Art as Knowledge - Year 12 Manifest Nicholas

Context

Investigation into “Distancing from reality” “Unmasking the message” IA2 Nicholas R

Unit 3 explores the concept of 'Art as knowledge'. This project provides opportunities for you to enrich your knowledge and aesthetic experience of the world through critical thinking, making and responding to art in the contemporary, personal, cultural and/or formal contexts.

As an artist, you will continue to extend your knowledge as you develop your art practice and use your artwork to communicate knowledge to an audience.

You will be challenged to consider the way art can communicate and map your reaction to, connection with and journey to places and spaces either known or unknown.

As audience, you will consider what you can learn from works of art and how prior knowledge and experiences can influence the way visual language is read and understood.

Inquiry phase 2 is the second stage in the self-directed body of work.

How does the evolving landscape inspire artists to create innovative artworks?

When exploring this inquiry question, I was faced with a little bit of a real-world scenario the wonderful world of COVID-19 catching the world by storm in ensuring common sense was on the back burner. I began to think about my inquiry question, and I was thinking about how major artworks that are more politically inclined have talked about wars and famines, but in my artwork I have not explored things such as diseases in the past except for plague and monumental depictions of historical pandemics.

Unmasking the message Ink on surgical masks Unmasking the message was a collaborative piece designed to show how an audience can change the way their interactions evolve art pieces. The intent was to encourage a community of people who were forced into quarantine and had just come out to express their feelings without telling them to do so. Two boards were placed around the college both identical in nature, ‘the human condition’ written in the middle and were two or three face masks glued to the board. What the students wrote and did was entirely up to them, it would be a completely pure form of collecting data, as it sparked their own creative involvement. The collection of the best or most written messages were selected. When an evolving landscape such as coronavirus, impacts on a global scale, it is important to realise that it's not just the artwork and the artist impacted that changes the piece. Coronavirus is also completely evolving the landscape in which the art lives in both audience and location.

This understanding that the coronavirus has changed everything to do with my landscape both mentally and physically I put into my artwork, by experimenting with changing everything that I would traditionally do with art. I changed the canvas, I changed the paint and I totally changed the mental landscape in which my artworks traditionally are created.

This piece is a collection of personal and external opinions placed onto a symbol of the face mask and the messages being the voices of the public.

Distancing from reality Stills from performance piece Plastic, corflute, hot glue, aerosol spray paint Distancing from reality is a parody that withholds a vitally important message. After the outbreak of the pandemic, the entire world was asked to keep 1.5 metres away from everyone else, putting measurement to social interaction. The distancing is obviously highly important in a medical field in order to stop the spread of the virus, but what does it do to our mental health? I wanted to create a symbol that shows how we are told to distance ourselves from each other. When doing my artist research, I noticed that the common trend was their surroundings impacted the way both Jacqueline Scotcher and Banksy created their artwork. Their chosen medias drastically changed due to the lack of connection to their surroundings. How does an artist change when they are void from social interaction? This piece was designed to break the concept of what we think social norm is to what it has to be in order to succeed at fighting off a global pandemic. I challenge both an artist standpoint of how my landscapes evolve in each example of social distancing and I challenge how the public would respond when they were confronted with a visual 1.5 metre distancing indicator. In order to make a striking representation that is confronting, I decided to create a mask of my own. Challenging the way we think about a new and unknown concept was an interesting path to follow down, but in the end their reactions proved that everyone's landscapes are evolving and it's how we interact and adapt that makes the difference between the artist and viewer. The mask became a personal symbol in showing the difference between a social standard, a social expectation and an unknown risk.