Collage and Reflection

In this workshop we were told to bring a black and white A4 portrait photo of ourselves, however I was unable to do this. The first thing we did is talk about the concept of collage and how its used in different art forms. We watched a collage video of a sequence of phones ringing and people answering them in different movies from the 60's. We learned about how the change in context of a piece of art can change the purpose or the perspective of the piece. We were then given a small amount of time to make a selection of collages with old black and white photos that were provided to us, the 2 smaller images next to each other are what I came up with within this task. Then, after a break, we were given some larger images and were given another time limit to make 1 collage, this is the bigger piece seen in the photo below. Following this the final task was to make one more collage with the scraps left around our work areas, this forced us to properly separate images and view them in contexts we wouldn't originally imagine them in. This is the final collage seen at the bottom of the photo.

This workshop and the process of making the work in it really made me work in a way I'm not used to or comfortable with, it made me experiment with seemingly uninteresting pieces and cutting and pasting them into different contexts that may make them mean something different, it was interesting to go into a piece without a preset idea of what the outcome is, and while the work I created doesn't have any deep meaning or layer to it (at-least from my perspective), I still feel that what I made sort of represents my style in a sort of shallow, insincere, comical way.

The task set for this was simply to create a collage, and being such a minimal brief left us a lot of creative freedom. I felt as though I needed to relate it to film somehow, seeing as I'm on a film course, so I decided I would find shots I liked from movies and cut and stick them together and see what happens. My first thought was what is going to link the shots together, so I decided to find a number of shots that have a centered, symmetrical quality to them, as these are the sort of shots that interest me the most in cinematography and film the most. As I knew that Filmmakers Wes Anderson and Stanley Kubrick use these sorts of shots the most I decided to look up some of their cinematography. Once I found a selection of photos I threw them into paint.net played around with them until I ended up with something I felt was an interesting piece from my perspective. As I said earlier, my style doesn't tend to have deep, thought-provoking meaning behind it (at-least not still image work) but I feel as though art doesn't need that to be enjoyed.
The collage I made consists of 2 shots from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and 1 shot from Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums. Looking for meaning in this piece led me to seeing how laziness (represented by the guy in bed) can be an obstacle (represented by the obelisk) to breaking through thresholds in life (represented by the doorway of the ship), however, in comprising this piece I had no perception of this meaning or any meaning to speak of at all.