Pete+Ogoh


 * [[image:IMG_9977.jpg width="400" height="600"]][[image:IMG_9835.jpg width="400" height="600"]]Animated GIF in-class assignment**

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 * REMOVALS AND LAYER MASKS**




 * EXAMPLE OF RECONTEXTUALIZATION**


 * EXAMPLE OF APPROPRIATION: ROBIN THICKE FEAT PHARRELL AND T.I.- BLURRED LINES**

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 * Recontextualization Essay**



The son of we althy French Protestants, Frederic Bazille was born on December 6, 1841. He grew up to be one of the most important of the French Impressionist painters of his era. Pressured by his parents, he arrived in Paris in 1862 to study medicine, although he continued studying art, a passion inspired from a young age. At one point he was a classmate of Monet, Renoir, and Sisley in a teaching studio the four attended. In time, the four ditched the studio in order to directly observe nature and create their own brand of art, slowly inventing impressionism. Bazille was killed in 1970 in the Franco-Prussian War.

Bazille’s Young Woman with Peonies was one of the more interesting paintings I saw in the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.. It probably caught my eye because it was one of the few paintings to feature a black subject in the painting. The painting depicts a black women with a beautiful, bountiful array of flowers before here. She looks as exotic as the flowers she is peddling. The woman’s facial expression held my attention as well. She just looks deeply discontented, or unhappy, and you can see in the wrinkle between her brows and the lines around her mouth. The manner in which she is extending a clutch of peonies chosen from her basket of different seasonal pickings was interesting because I could easily picture a gun being in that hand. The flowers in a weird way make her anger/discontent less palpable. It is almost like she is handing out the flowers as a peace offering to the audience. Bazille painted this in the summer of 1870 right before the Franco-Prussian war, so maybe that had something to do with the message he was trying to convey in the painting. This painting also alludes to one of Bazille’s most infamous paintings, in which he has a black servant offering flowers to a naked prostitute.

In recontextualizing this picture, I think I would take the woman’s discontent and put it in a modern setting. There is much in modern day America to be angry and enraged about. I think I might put some urban attire on her to emphasize that switch in the time period. For example, I could put hoop earrings on her and maybe a fitted (hat) to give her that hip-hop look. Also, I want to change the way that the audience sees her. In that picture, she’s a harmless black woman selling flowers. By the simple act of changing her look, I want to adjust the audience’s perception of her to make a point about how easy it is to put certain people in a box or label them. I’ll probably replace the flower in her hand with something else.

This piece, a recontextualization of Young Woman with Peonies by Frederic Bazille, is a statement on black motherhood. The black woman in this photo represents Mother Nature offering her seasonal blooms (children) to the masses, but the rain and dark imagery symbolizes sadness because the world rejects and mistreats them. She's offering up beauty in such ugliness. The shadowy silhouettes fading in and out of the gif depict people in positions of suffering and agony, and the removal of the woman's mouth is a metaphor for her voicelessness/powerlessness.

Response to Counter-Monuments article I found the article on counter-monuments very intriguing. In the article, James E. Young posits that counter-monuments ‘are those which reject and renegotiate ‘the traditional forms and reasons for public memorial art’, such as prominence and durability, figurative representation and the glorification of past deeds. He spoke about how counter-monuments go against the grain and strive to present an opposing viewpoint to a particular belief or to an event that occurred in history. Whereas typical monuments strive to be big, loud and visible, counter-monuments do the opposite and call for close, multisensory visitory engagement. I think counter-monuments call for a bit more introspection, creativity and thinking than traditional monuments, which ultimately makes them more interesting. I think that there are a myriad way in which we can commemorate the big events of our history, and that we have yet to really create a monument of the 21st century. I think technology should be incorporated more into present-day monuments, I don't think it has to be all marble and all these other materials that we typically think about when thinking about monuments.

Sketch-Up Assignment