Introduction

Hey everyone, it’s been a while since I’ve made another blog post. This project was all about using conceptual art to shine a light on dark or bad sections of our society. It was a really interesting journey and I learned a lot about both art and dystopias through this project.

Conceptual Art & Launch Concept

This is launch project, it took me 20 minutes to make and gives an accurate picture to my grade 12 years. For this assignment, we were tasked with creating modern conceptual art on how our grade 12 year is going and made this mess. If you would like to know more of the symbolizes of this chaotic piece, you can check the link from here. I was very rushed for this assignment because the day previously my house had a power outage thus, it was very difficult for me to do arts and crafts in the dark.

We also analyzed various other modern art pieces to get a better grasp of modern art.
I found this piece to be most interest out of the modern art pieces I looked at, it is called “Dispersion” by Christian Boltanski.

In this piece, visitors were encouraged to interact with the art by taking from the pile. Boltanski created this piece to break the rules of a traditional museum of no touching or stealing of the pieces in the collection. You should totally check out his work if you are interested, I found it to be really cool and different from other artists.

We also looked at the work of Tobias Wong, a famous and renowned conceptual artist.

I must say that I was very confused initially seeing his gallery and attempting to decipher the meaning of these art. I would check out if you are looking to gain a better understanding of modern art since his art piece I would say embody the soul of modern art, even if I find them very confusing at times.

Dystopian Novel: Fahrenheit 451

Connecting to modern art was the main theme: Dystopia. Everyone in our class was given the chose between multiple distopic books. I chose the book Fahrenheit 451 due to a Ted-Ed video, recommending the book. To give a short spoiler free summary, Fahrenheit 451 is about a firemen who burns book in a world obsessed with technology. Despite the book being made in 1953, the issues of its dystopia is very similar to issues concerning technology in our present day.

For this assignment we were being mainly graded for our note taking, and connections to other media. At the start of taking these notes, I was doing far too much work and taking an extremely unnecessary amount of notes. However, by the end of this project I learned how to make meaningful notes that would not take a long amount of time and had a interest message.

Conceptual Art

Our end product of this project was to create a conceptual art piece that shines a light to a dystopic part of our society.

At the start we had to come up with a blueprint or plan for what this piece represents, how we’ll make it and how it will be interactive to the audience. I made mine a type of board, covered with newspaper and articles I had found from my research, with string on it, imitating a web, to represent a web showing how social media traps people. Additionally, the audience would be able to put their own answer to “Why do You use Social Media” on the board.

How did this plan actually go?

A lot more work than I initially thought. More specially, taping all the articles and newspapers on the board took me around a week to do. I honestly should of approached this process more efficiently by using a paper cutter instead of regular scissors to cut our everything. Furthermore, I also had issues with my string, due to it at the start looking like a disorganized mess. However, I was able to come up with a quick solution, thank to my dad, of buying new jumbo yarn to make a more professional and organized web.

The Exhibition

I would say overall, this exhibition went pretty smoothly. Out of all the exhibition I have participated in during my 5 years of PLP, this was the most calm and chill, at least for my room. We did not set up a lot of decoration and just focused on having a space to present all our individual art pieces.

I would say my presentation of my art overall went well. The one negative for me was that people kept writing down positive things about social media on the sticky notes, and my whole art piece is suppose to highlight the negative affect of social media! However, I was very happy with how many people were willing to contribute to the board

Conclusion

Conceptual art can make viewers question the dark section of our society. Due to the freedom of the medium, artist are able to express themselves however they please, leading to interesting and groundbreaking art that makes guest think about bleak aspects of our society. Thank you for reading if you have gotten this far!