Postmodern Mixed Media Visual Analysis

My piece started with the quote about liberation: “It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.” I originally began in Photoshop getting images of caged zoo animals because that is the first idea that came to my mind when I think of being liberated but not exactly free. But when I finished my Photoshop piece to incorporate into the overall artwork, it did not work that well. I decided to keep the mountains in the foreground and ditched the zoo animals in the background. I wanted that to be the vocal point of the piece. Dr. Friebele then gave me the idea of how when we go somewhere beautiful, we never truly appreciate it because we are so concerned with taking pictures and capturing it on our phones. I then thought of when we went to BMA and I saw people taking pictures of the art on their phones (which I also did) and it gave me the idea to make my piece like an art gallery. The black iPhones would be the frames and I looked up pictures of national parks to get beautiful landscapes to put as the art in the frame. I wanted to still get the idea of not appreciating true, natural beauty, so I painted the actual landscape in the background of the iPhones. My color scheme was both analogous (in the blue and green) and complementary (the blue and orange). I added the people in the foreground to give the image a more real feel of an art gallery. If I just had the “art” on the wall without the people I don’t think viewers would see an art gallery. I used ink to draw the line that is meant to represent the start of the floor. The people have heads of TV with static screens. There is rule of thirds in my piece, horizontally. The first third is to the left of the ink line, the middle third is above this line and below the end of the frame on the mountains. The top third is the mountain frame to the top of my piece. There are also L-shapes in the frames of the iPhones to the left and right of the main mountain piece. These lines lead your eye to the vocal point of the Photoshopped-mountain image.                                            I purposefully put little detail in the background green, blue, and orange landscape of mountains, grass, and tall wheat plants to get the idea that you cannot see all the true beauty of the landscape when you use a phone to capture the image. That is why it is also in the background because the iPhones literally block you from seeing the whole natural scene. I decided to keep the floor white because I liked the look of the start black-ink line and I think there is a lot going on on the wall so it gives your eye a break and draws it to the people at the bottom looking at the art. I gave these viewers static TV heads to mean that there is nothing going on in their brains. They are not really appreciating the artwork they are looking at. The ideological idea behind my art is the idea of being trapped by technology. We never truly have freedom because we are so busy with our phones and computers all the time. The image in the mountains is of a laptop and a phone chasing after people. The technology is trying to capture the people and it looks like they are going to be successful because there is nowhere for them to go.