The media representations I chose to reflect on my culture were
paintings or the visual arts. The history of paintings goes way back in time.
Paintings have been an important artistic medium spanning cultures, continents
and time, and the nature of this art has been constantly changing—from
religious, classical paintings to more abstract and conceptual paintings. Paintings
have an inspiring, beautiful way of communicating messages, strong feelings and
emotions in people. I also think that words and quotes have the same effect on
people of communicating a powerful message and producing strong emotions and
feelings. For my remix, I decided it would be cool to try to combine painting
with modern day quotes. How powerful would it be to combine two very inspiring,
meaningful art forms in one representation? Paintings have not been traditionally
and historically represented with words. Most paintings don’t include words, only
the artist’s name at the bottom. Paintings rely more on colors, images and
figures instead of words to communicate a message. In comparison, quotes rely more
on the power of words, not images, to communicate a feeling or message.
I got the idea for my remix from the collage of quotes on my
Pinterest boards and thinking of how much these quotes mean to me. I pin way
too many quotes on Pinterest because quotes give me hope and inspiration. A
quote, just like a song lyric, can communicate the way I feel and my deepest
thoughts in a way that I’ve never been able to put into words. I believe that the
artistic medium of quotes has become very popular in social media, speeches,
print text and other contexts in our contemporary society, and correct me if I’m
wrong, but I think that quote pictures/blocks are a fairly new artistic medium.
I liked the idea of remixing the old historical painting with the new
contemporary quote block/picture. I drew on the paintings of Leonid Afremov and
Vincent van Gogh’s “Café Terrace at Night” because their paintings seemed to mimic
the same feelings and messages expressed from the quotes. The paintings of
Leonid Alfremov, with all the colors and contrasts and figures, especially stirred
up similar emotions and expressions of liveliness that I felt while reading the
quotes on my Pinterest board. The painting and quote seemed to connect in a meaningful
way.
I used Adobe photoshop to recontextualize the paintings with
the quotes, to enmesh and ingrain the quotes into the visual arts. I had to
take the block quotes from Pinterest and insert them as a layer into the painting.
I used many photoshop tools to do this. I wanted the quotes to look like they
were a part of the painting, to really be enmeshed in the texture, colors and layers
of it. I wanted it to feel like the quotes and painting were a part of each
other—that together they had shared meaning and power. This remix meant a lot to
me because visual images and words make me feel deeply and can stir up emotions.
I’m excited to see what overall effect it has on my classmates.
I like this idea of remixing or recontextualizing historical
texts—re-envisioning and responding to them in new ways. We respond to the old
and recontextualize it in our contemporary world, thus forming a new text with
new meaning and significance. I think it’s
important that we realize most artists and people “do not always create new
objects and forms but RESPOND TO PAST and PRESENT conversations” (Barney 145).
Hence, we don’t live in a vacuum. We are constantly responding to each other's work, to the things
around us, the things in our history, culture and identity, and inserting
ourselves into the conversation. We re-invent and play with the old. We do this
through adding, cutting, reassembling, manipulating, mashing, expanding,
revising, de-centering and covering. Who knew there were so many ways to remix?
When students get the chance to experiment and remix an old form, they see how everything
is interrelated and intertextual. The main take-away I got from this project
and lesson, is to give my students opportunities to respond to old forms in new
ways, which Barney calls conceptual and historical responding literacies.
https://www.google.com/search?q=leonid+afremov&tbm=isch&source=iu&ictx=1&fir=KDEQowTpk1GuKM%253A%252CU8kYr9y9N6WhfM%252C_&usg=__-BlC1LucW3UwmSj63xSBWNbjQrU%3D&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi-zqmt767ZAhVFAqwKHTo9AZEQ_h0IgAIwGQ#imgrc=_
https://www.pinterest.com/shelbkristine/remix/
In the assignment the project begins with a piece of media that represents a culture, race, ethnicity, gender, nationality, religion, etc. with which you identify. Your piece is thought provoking and well done, but I wonder who you could create more of a dialogue about your identify as Shelby. You talk about things that you do such as pinning the quotes. I would push you for this project to think about who you are versus what you do.
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