PARANOIA LAND

JENA STILLWELL 30903090 VISA 483

You may be familiar with Shepard Faireys Obey sticker, and its appearance around the world as as a popular image. As he states in his book: The Giant sticker attempts to stimulate curiosity and bring people to question both the sticker and their relationship with their surroundings. Because people are not used to seeing advertisements or propaganda for which the product or motive is not obvious, frequent and novel encounters with the sticker provoke thought and possible frustration, nevertheless, revitalizing the viewers perception and attention to detail. (5) I found this quote in my literary travels and found that it speaks to my own illustrations quite well. The purpose of my posters is to create ambiguous and somewhat unsettling meanings by transforming figures from my imagination and my own environment into juxtapositions, by adding text. The inspiration for these text phrases comes from found words that I come across in my daily life, and combining them with grimy illustrations creates a mash up, or collage of counter culture. The title of this paper is a prime example of one the phrases that I find, as it was randomly scribbled down in my source notes for this research. Although I do not work in stickers like Fairey, I found considerable similarities in the Obey canon and their purpose to provoke thought in the viewer, mirrored in my own work, as well as the combination of adding elements of found phrases, collage and mash ups.

The reason I bring mash ups into this research is because I am heavily influenced by urban, underground music. A mash up, in the music world, is a remix of songs to create something new. In this context, remix means to take cultural artifacts and combine and manipulate them into

new kinds of creative blends. Remix and mash up have been expanded to include music as well as static images taken from films, TV, the internet, and personal archives. (Knobel and Lankshear 22) I found the climax of this type of music while I was in Hamburg, Germany. The culture that I found in Europe was so different than my own in that way, especially musically, and the sounds that I found there relate heavily to the illustrations that I do, in that they are grungy and dark, but also bright and young. One of the main artists that I have been listening to and that has inspired my work through sound is Chinese Man (https://soundcloud.com/ alternativetrip/chinese-man-ive-got-that-tune). Their music is a conglomerate of different sounds and recordings and beats, all mashed up into a cohesive and particular style. The result of this, is a particularly urban and new sound, that I find translates to my work in that I, myself, use found words and pieces of environment in my pieces.

Many of the artists work that I have found in the recent years are also illustrative. But they also use this idea of the collage as a basis. Collage embodies the practice of finding things and combining them all together into a weird image, one that doesnt have to make sense. It uses appropriation of pop culture and found objects, which relates to the techniques that I use in my own drawings. Collage offers a retreat from logic or reason, transforming the familiar into the strange and the fantastic. (Monroe 81) Although my work is not collage as a medium, the techniques used in collage is an accurate description of what I am trying to achieve in my drawings, in that they have hints of strangeness, and yet, they are readable as many different meanings. An artist in this area that I relate to is Edward Ruscha. I admire Ruschas work, as we both have such a graphic style and we both create this advertisement effect with paint, which is

an unusual form for a poster. Mostly, I find similarities in our use of words. Words that are seemingly dark, and a little sarcastic, and more than a little vague. His bold titles are ambiguous, but that is what makes them strong, especially in contrast with their juxtaposed images of landscape. His technique is also very clear cut, the words are depicted as if they were printed,on if they were on the computer. I find that interesting since I have learned that the reproduction of text using paint has a particular hand made quality, more so for my own work.

The grungy quality of my text and subjects are somewhat influenced by the advertisement posters I found in Europe. My style of drawing mostly already had heavy elements of grunge and slime, but seeing those posters only reassured me that my style was not totally isolated. Most posters were for bands, some were for other types of events. They were everywhere, and they were all illustrated, something that I cant find here in Kelowna. I started a collection of these posters, naturally, as I have a habit of collecting (and maybe hoarding) found things that interest me. All of these works were so strange, that they always made me stop in the streets to look at them, maybe not for the band itself, but for the quality of the posters. In a small town such as Kelowna, not many people are exposed to posters plastered onto every wall, let alone ones that have vague meanings, as advertisement is very conservative here. In this style of drawing, Australian artist James Jirat Patradoon, is an illustrator I really admire. He creates characterdriven visual art, born of fictional worlds of borrowed imagery that act as distorted mirrors to our reality, mashed-up and remixed to create new stories. (James Jirat Patradoon Illustration) His images are, formally, very bright and colourful, yet dark in subject matter. The same with the artist from the UK, Boneface. They both have similar styles, which are very graphic and pop art-

esque, and both in which I draw heavy inspiration from. They use pop, underground, counter culture, based on heavy metal and video games, and complete with gore and grunge. They use these as ambiguous critiques on popular culture and society. And although I do not particularly aim to critique society with my illustrations, although sometimes I do, my works are created more to depict a morbid narrative. I enjoy the fact that I can bring viewers into a culture they may not think about otherwise, especially living in Kelowna, where this kind of culture is few and far between. The main difference between Patradoon, Boneface and myself is that they both work in printmaking and digital art, where my practice is in drawing and using paint as a medium of illustration.

The combination of remix, new music culture, my stay in a large urban city, as well as the grungy inspiration found from posters and other graphic artists and have inspired me to draw the posters that I draw and collect the words I collect. I believe that art is an extension of yourself and your beliefs. I collect the words I collect because theyre edgy and dark and ambiguous, and I mash them up with imagery drawn in a non-particularly straight style. It holds true that viewer makes meaning, in the words of Roland Barthes, as many people see different meanings in the combinations of my posters, and that, in a way, is mostly the point of them.

Works Cited
Dexter, Emma. Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing. Phaidon Press Inc, 2005. Print. Fairey, Shepard. Obey: Supply and Demand: The Art of Shepard Fairey. Ginko Press, 2006. Print.

James Jirat Patradoon Illustration. n.d. Web. 16, Apr, 2013. <www.juxtapoz.com/illustration/james-jirat-patradoon-illustraion/>

Knobel, Michele and Colin Lankshear. Remix: The Art and Craft of Endless Hybridization. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, Vol. 52, No. 1. Sept, 2008. Web.

Monroe, Ian. Collage: Assembling Contemporary Art. Black Dog Publishing. 2008. Print. www.edruscha.com www.boneface.co.uk www.chinesemanrecords.com