ARTIST'S STATEMENT

Central Question

What are the 6 most pressing challenges facing women today?

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Project Description

We created an art exhibition, published on the social media platform, Instagram. We curated 6 “main posts” of digital design edits made from collaging/editing our own images and ones from the internet. Each collage is based on one of the 6 main adversities. We also created 11 Instagram "story" graphics including empowering quotes, resources, and statistics.​ The project explores 6 main adversities women in the U.S. experience for the “main posts” and as the topics for the "stories" including sexual assault, period stigma, the right to choose in  Roe v. Wade, gender stereotypes, representation for women in power, and body censorship.

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Literature

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Influence

The art is inspired by the artists Marius Sperlich, Alice Aedy, and Choo-San. These artists use social media to display & interact with audiences to create a big impact. Marius Sperlich's photography work uses both human figures and objects in a minimal curation to create a message that one may not realize at first glance (​Azoulay). His artworks almost appear as photoshop. Alice Aedy photographs real problems of situations, people suffering, or landscapes to bring about her messages. She combines both a realistic photograph and sometimes overlaid text for her artworks. Choo-San is an artist who like Marius uses the body to depict his messages, but does so by using the body as a canvas. His work is interesting because he connects the body to his painting despite the painting being something that would not be on a body like batteries. They all use human forms and a combination of another element to make their work more dynamic. The artists' works all show messages in unconventional and minimal fashions that create a unrealistic, photoshopped aesthetic. We want to achieve this similar look, but we do so with photoshop and collaging because we did not take images. Their work all depicts messages in creative ways but have a similar art aesthetic, which we try to mimic in our own way through our collages using both figures, objects, and text.

Subject

For our subject, the UN explores in their article "Six women’s issues explained with emojis" our central message of bringing attention to particular issues of feminism in a graphic manner (“Six Women’s Issues''). This source uses visuals like simple infographics to help the audience see evidence that feminism exists even today. It relates to the effects of Covid-19 on feminism as we are trying to do by bringing attention to the issues through advocation in social media as many issues have in the pandemic. It discusses six main issues as we are doing including sexual assault/violence, period stigma, and representation. However, we did not use the same six because we found three could be discarded for more general issues rather than ones solely affected by Covid-19 that we thought we could speak better on. 

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Methods

In preparation for creating our pieces, we took a qualitative approach by studying archival research--discussed in the literary review. In order to gauge the impact on their audience, we will be conducting primary research by collecting primarily quantitative data through Instagram Insights. This feature gives a follower breakdown (i.e. age, region, and gender of followers) and measures aspects such as interactions, likes, shares and saves on stories and posts. 

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We also used a series of artist techniques such as Adobe Photoshop, collaging, and word building. 

Audience & Impact

The goal of our capstone project is to raise awareness about gender equality and educate audiences on the challenges women face.

The impact of this project will not only be measured through Instagram analytics but also post-Arts Fest Instagram story polls and questions that followers can respond to. Some examples of questions will be if any of these pieces changed individuals’ views about an issue, or if it opened their eyes to a “new” issue. It is easy to recognize that certain people might receive our platform and work differently--such as the way audience members interact with posts, or how it makes them feel. With this in mind, we came up with the hypothesis that more women will be following our account than any other gender--and women will interact more with our posts. We believe this because women might be more aware of the issues we overview, therefore the work might resonate with them more--and these individuals will be more likely to share it on personal accounts.

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Throughout this process, we have both learned how to utilize Instagram as a tool for art curation. We have grown as qualitative researchers and have strengthened our editing skills through the many fine revisions of their capstone project.

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References

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Azoulay, Bonnie. “Meet The Berlin Photographer Using Instagram to Tell Provocative Stories.” HYPEBEAST, 2 Jan. 2020, hypebeast.com/2020/1/marius-sperlich-berlin-photographer-interview.

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“Six Women's Issues Explained with Emojis.” UN Women, 17 July 2020, www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2020/7/compilation-womens-issues-explained-with-emojis.  

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Acknowledgements

We'd like to thank Heather-Erin Bremenstuhl for being our main guide throughout this project to help us get to a place we wanted. She was always available for us and pushed us to create art with a strong message.

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