CASE STUDY:
JOHN STEZAKER
Do a case study on John Stezaker's works and create a series of 3-5 images using traditional methods (non-digital) based on your study of the experimental intent for a campaign using his style.
CREATIVE BRIEF
O School (CLG, Charity) is a dance studio and performing arts centre, as well as a social enterprise that opened up in 2006 under the purview of MCCY, with Institute of A Public Character (IPC) status effective from 2016. O School provides a wide variety of dance classes to the Singaporean dance community and aims to identify and develop youth dance talents as well as the Singapore dance market, so as to build sustainable careers for these talents.
INSIGHT
Dancers are unable to showcase themselves as they have done before with competitions and classes.
MESSAGE
Every dancer deserves a platform
Every dancer deserves a platform
CONCEPT
Community
CASE STUDY
John Stezaker's work is very much collage-based. He makes use of simple traditional methods, cutting and pasting usually not more than 2 pieces together. There are some pieces where 2 pieces are put together, but it is clear that a third piece was used for reference to shape one of the final pieces.
His most common works would be the styles in the (from the left) first and fifth pieces.
As can be seen from all of them, he typically has one human subject. Sometimes he will incorporate paintings, scenery or pictures of many people. I found the most interesting ones to be when he replaces an entire person with an image.
MY MATERIALS
I looked through my stack of books, pamphlets and materials from school learning journeys to find any image I liked. I wanted to focus Dance, Community and Visual Art.
I looked for any kind of scenery, or any art piece that gave a sense of community.
Obviously, this is a dance company, so I wanted my main subject matter to be dancers. I wanted to mimic Stezaker's cutouts of scenery in human shapes so I saved some images of dynamic poses. I also found some images from Super24, O School's competition that I felt represented the feeling of community.
credits: @poeyyt (instagram), Super24 (facebook)
EXPERIMENTATION
I started trying to cut out a silhouette with scissors as I thought it would be easier but it was difficult to make the lines look clean, so I ended up cutting everything with a pen knife. I tried playing around with simple layouts with just one photo layered on top of the other, but the sizing of the photos made this difficult. I shaped pieces of scenery by tracing a silhouette I cut out and experimented with placement, not just focusing on layout but also on what feeling/message it invoked.
FINAL WORK
I realised that my pieces aren't exact replications of John Stezaker's works, but I felt that my techniques were similar. Since my focus is on dance, I didn't really want my subject matter be a portrait as it didn't feel dynamic. I initially wasn't happy that my printed images had lines through them, but I really liked how it looked after I scanned them as it gives off a grainy effect that looks interesting.
Overall I was pleasantly surprised by how these turned out, and I was glad that I had materials on hand to use.
This project taught me to explore with the resources I already own, and to work within their limitations. Unlike digital media, I'm unable to resize the photos as I would like to. It was really interesting to see how mixing and matching different things gave different outcomes not just in terms of layout but also message. I will hopefully be able to use these skills in later projects to convey messages in unconventional ways.
THANK YOU FOR READING
