Global Collaboration

In the second unit of If These Walls Could Talk, which is an art history elective I learned about murals in the 20th and 21st centuries and how different materials were used to create the artwork. I also learned about different artist that lived during those years and how materials changed over time. Specifically, I learned a lot about contemporary artists like JR and Shepard Fairey, who are two of my favorite artists. For the second Action Project, we were put in a groups and had to come up with an idea of a mural that will be installed in our school’s new space. We experimented with different artistic media and techniques to create materials swatches to help us determine which would work best in creating our final mural. In the end, we chose wheatpaste and mosaic because we all like how they looked on the swatches. I enjoyed creating my swatches and working with the technique I chose. However, working in my group was challenging because we all had disagreements and we had a hard time working with each other. But at the end, we all came together and found what we wanted.

Created by JV, RD, GN, MV, DR, 2015*

Name:JV
Title: Global Collaboration
Date: 12/10/15
Measurement: 3.4 by 11 and 3.4 by 11

The image that my group and I created is a series of three faces created using the facial features from the members of my group. In the background, we incorporated parts of the globe to show how we are from all over the world. This is a tribute mural that represents us as students at GCE, how we are a community and to show us as global citizens. We wanted to create something interesting yet eye-catching. We chose to use JR’s Face2Face idea, which is to print out black and white faces and wheat paste them to a canvas. The swatches that we did all came out good in fact, they came out better than I expected. I worked with wheatpaste also known as flour paste, which is like a gel adhesive made from flour or starch and water. It has been used to create all different types of artwork. It is really easy to work with, all I had to do was apply paste to the surface, put down image over paste. Apply paste over the image this seals the image and protects it. Wheatpaste is my favorite type of medium to work with because of how simple it is to make and how inexpensive it is. I appreciate being able to make it myself with simply water and flour and the glossy finish it leaves on the printed images. 

After completing all of our swatches, my group chose to use wheatpaste and mosaic in our final mural. My group chose to work with wheat paste and mosaic, we choose these two because we liked how the swatches came out and we think the final piece will look good with our combined faces wheat pasted on the canvas and having a mosaic design around the face representing parts of the globe. I think our final mural is going to come really cool and I can’t wait to see it in our new space.

Created by MV, Mosaic.

Created by JV, Wheatpaste, 2015*