After my first tutorial which made me re-think my initial idea for creating zine and instead possibly and making an installation and or using the bedroom as a space for my work, I decided to look at installation artists and artists who have either used the bedroom or been inspired by it for their work.
Tracy Emin 'My Bed':
'When Tracey Emin aired her dirty laundry in the 1999 Turner Prize exhibition at Tate Britain, she set a new standard for confessional art. She conceived of the installation, titled My Bed (1998), after a long, bedridden bender following a bad break-up. When Emin finally left her sheets, she examined the mess she’d created. Crumpled tissues, period-stained clothing, cigarettes, empty vodka bottles, a pregnancy test, lubricant, and condoms surrounded her bed. She decided it was a work of art...It remains one of contemporary art’s most striking depictions of vulnerability, a self-portrait that doesn’t veer from the messiness of depression and heartbreak. In particular, it appealed to viewers who connected their own painful experiences to those implied by Emin’s installation.' https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-tracey-emins-my-bed-ignored-societys-expectations-women
I love how raw and personal this installation is, and I really like how much of a fuss it kicked up in the media at the time. This messy, unfiltered, disarrayed display of a woman's bedroom completely contradicts the way that women are usually portrayed and thought of stereotypically as the 'housewife' trope - very clean, fresh and tidy, very prim and proper, not allowed to be vulgar or overtly sexual etc.and this installation completely flips that notion on its head, shining a light on a side of women not usually seen by the public eye. Also the way that Emin has made such a personal space and experience public I find a really interesting to deal with a personal hardship and also question common held beliefs and expectations of women and femininity. This is definitely an approach I'd like to take for my own installation and looking at Emin's work has further consolidated how taking our often most personal and private space, the bedroom, and using it to express yourself publicly can really challenge people.
Molly Soda:
I remembered that in one of the previous lectures the work of Molly Soda was shared and thought her work would be good to look at as she did a really interesting project looking at the relationships we have with our bedrooms which she then turned into an interactive exhibition.
Soda described this project as being about and girls and for girls in their bedrooms. Very similarly to Emin, it takes the private behaviours inherent to those spaces and makes them public, reflecting how that process changes the way in which those behaviours are seen and contextualised. As a result, her images are raw, rejecting conventional beauty norms, whilst still maintaining a tween-Tumblr aesthetic and employing kitsch elements and lowbrow internet culture. This aesthetic is definitely something I'm considering on using in my own installation as not only is in really in fashion at the moment, I also think it could be a good way to show how, like when using the internet as an escape mechanism, I'm trying to demonstrate a world that transcends norms held in society and shines a light on what things could look like.
More images of Soda's work:
Initial mood-board for bedroom installation:
I've started a Pinterest board to brainstorm my ideas for my installation. I'm currently thinking that I want to use a lot of colour to show the vibrance and diversity of the LGBTQ+ community which is commonly represented by a rainbow flag, but also to symbolise how much more bright and free a world post-gender would be. I want to use a lot of neon to symbolise the future and after doing the textures and surfaces workshop I really want to include silver foil to further enhance the futuristic look but also to hint at retro-futurism, as like the photos at the top of the moodboard if you take photos of silver foil in a certain way, which here is mainly with warm, soft lighting, blurred focus and trying to capture the refractions of light can make the photos look very 70's-80's disco esque but they also have a very similar vibe to the images of retro futurism in the 1960's.
Initial Bedroom installation plans:
Below are two versions of an initial plan for my installation which I made in photoshop playing around with what the foil could look like in my room and possible things that I could stick on top of it. To create the pink lighting effect I'm thinking that I could cover my lights in pink acetate.
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