Independent Project

Have had to reload lots of larger images to manipulate with photoshop. Have had to decide how I was going to superimpose John Howards face over the images of refugees. Should it be the same face, should it be the SMILEY face or should it be a variety of faces. 

Thinking about the Jack in a Box.......this is meant to be ironic as a Jack in a Box is meant to be fun, playful, surprising, a joyful toy. A plaything. The idea is that we have John Howard and his political partners playing with people's lives,,,perhaps it will be more ironic if only a smiley face jumped out, the same one on every face,............still thinking. Will play with some images and see how I go. 

Independent Project

Have decided to go with "Keeping the Lid On" but will have to find a suitable spring to go in the box. The idea behind this is that the spring will be attached to many images concertinered so that when the lid is lifted, the images burst from the box like a "Jack in a Box". During John Howards last election victory, many of the refugees were left floating in terrible conditions at Ashmore Reef and Christmas Island until after the election. Certainly "Children Overboard" was not exposed for the lie it was until after the election also. I have appropriated many images from the internet to create new images for this project and will post them now. The quality of some may not be good enough to use for the final submission. I had googled large files but when saved have discovered they only saved as small files, new search  may be required or I may have to employ a scanner and start again.

URL for Iraq war art

www.dart.fine-art.com/aqd-asp-i_ 118643-buy-artlis...

Independent Project

Thinking about what I wanted to do for this project. Have decided to stay with the same concept but finding new ways of expressing myself. This process have proven quite cathartic and will probably be good for to get this out of my system   ......  or  not...... maybe it is just the beginning of something by way of protest or political art. I have enjoyed the collage medium and collage is one of the subjects in theory we are covering over summer. It has melded quite well.

Idea 1 Slideshow....maybe silent.... of refugess with faces removed. Silent rotation of lots of images. Thinking about the 353 people who died on the SIEV X and the memorial that is at Christmas Island. Nameless people with no face. The other thought I had was to replace their face with that of John Howard, placing him in their situation.

Idea 2 "Keeping the Lid On".....The idea is to have the same faceless images of refugees ( or with John Howard superimposed again over the face ) and to place the images in a box which has a lid on top sealed tightly. The lid is painted to be a replica of the deck of a boat, natural timber with the black tar stripe through it. This very much the idea based on how Howard managed to "keep the lid on this issue" until after the election.

Artist snapshots

Practising taking snapshots of screen and then included some of artists. Interested to see if this works

Artists to follow up

Saul Bass, Paul Rand, Ikko Tanaka........thought I would follow these artists up but ran out of time. Looked at their work when I was deciding which artist presentation to do.

Printing of Narrative Project

I had my final images printed today. I first printined them small to make sure everything was aligned before embarking on 7 x A4 images. All looked really good. Had them printed at Office Works. I then ordered the A4 size and the first three printed up quite dark so persuaded the fellow, very helpful, to reprint and they were better but still a little darker. Anyway decided ( at that price) to go ahead with them. All look fine but 2 seem to not be as well aligned as they should be so will have to see if they will work for the final assessment.

Narrative Project

A couple more images to add to project. This is the final selection of images ready to be professionally printed for final submission. The order the images will follow in terms of the "Barriers to Movement" will be War, Terrain, Despair/poverty,Leaky Boats, Wild Seas, Naval Patrols and Politics.

Narrative Project

I have had to redo several images. I get through the process and print out a copy and find that I have missed a step as I want all images to be uniform in size and pixelation etc. Anyway the final images in my Narrative project are as follows.

Narrative Project

Managed to have 6 images complete for Narrative project. It is a literal narrative, final piece will probably be 7 x A4 images read from top to bottom on the wall..........I have to redo 2 images I have done because I missed out the blur step before the barriers you put in place...

Narrative Project

Process of development of images

Image selection which cover the proposed barriers. I have standardised the size of each images so they can be processed and printed as standard and uniform sizes. Each images has been cropped if necessary for best effect. Each image has been converted to black and white. Each image has been blurred. I tried to create the blur by changing the quality of the image and then enlarging but have since discovered (Thanks Jesse) the use of the filters. I chose Filter - Pixelate - Fragment.

I then put in the bars via the ruler so each was the same size and location so when the images are on the wall they follow one another consecutively. I had trouble creating white bars, they were always pale grey but by using Image-Adjustments-Curves, I was able to create the colour I needed for the bars or barriers to movement.

The style of barrier I prefer for narrative project

 This is the style of barrier, spacing etc I want to achieve on images, this is a great image to use too but sadly the quality is not good enough so will have to research some more. The one thing I have also been thinking about is that the blurring effect from poor quality images is also a metaphor for the blurred aspects of the issue. The truth is blurred and there is nothing black and white about each case.

Narrative Project

I have printed off the works that I had prepared with photoshop but have decided there is more work to be done. For starters I have too many bars in on some images. I should have printed out a couple before I completed ALL that time and effort on each image only to decide today that it is not the effect I want. Will have to start again and some of the images will need to be replaced as the resolution is not good enough. Here is one of them to be changed.

