Teddy in Reality
Teddy in Reality
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Exhibition
Teddy in Reality is a mixed media piece inspired by the installations of Tony Oursler and displays the concept of depression in how people tend to act when dealing with depression.
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Artist Inspiration
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Planning
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Artist Inspiration Continued
One specific piece of Oursler's work that directly inspired my piece was couch Piece. This was discussed briefly above in 'Artist Inspiration'. A video of this piece in action is embedded to the left. I wanted to take the obscure aspects from Oursler's work and implement them into my work with a deeper meaning attached to them, which was referenced above in 'Artist Inspiration'. |
Process and Experimentation
The process began with the search for a teddy bear. This search entailed finding a bear that was innocent looking yet big enough to fit objects inside of it. I experimented with a couple different bears in order to find one that worked best with my vision. One white bear had too small of a torso to complete what I wanted to add inside of it. I had found an old dog stuffed animal in my basement. It was the perfect size but it had a Santa hat and scarf sewn to it.This obviously needed to come off due to the fact that it would make absolutely no sense to have a Christmas themed bear, it would take away from the meaning of the piece as a whole. I took a scissors and slit the back of the teddy bear, here I experimented with the size of the slit and kept cutting pieces off in order to create an opening that was big enough to display the interior of the stuffed animal. I made sure to keep the stuffing as seen to there left, I wanted to keep the stuffing in order to add to the negative space in the bear and create a look as though it was still intact. At first I wanted to use fake blood to cover the interior of the bear, but pure fake blood is unable to dry. I also needed to add black to the colors in order to create a darker and more dead mood to the piece. I decided to go with acrylic paint in the end. I experimented with different shades of red and black and with different methods of application. I decided to go with a dork as the application method. It was a little out of the ordinary but this method worked for the look I was trying to achieve. I wanted it to look messy and kind of hap-hardly, because blood does not flow nice and neat it's more jumbled and all over the place.
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Reflection
My art reflects Tony Oursler work due to the metaphor chosen and medium used to create this piece. The media that Tony uses is mixed media, which is why I decided to create a mixed media piece to reflect Tony Oursler's work. The metaphor portrayed within my piece is directly related to the meaning I interpreted from Tony Oursler's piece, "Couch piece" from 1995. The meaning of piece entails that people with depression tend to act like everything's alright and that they actually aren't hurting so nobody has to worry about them while in reality they are hurting inside and might even be having suicidal thoughts all while having a smile on their face. the meaning that I interpreted from Tony Oursler's "Couch Piece", was that the puppet was acting as if everything was okay when in reality there's literally a chair on it's head, in reality there's no way it could be okay. Some differences within the two pieces are the use of a projector to display a video onto the piece. Tony's piece was more interactive than my piece even considering that I encourage the audience to pick up the piece viewing it from the front and then finally realizing that there's more to it than just a cute stuffed animal as you turn it to the back. A challenge I had was the search for a voice recorder that could be placed inside of the bear in order for the connection to Oursler's piece to be even stronger. This is something I plan to add into the future to enhance my piece even more, A video will be uploaded of this in the future.
ACT Reflection
I inferenc1. Clearly explain how you are able to identify the cause effect relationship between your inspiration and its effect on your artwork?
Tony Oursler had a direct impact on my artwork, as seen through the medium used and the metaphor analyzed within the piece. 2. What is the overall approach the author has regarding the topic of your inspiration? Oursler's overall approach to his artwork is to take the Obscure and make people think about what's actually going on in the piece and produce emotions within his audience of uncertainty. 3. What kind of generalizations and conclusions have you discovered about people, ideas, culture, etc. while you researched your inspiration? I can generalize that people who suffer from depression tend to hide the fact that they have depression and fake that they are happy in order to avoid drawing attention to themselves due to the hatred and sadness they feel about themselves. 4. What is the central idea or theme around your inspirational research?. Depression and absurdity were the central ideas around my inspirational research. 5. What kind of inferences did you make while reading your research? I made an inference that Tony Oursler created pieces that were absurd but struck an emotion within people. |
Gregg M. Horowitz, ‘Absolute Bodies: The Video Puppets of Tony Oursler’, Parallax, vol.16, no.2, 2010, pp.95–106.
‘Tony Oursler: L7-L5 / Imponderable’, CaixaForum, Barcelona, Spain, 27 May - 3 September 2017
‘Tony Oursler: L7-L5 / Imponderable’, CaixaForum, Barcelona, Spain, 27 May - 3 September 2017