and I want to work in an innovative way. My concerns from my research report are more about being a contemporary teenage girl, and the qualitative responses from my survey seem to demonstrate that celebrity lifestyle is something young women look at on a daily basis.

I have decided to look at Cosmopolitans' Top 200 Celebrity Selfies, in order to see the similarities and differences between these images.

When clicking through the collection of images, I was beginning to think of this as a bit of an online gallery - each celebrity has created their own composition, and cosmopolitan magazine has curated them together and exhibited them for an audience. As I was looking through, something became very apparent - most, if not all of the images feature a young woman. The celebrity selfie is clearly female-dominated, and also most of the women are white. These images reminded me of something I had read before about the science of beauty, and I have purchased Nancy Etcoffs 'Survival of the Prettiest' to read into this some more.



Unfortunately, due to illness, I have been unable to meet with my tutor this week to discuss some of my ideas. We have re-arranged for the beginning of next week, but below is my idea so far, moving towards the end of the unit and onto a potential final major project for exhibition.

I want my ideas to be fluid and relevant, and I don't want my own viewpoints to affect the outcome, as at this stage I hope it to be unexpected. My main idea is to print around 50 of the celebrity 'selfie' images, and show them to my teenage sister, before asking her to choose a few of her favourites, or the ones she might 'like' if she saw them on Instagram.
I will ask her to keep her choices to herself and not show me or tell me who the celebrity is, but to describe exactly what she sees within each image, as if she was explaining to somebody wearing a blindfold. I will make an audio recording of her responses so that I can use it to re-create the image myself.
I will set up a video camera and record myself re-creating the celebrity selfie from the perception of a teenager. I will take the 'selfies' on my mobile device, but I will record the transformation process on a camera stood on a tripod. This way, I will have both photographs and a moving image performance.
I will leave the decision of where this content will go until that point, as I don't want to interrupt the natural process, however, I am thinking of experimenting with photograph montage, and stop-motion type GIF from the moving image content.