Cosplay: The Comic-con Culture
I am captivated by popular culture and its potential in the art medium, particularly performative collective interactions and Neo-tribes formed within a popular culture-driven society. I am specifically interested in "cosplay", which I define as the art of dressing up and performing a character constructed from both popular and obscure media, embracing nostalgia. In many cases, these familiar nostalgic as well as strange elements are combined to create new forms that shift meaning into a novel, individualized representation that encompasses a constantly growing social cohesion through cultural symbols.
For crafting technique, I find myself influenced by both Romanticism and Realism. I find the methodologies of these two periods challenging and influential since they embrace and harness the power of the imagination to envision and to escape, while simultaneously attempting to represent subject matter in an accurate manner. My work encompasses canonical styles used by both Romanticism and Realism to create visual elements of "borrowed" line, texture, and value (tone), mythology and importance of the images in a color palette.
The oil painting techniques popularized in the Romantic era, with the use of gaze, dead colours, and thin color layers exude, for me, a strong influential force in style and tone. For example, the paintings of John William Waterhouse (Pre-Raphaelite) master the notion of the gaze in many of his depictions of women. In subject matter, his representations from both ancient Greek mythology and Arthurian legend, such as The Lady of Shalott, are visually haunting, notwithstanding his attention to detail and texture.
From a philosophical perspective, I gravitate towards the Pop Art movement and the work of James Rosenquist, respecting his ability to adapt and utilize symbols of popular culture and society.
I use the Pop Art movement relationship to Romanticism and Realism to form narrative fragments and transformation in a story telling cinematic space.
The work of artists as philosophers and inventors inspires me to seek out new challenges for myself using inter-media including painting, printmaking, videography, photography, writing, sculpture and drawing.
As a visual learner, who occasionally experiences difficulty with formal teaching methods, I find that cinema offers me an escape into a structured and scripted world, which can be repeated and reviewed with various levels of engagement. I liken cinema to a non-judgmental teacher that entertains and invites closer examination, coaxing a nuanced approach to understanding and taking in information.
The fandom community has had a profound effect on every aspect of my life: relationships, art, and inspiration. The atmosphere is one of positivity and belonging—a community expressing itself through performative costume, showcasing various skills in the construction of costumes and related paraphernalia. The largest attraction for such a "Comic-con Culture" is the common interest that unites the fandom. The fan culture phenomenon is growing and expanding. I am interested in challenging some of the misconceptions popular media perpetuate regarding fans or “geeks,” derived from widespread and misleading stereotypes. The fan community is a collective body sharing a compilation of experiences and nostalgic memories that shape a collage of events, settings and people to create an identity or series of identities.
Nostalgia is deeply etched into the shared experiences of the attendant community, especially nostalgia drawn from one’s youth, and the costumes on display are those of characters and figures whose impact on the participants has been especially profound. In a way then, the "Comic-con" becomes a community of shared nostalgic experiences that has informed a social collective of Neo-tribes. The "Comic-con"social role-play and its associated pretension (the social scripts that the various genders and types of people play out) is stripped away, and the participants communicate and share their interests freely and openly, creating a cultural connection that can be universally reshaped and centred to represent individual experience.
For crafting technique, I find myself influenced by both Romanticism and Realism. I find the methodologies of these two periods challenging and influential since they embrace and harness the power of the imagination to envision and to escape, while simultaneously attempting to represent subject matter in an accurate manner. My work encompasses canonical styles used by both Romanticism and Realism to create visual elements of "borrowed" line, texture, and value (tone), mythology and importance of the images in a color palette.
The oil painting techniques popularized in the Romantic era, with the use of gaze, dead colours, and thin color layers exude, for me, a strong influential force in style and tone. For example, the paintings of John William Waterhouse (Pre-Raphaelite) master the notion of the gaze in many of his depictions of women. In subject matter, his representations from both ancient Greek mythology and Arthurian legend, such as The Lady of Shalott, are visually haunting, notwithstanding his attention to detail and texture.
From a philosophical perspective, I gravitate towards the Pop Art movement and the work of James Rosenquist, respecting his ability to adapt and utilize symbols of popular culture and society.
I use the Pop Art movement relationship to Romanticism and Realism to form narrative fragments and transformation in a story telling cinematic space.
The work of artists as philosophers and inventors inspires me to seek out new challenges for myself using inter-media including painting, printmaking, videography, photography, writing, sculpture and drawing.
As a visual learner, who occasionally experiences difficulty with formal teaching methods, I find that cinema offers me an escape into a structured and scripted world, which can be repeated and reviewed with various levels of engagement. I liken cinema to a non-judgmental teacher that entertains and invites closer examination, coaxing a nuanced approach to understanding and taking in information.
The fandom community has had a profound effect on every aspect of my life: relationships, art, and inspiration. The atmosphere is one of positivity and belonging—a community expressing itself through performative costume, showcasing various skills in the construction of costumes and related paraphernalia. The largest attraction for such a "Comic-con Culture" is the common interest that unites the fandom. The fan culture phenomenon is growing and expanding. I am interested in challenging some of the misconceptions popular media perpetuate regarding fans or “geeks,” derived from widespread and misleading stereotypes. The fan community is a collective body sharing a compilation of experiences and nostalgic memories that shape a collage of events, settings and people to create an identity or series of identities.
Nostalgia is deeply etched into the shared experiences of the attendant community, especially nostalgia drawn from one’s youth, and the costumes on display are those of characters and figures whose impact on the participants has been especially profound. In a way then, the "Comic-con" becomes a community of shared nostalgic experiences that has informed a social collective of Neo-tribes. The "Comic-con"social role-play and its associated pretension (the social scripts that the various genders and types of people play out) is stripped away, and the participants communicate and share their interests freely and openly, creating a cultural connection that can be universally reshaped and centred to represent individual experience.
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