Sunday, October 25, 2015

As far as my layout i would like it to be something like this, or have the celebrity pieces be on neighboring walls with the flag, so that the flag is the center piece kind of tying it all together.















These are a few examples of the celebrities i would like to use for my project. I still am going to use celebrities, however I am actually choosing celebrities who were illegal immigrants, instead of just randomly labeling any celebrity so that this project stays on course and creates more of an impact on viewers.
I decided to recreate the American flag, which I will end up turning into a pretty big print which will be one of the main focuses of my project.  the reasoning behind this flag was that I'm mainly focusing on immigration issues between U.S. borders so i decided to combine aspects of the U.S. flag, Mexican flag, as well as the Canadian flag.  I wanted to show that we are a melting pot country and we shouldn't be afraid of it we should instead accept it.

Above are images of Guillermo Gomez-Peña an artist who dressed himself up in ridiculous costumes and attempted to cross the border, which most attempts failed except this one.  after looking over his work it made me want to incorporate a performance piece or something similar into my own project
After looking for some artists that focused on issues across the borders I came across Neil Rivas, who is the artist responsible for this work here.  he decided to transform well known superheroes, that everybody loves, into illegal immigrants. "If the US Government considers people illegal, then I think that policy must also be applied to superheroes," Rivas said. "For instance, Superman is illegal.  He’s from Krypton." i decided to take a route like his where instead of superheroes i would turn well known celebrities into illegals by labeling in the same manner. some celebrities i want to use are Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Kendrick Lamar, etc.
After telling the class my idea I received a lot of good criticism which ultimately is going to change my project for the better.  One comment that was brought up was the fact that this is an issue that has been around for many, many years so I need to really push my project into a direction that many people haven't seen before. Now it's time for me to start digging through resources in order to find a new direction to go.
I would really like to focus my project around immigration.  Immigration has a personal affect on my life because, though I might not be an immigrant, my parents were immigrants and had to work hard in order to make a better life for themselves.  Not only my parents, but aunts uncles cousins, and even grandparents, were all at one point immigrants in the United States. I would like to put myself in their shoes and see what it feels like to be treated like an immigrant by labeling myself one and simply walking through the streets of downtown Reno and see how people react to me and record some of the things they say to me. I know this doesn't compare to being an actual immigrant however I would like to stir up reactions from random strangers I want to push boundaries.