THursday Idea blog #9

new artist statement.
i think a really helpful piece of the process to figuring out where my project is at has been having to write a new artist statement for the project to be presented after the midterm at the research presentation. It absolutely needs some cleaning up but i do feel that it has helped ot form solidify the new ideas of the continuing project.

The concept of my work is to create images that hijack the visual language of fashion photography in an effort to explore the relationship between consumers and the social and economic situation in which they act. The experience of economic coercion reaches every person that engages in the western consumer landscape both directly and indirectly. Foucault suggests that our internal relationship to coercion leads us to desire the ability to coerce. Advertising has a long tradition of working towards controlling the choices of consumers and in turn western economic powers have a history of exploiting those who produce goods. In participating in the current consumer environment the consumer is complicit in this exploitation. The youth obsessed world of fashion photography and the advertising it produces seeks to create a mental environment of desire in the viewer, thus moving the consumer to desire the objectified contents of the advertising and while asking them to engage with a system of coercion that produces the objects featured.

In pursuit of my concept I have created images that seek to use the visual language of youth targeted fashion advertising to suggest the coercive relationship that forms as a result of participation in the current economic environment that produces the goods to be sold to those youth targeted by these ads. The elements of the consumer object, the coercive object and the objectified person form a visual language that I hope will bring the viewer to question the relationship of the objects pictured and lead them to examine their relationship to those interactions.