Bright Friday
Brief: Produce a creative antidote towards Black Friday, that will be featured within Bright Friday festival.
The University of Brighton joined forces with environmental charities Hubbub and WRAP to launch Bright Friday. Acting as an antidote to Black Friday; an American tradition where retailers offer high discounts in an attempt to persuade customers to spend more money. Opposed to the ethics of Black Friday, Bright Friday brings together a variety of creative channels such as exhibitions, comedy, film, performance and workshops held in Brighton with an aim to emphasise positive messages towards consumerism and fashion; unlike its counter part Black Friday which has been seen abusing fashion and retail industries.
Possible creative outcomes for the project could surrounded avenues of illustration, film, photography, creative writing, art and fashion; with potential themes highlighting the silly side of fashion, how to value clothing, making clothes last longer and seeing value in waste. My project began by researching into consumerism, and how artists have reacted to it. Consumerism spanned from a society wanting to buy and sell with the ultimate aim to own, it is a social and economic order. For Black Friday is all about consumerism, taking advantage and polluting the consumer with buying and owning opportunities, this ideology of consumerism was an aspect I was keen to explore further. Through my research I discovered pop art emphasise consumerism through lots of its works, artists such as Warhol and Kuri constantly experiment and delve into the world of consumerism. Warhol’s rather contradicting “Brillow Boxes” raises everyday consumerism to the status of fine art, bringing consumerism itself to a level of importance and prestigiousness, opposing the symbolism of throw away culture that tends to follow Black Friday and replacing it with the everyday beautiful; in turn this contradiction of imagery towards consumerism was a fresh exploration which I found interesting. Similar for Kuri, consumption and consumerism acts as his material, taking inspiration from receipts Kuri re-imagines them into huge exquisite wall tapestries; in turn reflecting similar connotations to Warhol's “Brillow Boxes.” Transforming an everyday throw away item such as a receipt into an item of immense scale and beauty, strongly identified with me an element of value in waste and turning something ugly into something beloved. This balance and mixing of beauty within waste, consumption and consumerism that Warhol and Kuri produce, was an aspect I wanted to explore further and experiment with
Following on from my initial research, I began drafting ideas and potential themes to work with; preliminary concepts ranged from creating a form of garment describing consumerism and the flaws of Black Friday, to a toilet roll of receipts highlighting value in waste and an animation piece focusing on the funny side of fashion and consumption. Undecided on choosing one idea, I ended up exploring two of my initial concepts the garment and toilet roll of receipts.
Influenced by Warhol’s reaction to consumerism I wanted to explore and experiment with the ideologies of wasteful fashion and and the absurdity of buying, selling and ownership. I felt using a garment as a canvas offered opportunities to express questions of value in clothing, making clothes last longer and recycling; concepts that Black Friday abuse. A considerable amount of incentive and inspiration for this idea extended from my Bowie project, where by I re-used an old coat that I then stitched, painted and collaged memories of David Bowie onto the garment. I felt I could use and experiment further with this creative process, adapting the theme to concepts surrounding consumerism. Before I began making the garment, I researched into the imagery I could use to express the meanings, emotions and questions surrounding my chosen subject matter. From my investigations I noticed sale signs and advisement promotions provoke and aid the pollution of Black Friday, they attract the buyer to “cant say no” deals benefiting the seller, but ultimately they are a visual symbol and a graphic icon for consumerism design. In particular vintage hand painted signs and eighties supermarket signs hold an element of attraction and visual interest, that I wanted to experiment and work with.
Sourcing first hand and second hand imagery of a variety of different sale and promotion content, I began to sketch and paint details of the imagery that I found visually interesting but ultimately relayed the questions I wanted to provoke on my garment. The roughness and sketchiness of my initial drawings generated a variety of textures and mark making, but also highlighted movements of rush and panic, which in turn I felt relayed messages of the manic rush and carnage that is generated around Black Friday; so instead of finessing the sketches I scanned them straight into Ps adjusting the details with a black fill so they became bolder, stronger and easier to visualise, and created separate layers for each image. From this I constructed a series of patterns using my observational drawings of sale signs, which I then printed onto cotton, a technique I discovered making my Bowie piece, ready to be stitched and sewn onto the garment. However before I could begin this, I had to have a garment. I decided on a coat because I felt comfortable with the creative process, as I used a coat for the Bowie project, but ultimately a coat offers a large canvas to work on, in turn enabling myself to experiment with more content. Having bought the coat from a charity shop, and with my cotton signage patterns printed, I forged a rough coat design template to work from, but I wanted to leave it quite open and unrestricted. Using techniques I discovered with my Bowie coat and devising new processes, I began to stitch, paint, draw, and collage onto the garment. Starting on the back I sewed all my cotton patterned pieces, overlaying and mix matching different parts; eventually ending up with an almost patchwork of signs, promotions and advertisement all alluding to the show of Black Friday. I then finished on the front using a mixing of inks, acrylics and highlighters, I began to paint further imagery surrounding consumerism and consumption.
