Artist Three – John Whitlock

John Whitlock is an American collage artist born in the year 1979 whose practice includes charcoal drawing, painting and mixed media assemblage on canvas and paper. His work is about transformation and the reframing of the familiar using abstract. His aim is to evoke implied, but equivocal narrative through abstraction. In the first image, you can see different peculiar shapes and a drawn eye masked into one of the shapes. With the eyes you can see intense shadows which evokes mystery and suspense. This is because shadows can create an atmosphere of uncertainty, as they obscure details and can be interpreted in various ways, as Whitlock aims to present equivocal narrative, he has achieved this successfully as no one knows the real meaning behind the piece leading to us as audience creating our own interpretation about the piece. It also seems random and that it was created without a purpose/intention.

For these experiments, I took inspiration from the artist Cur3es where in his work 'Shards' there's parts of the woman's face in fragments. I did this in Photoshop, and I took different angles of the face then placed them into fragments. To see the ending result, I repeated this step twice, but combined the faces of two genders instead. I wanted to play with the idea of gender and perception by combining the faces of two genders, while keeping the same angles and composition of the face. This also allowed me to explore the idea of gender fluidity and create a unique visual representation of it. In order to convey a sense of void associated with those who are denied freedom of expression, I chose to make the image black and white. The black and white colour scheme creates a sense of emptiness, representing the lack of freedom of expression in our society. The fragmented look of the image also reflects this idea, giving the impression of a shatteredmirror.

I substituted text for some of the fragments in these experiments. John Whitlock's idea of adding shapes was also incorporated. Other areas of the face were also masked into those shapes.