Can Raped Mannequins Fly?
Question of the century, indeed.
In my last post, I wrote about the making of our raped mannequin installation, titled 'No Means No'. In this post, I will go into the details of how we put the installation in place. And believe me, it was quite a struggle.
But first, we had to make a sign explaining the title and concept of our artwork.
The idea was to cut the words out of the chicken wire and paste them on a sandwich board as the title. Our concept:
The typography was inspired by the Grunge Art era, since overall our installation is quite abstract and grunge and not your typical "polished" comping-y stuff (especially with the chicken wire and whatnot).
Onto the actual installing the installation:
That's Faza on the ladder. Our plan was to string ho thread into the head and body, and hang them by creating a loop in the ceiling. The head was already hard enough, and took us about twenty minutes to half an hour, if I'm not mistaken. The body was more difficult, since it was heavier, obviously.
That was our first attempt.
Since we could not figure out how to make the hook thread even stay on the body, let alone hang from the ceiling, we decided to inquire some help from Pak Rahmat the next day (he was absent that day).
Of course, the next day, the head had fallen off and was lying in a sad pile along with the body.
Pak Rahmat was smarter than us---he taught us how to knot the hook thread around the body and head at the same time, so they are united into one entity instead of two seperate ones.
(I'm the one in tribal print and black boots)
This is the final result:
Some close ups:
And th-th-th-th-th-that's it, folks!
SELF EVALUATION
Overall, I think this was quite an assignment. We got to develop our concept quite well, going from the problems of urban life, into what it feels like to be a young girl in urban culture and what we are represented as. We dug deeper and came to two focal points, Rape Culture and Sexism, which if combined, results in sexual exploitation. The blow-up doll symbolises this. In the end, we wanted to create something that will shock viewers and garner attention, and I think we achieved that. Our project is very different from the other two teams'---we explored our concept deeper, and we're able to create a mental link between the artwork and the viewer. And I think that connection is what makes this a successful artwork.
If there was anything I could change about this installation, I would've probably made it more human-like. As it is now, it still looks like a doll, which can be good or bad, depends on your thinking. In essence, it looks like a blow up doll, so it delivers our concept well. On the other hand, as someone who took nude drawing classes and have been studying anatomy for a while now, my brain insists that it looks more "human". Then again, that's probably just me nitpicking. Overall, I think it delivers the message well.
The challenges in this assignment was connecting our very dark concept to comping. All the other teams took more lighthearted approaches, and for a while I doubted that our installation was "clean" enough for Comping Techniques. But that changed as we went along, and our professor seemed to appreciate the concept and thinking that went behind our installation, as well as how it is projected. If it's not as polished as some of the other ones, so be it. We were never aiming for polished anyway. We aimed for grunge and abstract and brutality, and I think that was delivered well.
In conclusion?
I learned a great deal this term in Comping Techniques. How to be neat, how to take your time, how to present your ideas well in front of the clients, etc. But most important, I learned about teamwork, and how to keep my head when things don't go exactly to plan. And I think these are very important qualities for years to come.