#colour change mine; black-bolded original to article

[underanothername]

Excerpt:

Last year, Trump released a 10-point policy expanding on his Schedule F plan. It argues Schedule F is about introducing accountability into a workforce where it's lacking — "firing underperforming employees … is often completely impossible," it says. But it also proposes to overhaul federal departments, relocate up to 100,000 jobs from "the Washington Swamp" to "places filled with patriots", and fire "all of the corrupt actors in our National Security and Intelligence apparatus". Dozens of conservative and Trump-aligned organisations, led by the influential Heritage think tank, are now working on "Project 2025" — building a database of up to 20,000 conservative-minded workers Trump could appoint across government. "This database will prepare an army of vetted, trained staff to begin dismantling the administrative state from day one," Heritage president Kevin Roberts told the New York Times, which describes the project as a "right-wing LinkedIn". Heritage details the vision further in an 887-page blueprint for reshaping government. It advocates eliminating programs and personnel focused on, among other things, climate protection and racial and gender equity. At the Treasury Department, for instance, it proposes interviewing every official who has ever taken part in a DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) initiative, so they can be fired unless they objected to participating. While not formally adopted by Trump, the document largely aligns with his platform, and its contributors include many of his allies, supporters and former officials. It's "probably the best detailed blueprint of what Trump 2.0 would look like", Professor Moynihan says.

[ladyzoeaitken]

Research

16th October 2017

After speaking to Dem, we discussed how I could further explore the fashion images by looking into Afrofuturism and using the same techniques of how it was coined together to reflect a new personal movement.

While I like the idea of this I am worried that it would stray too far from the original brief, I feel if I were to explore this theme then I would need to think about how I could add in this element of space.

Afrofuturism – As the Tate would describe Afrofuturism as: “a cultural aesthetic that combines science-fiction, history, and fantasy to explore the African-American experience and aims to connect those from the black diaspora with their forgotten African ancestry”

-While the movements theories and been around since 1930’s term “Afrofuturism” wasn’t coined until 1994 by Mark Deary in his essay titled: “Black to the Future”.

The movement mainly focuses on combining culture, history with science fiction elements of fantasy; Dem discussed the idea of using familiar culture focusing on particular points such as; craft, fashion and aesthetic then combining these elements with a fictional question of “what if?”.

I started off researching into the art movement by studying the work of Ellen Gallagher and Sun Ra the musician.

                                            Sun Ra

I found the film's concept hard to grasp at first, I believe this was down to language that was being used; I also thought it held strong surreal elements which played on the stereotypes that other races normally associate with the black culture as it first starts off showing a female physique shaped spaceship typically assigned to an Afro-American woman.

Towards the end of the film, Sun Ra starts to introduce his own metaphysical theory for how the move could be done and how that would impact on time itself.

“Equation wise the first thing to do is to consider time as officially ended, we work on the other side of time – we bring them through the isotopes, teleportation, translipucation or better still transport the whole planet here through music”

I understand the main message of this film was to gather supporters to what we would know Identify as the “Black Lives Matter” campaign; Sun Ra tries to convey this idea across of a utopian world where Black people are able to escape violence and racism through posing the question: “What would the world look like if the Black community held most of the power in society?”.

It was this important question that made me start to look at the modern world around me, I started to think about what element of the world I live in that I would want to change? What social injustice I would want to reform and how that would take effect in the world.

I think if I could pose a question for change I would ask:

“What if millennial women ruled the world?”

Bearing this question in mind I started to create an experiment that could embody this message.

I still wanted to use the original idea of equations so decided to use the sum 1+1=2. 

To represent one, I took two of the same fashion images and started to collage them together; because the symbols for the equation was +, I choose to double up on the images by overlapping them and increasing the colour temperature of the piece so it turned a bold shade of pink and red.

I then added in cactus’s as they are culturally appropriate to millennials.

While I loved the overall piece, I did find it was missing something, with afro-futurism there seems to be this empowering message always lurking behind the work however mine does not seem to have this message.

I started to look into other afro-futurism inspired artists and came across Ellen Gallagher’s work.

Ellen Gallagher is an American artist whose work often features racial issues and touches upon such topics as “how society imposes stereotypes onto race groups” this is evident in her 2004-2005 created piece “DeLuxe”.

“DeLuxe” consists of 60 individual framed collaged pieces of work hung into a rectangular shape which is made up of 5 rows of 12.

The work was either drawn or was a combination of digital and traditional printing techniques such as lithography, etching and screen printing. Some of the work also included fabric such as velvet, plasticine, toy eyeballs and coconut oil.

The collaged imagery used for these pieces was taken from magazines articles dating from 1930’s until the 1970’s where they target demographic was the women and men that made up the African American consumer. -The imagery itself aims to sell everything from beauty to hygiene products such as wigs, underwear, slimming aid and even skin bleaching products.

I enjoyed how impactful the final display of the work looked; the way in which it was hung with each frame being placed within 5cm of each other creating this dominate piece of art which I felt forced the viewer to interact with it also mimicking the body language of how a protester would do when protesting.

Out of all of Gallagher’s techniques used throughout the 60 pieces, I enjoyed how she used the word “DeLuxe” in an ironic sense as the word itself can mean “superior” however when these adverts were being produced this term would not have been associated with the African-American community.

I found through the manipulation of the imagery and the ironic usage of the word made a strong visual statement, I wanted to use this combination myself.

https://www.stylist.co.uk/life/abortion-jane-doe-sues-aclu-trump-abortion-rights-us/163392

I choose to apply this combination against the piece I created (1+1=2) with a news article I found where a teenage girl in Texas sought to terminate her pregnancy but encountered hardship in doing due to trumps administration. They tried to delay the processing time so that the girl would not be eligible for the termination as it was illegal to have a pregnancy terminated over 20weeks.

Reading the story, I found the imagery in the piece harmonize well with the article, for instance, the event was meant to have taken place in Texas, a place where people would wear western style clothing and cactuses are apart of the natural landscape.

I wanted to use ironic wording like Gallagher had used in her own work – In the article there is a picture of a banner which states “Freedom = Choice” I felt using the word “freedom” over the top of this piece would nail the ironic message I was after.

Originally, I added the “Freedom” over the top in a typeface, however, I didn’t feel this looked right; instead I

added a blindfold made from black sugar paper, outlined in white gel pen were the words “Freedom” I then placed this over the eyes of the first girl.

The idea behind this was to create a sense of social evolution; I wanted the first girl to represent today’s ideology of what freedom holds for women and girls.

The “Freedom” blindfold was meant to represent the limited freedom that they hold, for instance in this news article abortion is meant to be legal which would indicate that women and girls have the freedom to make decisions over their own bodies however with what is stated in the article shows the polar opposite of this.  

After reading the article I felt that freedom was almost an illusion and confirmed this idea that decisions being made for women are still being made by men; the blindfold is meant to represent this as an act of how we are still being kept in the dark.

I choose not to cover the eyes of the second girl as I wanted her to represent the newly reformed world were millennial women have taken over and the word freedom would not need to be presented because it’s a moral that’s deeply ingrained into the social culture.

On reviewing the piece, I thought it worked well I also enjoyed how it was able to have a meaning behind the work which to me gave it value; I do have concerns as to whether there might be too many themes colliding in one piece.

If I were to develop the piece I would start to draw from it using mixed media techniques ensuring I was adding other millennial-futurism elements before using the outcome to progress it further by experimenting with printmaking techniques.