THE UNIVERSE & STUFF

Final Art 2500 Project

My featured artists this week is Curiot. He works primarily in Mexico and paints these massive creatures all over the city. Curiot's work caught my eye partly because his images just look so cool. He truly has an eye for creating the fantastic and otherworldly. His use of color is very impressive as he uses vibrant colors inspired by the city and Mexican traditions such as Day of the Dead to pain these creatures who in turn are made up of bits and pieces from buildings and tribal masks. Curiot also sometimes uses his art to tell little stories, such as the one in which it would appear a tribe of humans are bringing trees to one of these creatures as a gift or offering. Ultimately, Curiot's eye for the fantastic and his beautifully vibrant colors are what gained my interest.

Link: http://gifti.me/i/s3L0iXhS.gif

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These images by Michael Paul Smith really stuck out to me because at first glance it's very easy to think to yourself, "oh he just found some old cars and photographed them." But then when you see a zoomed out view of what he is doing it all comes into perspective, pun intended. Using perspective Smith takes miniature cars and buildings and places them against their normal sized counterparts in a way that makes them all seem to be part of the same photo. I really enjoy when people use tricks like this to make the unreality reality. Smith really accomplishes this by sending the viewer back to the 1950's with his miniatures.

Assignment 3

I was drawn to Dasic originally because of the first image I posted. It played an optical illusion on me and I thought that the artist had painted a mural that was impossibly high, to the point where the camera couldn't capture the top of it. After some more intense viewing I realize that he had actually just painted the mural on every part of an overpass creating this illusion. Looking through Dasic's other works I really appreciated the way he uses many bright, vibrant colors and paints them in urban settings that seem to lack these vibrant colors. It is as if his work is a small portal into a cartoon world hidden within the city.

            The case of Girl Talk is pretty clear-cut in my opinion. Girl Talk uses music that doesn’t belong to them to profit and this is clearly a punishable offense. In the article it even states that nobody sues him just because they believe a lawsuit against him would kick off a storm of copyright reform in which they could no longer sue lesser-known artists any longer. However I believe what Girl Talk does is also a punishable offense and worthy of a lawsuit because at the end of the day, he is using others work for his own profit.

For my two images I wanted to try and take propaganda posters from the 40's-60's and reapply them to modern times. I feel pretty successful in doing this. My works relate to the recent news that the NSA has been potentially spying on American citizens, as well as the news from last year that a law had been enacted that allowed drone strikes on Americans when in desperate need. I tried to convey with my work that our current forms of communication such as cell phone conversations and texting aren't as safe as we might think. I used older propaganda posters because they have this feeling of paranoia and zealousness about them. They take situations to the extreme, such as saying anybody could be a spy so watch what you say. I turned that on its head and made it more about anybody could be reading your texts or listening to your phone calls. This project came together pretty seamlessly. The main thing I struggled with was trying to get the text I replaced in the second image to look like it belonged with the other text. If you can't tell, I put in the words "Leaving" and "Texts" in manually. Both of these ended up looking thinner than the other words and I wish I could have found a way to improve them. A more minor struggle was getting the cell phone in the first image to look proportional and to get it to face the same way. I played around with distortions for a while and that was the best I could get. I do want to say that I was very happy with the coloring I did. I was able to use my adjustment layers to make things the appropriate look for the times. Such as the NSA symbols in the corner having that aged 50's look to them, or the color of the American flag on the uniform of the spy in the first image. Thanks, for viewing, I hope you enjoy.

I was initially drawn to Seveso's work when I saw his series in which he mixed ink and oil and used high speed photography to capture the two mixing. I was drawn to it because the colors and forms Seveso creates with ink and oil look surreal, and have a quality to them makes them seem digitally created. Diving further into his other works I found that he often works with digitally altering pictures of models. I found this interesting because after all, we are in a photoshop class, and using photoshop to distort reality really grabs my attention. In the pictures of the models Seveso once again uses colors and surrealism to make you question if the picture you're looking at was even real in the first place or if the entire thing is digitally created from scratch. That level of transformation in photoshop really intrigues me.