Narrative Project

Have spent last night working on Narrative Project. Mine will be literal and will have a series of images which trace the story of refugees journey to a new country and the barriers they encounter in this process.  The barriers I have identified are Fear, War, Poverty, Terrain. Unseaworthy Boats, High Seas and Drowning, Naval Vessels, Rascism and Politics. I want to place bars across the images to represent the barriers and habve thought aboput using black or white bars mixed up or alternately to indicate that the issue of refugees is very much a humanitarian issue and solutions are not black and white.

Presentation Barbara Kruger

Did presentation today and I think it went OK. Provided a powerpoint presentation but have not been able to upload it onto this blog.

Test run to upload powerpoint before progressing it further

Well that did not work as it did not recognise format. Tried it as a video upload but that did not work either. I guess I will just have the powerpoint presentation ready on CD and on my USB stick and hope it is compatible with the Macs at Uni. May have to take my laptop too as old as it is....

Artist presentation

Have been reading a book about Barbara Kruger and thinking about her work today while having a HUGE day weeding and mulching my garden. My garden is not quite one of earthly delights yet but it will be an edible garden one day and I do enjoy the physical workout and time to think. Have been searching for some images on the internet but will need to scan some for better presentaton quality. Here is one image I really like

Collage Definitions

www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/oldcontent/cbeardon/dcollage/collage3/def1.html

I was looking for definitions of collage and found this website which dealt with a range of collage art from dada through to pop art and thought it was interesting.

Photoshop Feature Enhances Collage

I have found a feature which adds merit to my collage. It is a spiral blur, I used a couple of different levels to see which I preferred. A small level was best I felt . I did not wan't to lose the essence of the collage in that I want it to still be decipherable if one really spent some time looking at it but I loved the Vortex effect this technique had on the collage. At the time of the Tampa incident, I felt we were all sucked into a vortex, out of control....the refugees had no control, islanders had no control , navy was not in control and certainly political events spiralled out of control.........here are those couple images.

Experimentation with Photoshop

This was a fun exercise and gave me some insights into what is possible with photoshop. I used a variety of tools, Dry Brush, Stylized then embossed, glowing edges, clouds etc. All of this was interesting but I still have not found a feature or technique which I think has enhanced my collage with some added artistic merit, either through just form or conceptually but will continue to work on it. Photoshop has allowed me to experiment but it would probably be of more benefit had I some clear idea of where I want to take this collage and already understand what is possible with the medium. Long way to go...............

Continued Experimentation with Photoshop

This morning I decided to play with artistic strokes of photoshop just to see what could be done, become familiar with the program. Still have a lot to learn about using layers but have bumbled along in my own way, saving some I thought interesting as I went. A couple examples to follow...... just need to go back and reduce size of images for uploading

Source material

I have decided during this exercise that I must re-read "Dark Victory" by David Marr and Marian Wilkinson in order to reconsider the facts of the Tampa Crisis and the ensuing attitude toward refugees.

Collage development 8

I have retyped the words in the middle /top of the collage.The red across the naval zodiac has been enhanced to emphasise the fact that they too, although at Howards insistence rather than the clear observation of maritime conventions, may have blood on their hands. In the centre of the collage are 2 people in uniform carrying young children to safety having been unloaded from a refugee boat. I thought it important to show the compassion of the people involved in the sea rescue. Their compassion was evident, unfortunately the compassion of the Australian Government was not.

Collage development 7

I wanted to blur edges a little so cloned the sea around the shipping containers in the middle of the image, increase the size of tha Tampa and deleted the words around the woman as they were incomplete and had been finished by hand.

Collage development 5

Having increased the size of the navy zodiac I cleaned up around it with a cloning tool so as to provide an edge to the water

Collage Development 4

The role of the navy previously unheard of, became important under the direct instruction from Howard. The boat, also in black and white was increased in size and I decided that it was unnecessary to have another image of refugees in the front right hand corner so I allowed the boat to take over that image.

Collage development

Having increased the size of the headstone I decided the size of the husband of Fatima needed to increase, to emphasise his grief and to humanise the refugee, something that Howard clearly tried to avoid.

Collage Development 2

I decided to increase the size of the headstone of the refugee because the issue is about Australia's compassion (or lack of) and whether or not John Howard has blood on his hands because of his stance with refugees. I started to enhance the colour red falling from his hands.

Collage Development

I decided there was too much information in my collage and that some things needed more emphasis so decided to eliminate the crabs in the bottom left hand corner and increase the prominence of John Howard's presence by cloning his suit over the top of the crabs. The red crabs make Christmas Island recognisable but the main feature of the collage is the Tampa issue which happened at Christmas Island also. The crabs become irrelevant.

To add the last lot of images to my blog, I created a file for them all, reduced the size of each one so they would be quick to upload. I thought I would be able to create a slide show to upload but have been unable to solve this problem. It may be I do not have the right programs on my computer. I can convert a file to a slide show on ny computer but i don't weem to be able to convert the whole file for uploading. Can anyone help please. As you can see I have uploaded each image separately which has made the blog very loooooonnnnnnggggggg. and was a slow process.

Images considered for collage

These are some of the photos I considered for my collage. Most are from my private collection although I did not take them all, some images are from a movie (forgotten the name) some from paintings I completed while at Christmas Island and others from the internet.