Similar to the Bowie coat, I wanted to express the final garment further through a look book and fashion film. My initial thoughts for the shoot was to use a projector and model the coat while overlaying projections of shops, advertisement and other consumerism imagery to create a distorted and experimental photo and film. However the majority of my time was spent making the physical garment, so I didn't have enough manageable time to produce my intended shoot and film; adapting I ended up devising a make shift shoot in my living room. Yet this improvised shoot worked really well, using light and a zoom technique on my camera which I found by accident; I composed a series of purely experimental photos and footage, that described notions of distortion, exaggeration and blurriness. The obscurity to the photos and film was something I was keen to portray, because I felt the blurriness represents the panic and frenzy surrounding Black Friday, but ultimately alludes the delicate questions surrounding money, poverty, and human wealth fair which in essence get mystified within the blur of the fashion world.
Overall I am happy with the final money coat and accompanying fashion film and look book. I enjoyed re-visiting the process of producing a garment that I had previously explored with the Bowie project. I feel the coat along with the film and photos depicts the farcical surrounding Black Friday and consumerism but also brings to light the fragile opinions and questions surrounding the fashion world. After completing the money coat began work on my toilet roll of receipts idea.
Inspired by Kuri’s receipt tapestries, I further wanted to investigate and experiment values of consumerism, waste, ownership and recycling but with a positive twist. Receipts are a symbol of consumerism, yet society tends to throw away receipts, discarding them as worthless pieces of paper. Yet a receipt holds values of money, its a personal recording of spending and owning, an unconscious valuable object, that is just dismissed, in turn highlighting value in waste and consumerism, but ultimately the absurdity to buy, sell and own. These ideologies and concepts formed the bases of my second outcome.
Sketching out different ways I could use receipts as a medium, I soon came to the conclusion that I wanted to create a toilet roll out them, but the of it practicality was a challenge. I experimented with several different avenues of processes and techniques, firstly printing on paper strips and then glueing them together to create a roll, but then the final outcome didn't really represent a toilet roll, the texture and form was all wrong but the printing of the receipts was precise and clear. For my second attempt I drew onto a toilet roll, this generated the right texture and feel but now the receipts where unreadable due to ink spreading on the tissue. To overcome this problem I took inspiration from my money coat, using the same technique of printing onto the cotton I adapted the cotton for strips of toilet roll, ran it thorough the printer and then stuck all the strips back together to form a toilet roll of receipts.
With the technical and practical side of producing the roll covered, I turned to playing with the receipt design. Instead of using real receipt designs and printing them onto the roll, I wanted to exaggerate and find humour within the meaning and format of a receipt. My experimentation’s led me to creating four different designs that at first glance look like a standard receipt but on closer inspection I have changed subtle details. Using four different major retailers, such as Tesco, I adapted each of their respected name into an innuendo, for instance Wastesco. Furthermore where the list of bought products and pricing are normally laid out, I have placed the truths to shopping; the things we buy sub-consciously, for example we buy to show our wealth, to gain popularity and to get friends. These adapted designs of receipts allude to the truth of spending, money and consumerism as well reinforcing elements of humour.
In conclusion the final toilet roll of receipt is a humorous, challenging and entertaining piece. It describes the absurdity to consumerism, the waste that is thrown away due to over spending owning what we don't need; the symbol of a receipt on a toilet roll alludes meanings and questions around wasting money and materials, essentially “throwing money down the toilet.” On reflection both pieces work in tandem, together they both provoke and raise the questions I had about consumerism, Black Friday and the fashion world, is it all necessary? is it abused? can we find value in waste? why do we need it? This project has enabled me to develop, adapt and learn new skills, processes and techniques, but ultimately my explorations and experimentation's into these subjects have left me with a new approach to viewing the world of consumerism.