Project Outcome

From the beginning of this project I wanted to develop a response to the brief, ‘Artist and Object’, by creating an image or animation. In the end I chose to make an image using a drawing from my sketch book which I later developed in Photoshop.
The Chapman Brothers approach to making thing’s has inspired me a lot during this project. As I have tried to think how their work would develop as an image while keeping in line with my own thoughts and ideas. My final piece consists of twelve drawn human figures in a row similar to a comic strip. The image is divided into the month sections of a calendar which are separated by light and dark contrasts in the background. This was to form a contrast between good and evil, to bring things into question about good motives and bad motives in society. The figures represent conflict i.e. war and violence. Using their hands to form guns is a universal sign that can be seen as a threat, and as a symbol of death. I have also used the twelve figures to represent each month of the calendar and to represent the current wars that are ongoing today. Writing the names of each war and their individual death toll underneath each month. I wanted each figure to look the same or similar to each other by making them unmistakably human but covering their faces to make them featureless. This was an attempt to deface my own image, in response to the way the Chapman’s have defaced Goya’s works.
By using the Chapman’s way of addressing societies morbid fascination with death and war I looked into my own detachment from the realities of war-time killing by viewing the video games I and many other people play for fun. In which the aim of the game is to kill as much as possible in order to win. I have found that the perpetual cycle of a calendar lends itself to the perpetual cycle of violence and killing that the Chapman Brothers use in their work ‘Disasters of war’. This has led me to the conclusion that there are no winners in war, just infinite cycles of killing. By which the Chapman Brothers portray in a gruesome manor with their diorama’s which are almost suspended in time so as to last forever.