John Baldessari artist page

Artist pages for mixing magazines with graphic chaotic images

creating beauty out of chaos

House of Chaos

These three photographs are of my own home. I have been trying to figure out why I like clean and orderly things and balance in my artwork and I believe it is because of the embarrassment I feel when it comes to my messy house. I decided to face my fear of people judging me for something I cannot control so I created a series of images that exaggerated the most cluttered areas of my home. Then I changed the colors in the images to dramatize them even more; I purposefully made the images very bold to articulate how strong my feelings are about my parents problem with hoarding. I also edited the images in such a way that made it hard to decipher what the original image was in order to play on my insecurity about showing people my house.

Flowers and question mark

This piece revolves around Socrates' idea that we know nothing. I feel that we should always be questioning things and be open to new ideas. How do we know what we think we know is right? We don't. I feel that asking questions and learning as much as we possibly can is the best way to live our lives. "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." (Aristotle) When we start to accept things as they are fed to us, we close our minds to all the other possibilities that are out there. I used an app on my phone to write out some of my ideas about knowledge and then I manipulated the words to form a question mark. I left some of the letters out of the question mark to bring a sense of ambiguity to the table, which reenforces the idea of not knowing.

Hands in progress

Lucky

I started this piece on a day that I was in so much pain that even my pain medication could not completely suppress the distress. Once I could get out of bed to work on art, I started rumaging through my magazines and I came across five or so LUCKY magazines with beautiful models and subtitles like "Bombshell hair" and "PERFECTLY PRETTY." I suddenly became so infuriated (at such a high dose of prednisone, one's emotions are often extreme) because of the messages these magazines are sending. They are telling young women that, to be regarded as "perfect", they should focus on improving their appearance. I looked at the word "lucky" and felt like the unluckiest girl in the world; I was spending my senior year fighting my own body (ulcerative colitis is an autoimmune disease) with drugs that gave me fat cheeks and acne and a whole slew of other side effects. Then, I took another look at myself and realized that, compared to so many other children, I am so fortunate.