Mary Had a Little “Lamb”? Rhymes (journal)

one of my first compositions without any background

I faced a lot of technical issues when doing this composition, mainly working with bitmap to create a nice high contrast halftone image of the woman’s orgasm face.

I tried threshold and liked it but did not like how it worked with the halftone

played with the virgin mary image a few times but abandoned this since it lacked meaning and was too “clean”

another early basic composition..you can tell I was playing around with random things in the initial stages haha

Above: compositions that didn’t make the cut

And for those wondering, yep, that’s the image that I used to create the strange lamb leg/male phallic look alike. Those cute little lambs have no idea what they’ve created by posing that way…

and the technique I used to create my halftone images using bitmap can be found in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgXvxTIGwlQ

Music that I listened to while doing this assignment:

The Cramps, “The Most Exaulted Potentate of Love”

The Dead Kennedys, “Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables”

West End Girls, “West End Girls Goes Petshopping”

Britney Spears, Giorgio Morodor, “Tom’s Diner”

Mark Ronson & The Business Intl, “Bang Bang Bang”

This is not all but just some of the selected that helped me while I was doing. Obviously, not all helped…I just added in Hurt’s “Lights” cause their new album is out!! but then again maybe I could have been inspired by some of the scenes in the music video…

Mary Had a Little “Lamb”? Rhymes (final thoughts)

My art is trashy and so am I

I honestly was afraid someone would judge my work as simply “shock without substance” aka Damien Hirst detractors (not that I think Hirst’s work is great and all but you get my point). The reason for why I chose to work with such risque subject matter was that I was just really interested in it and had been wanting to try applying it to a work for quite some time. This assignment gave me the opportunity to do so I just went with it. It wasn’t just about dumping porn and gore since I really thought about the composition and considered the meaning of the images in relation to the chosen rhyme. Personally, I was quite sick of doing things subtly,the whole minimalist trend going on and all the pretension with false social justice preaching(especially on Instagram…getting real personal now hah) so I just wanted to go all out and be direct about the things I was interested in even if it is not widely accepted. I love the excessive and trashy low art so I didn’t even try to present mine neatly all prim and proper. Instead, decided to place my images above the random trash bin I found in a corner for presentation. There was a certain sense of thrill whenever the rest threw their scraps into the that trash bin while we were preparing for presentation. While I feel like I could have made my compositions and images a whole lot messier and trashier, I am still quite satisfied with the end product and glad that some of you liked it too:)

I mean like…thanks for bearing with me during my presentation…

P.S. Yes, for those who don’t know, I did enter the trash bin in that photo…

Mary Had a Little “Lamb”? Rhymes (research)

I did this poster during the first lesson based on what came to me straight away when I read the rhyme Mary Had a Little Lamb straight away. I loved trashy art and exploitation movie posters so I decided to use those ideas and look for this assignment.

Professor Ina also told me to refer to Hannah Hoch since my composition reminded her of Hoch’s work. Strange enough or maybe not, Hoch’s work looks very familiar…I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it somewhere before during my regular internet surfing journeys for the weird…

Untitled Collage (1930)

While I really liked Hoch’s work, I wanted to go for something a lot more graphic and messier. While Hoch’s work is handmade, Hoch’s work had a strong “photoshopped” feel that was not very in line with the requirements for the assignment so I had to think of how I could incorporate her style but still have that “hand-printed” look. Thus, I referred to exploitation movie posters which were very messy and had a strong “hand-printed” (not sure if this is the correct term but its the idea of it have a traditionally printed look) look. Exploitation ones in particular since their main was to shock and be the extreme of everything wrong so the posters were naturally very graphic and in-your-face. Correct me if I’m wrong cause I’m not the most well versed person when it comes to movie posters and such but whatever I reference is honest and true from heart.

These were not the exact references I referred to since I referred to whatever I remembered from all the posters I looked at in the past and what stood out to me. I tend to reference gritty horror ones since they are a lot more graphic and I like that. The posters managed to make photographs have a “painted”/”inked”/”hand-printed” feel and I like how direct they are about their subject matter that it just pops right at you. I was also keeping in mind my love for erotic-grotesque artist Suehiro Maruo’s works.

The above is pretty much sums up my influences and research for the look of my compositions as for the idea…I would say it just came to me and I just gradually built on it based on whatever that came into my mind…maybe due to being into a lot of these things. I do have a quite a few books (some academic) on erotic matter such as the era of Weimar Berlin, Japanese ero-guro artists, a french book on shock collage…I like surfing the deepest recesses of the internet when I’m alone at night…hmm… Whether or not that says something about me…hmmm…okay that’s enough.

Mary Had a Little “Lamb” Rhymes (final)

Mary had a little Lamb

His fleece was white as snow

“Why does the lamb love Mary so?”

But still it lingered near

“Why, Mary loves the lamb, you know?”

“Why does the lamb love Mary so?”

Okay, I’m gonna be direct about this but there really isn’t some deep religious meaning to my work…its just in your face plain sex, BDSM and satanic goats. Pure trashy art, my friend~

I started this project with the idea that the rhyme “Mary Had A Little Lamb” was actually really ambiguous and started working around the way certain verses sound when spoken without any context. I also brought in my love for trashy things, “poor taste” such as using the aesthetic of exploitation movie posters. Mary and the little lamb seem to be associated with a certain form of innocence so I wanted to reverse that as well. The way I went about it was to imagine if the rhyme was read to a blind person and what could the blind person have imagined. Thus, I interpreted the rhyme as Mary and her “little” lamb having a really close relationship…really close…maybe a bit too close. I was also interested in the topic of beastality so I saw Mary and the lamb as sexual partners. The idea of lamb also brought into mind the dynamics of the dominanating and the submissive so I decided to include BDSM images as well. The little lamb of hers could be a sort of slave, a submissive toy to play with, thus “everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go”. Yet, I was also interested in the topic of the lamb/ goat as a satanic symbol so for some of the compositions, I reversed the dynamics and have a satanic goat represented by the goat mask instead. The goat mask also adds on to BDSM look. In contrast, I added the visual of the Virgin Mary overlooking a figure in bondage to add on to the idea. I also played with the visual of the lamb’s backside with its tail that resembles a male phallic and incorporated elements of psychedelic art too. Keep up with the use of double meaning to images, I added a flower in the centre of the lamb legs which also happens to resemble a beautiful vagina. Further down, I worked on the theme of ambiguity and censorship as I felt that Mary had a little lamb could have been a censored version of Mary and her lamb’s deep relationship instead portraying a nice innocent image of a girl and her lamb. The last image pretty much sums it all: laugh in the face of censor ship, forget about subtlety, just show it all.

Final Submission: Inner Space

Inner Space from Charlene on Vimeo.

A recreation of a journey through outer space using household objects, familiar buildings and my body. I have been very interested in outer space since young so I decided to recreate it using scenes and objects that have been familiar to me since young. Instead of going OUT into space, I go back IN to familiar objects. Hence, the title Inner Space. I mixed 2001’s Overture with some deep space recordings for the soundtrack and I deliberately allowed the can details to be seen so this could also be seen as a bad parody of space movies.
Special thanks to Pang Xin, Shanelle and Wu You for helping me out with the plate, can and pen scene:)

Please refer to the link above cause the video that was shown in class today was really over exposed and did it affect the video quite a lot:(