Assignment FOUR.


For this assignment, we are use methods of photo montage/photogram to create a surrealistic piece entitled "Urban Fantasy."


I started by brainstorming what the urban life is about. I start to think about how in the urban city working people back stab one another to climb up the corporate ladder. How relationships between people are becoming less secure, where more and more young single individuals are treating relationships as a game. How urban city dwellers are trapped in the rat race of earning to live and living to earn.

I picture the suburban as the ideal. The carefree suburban lifestyle where people can escape from the rat race and truly enjoy life. Where the worries of daily living stop taking precedence over the fulfillment of personal dreams.

Thus I conceptualize where urban city dwellers are like people trapped in a cage. The cage symbolizes the urban lifestyle where every one is caught in a rat race, and where people cannot fulfill their idealized dreams.

The clouds and the sky symbolize the ideal, the unreachable. The clouds are seen to be life pieces in a jigsaw puzzle that is falling apart and downwards. This symbolizes how the people's idealistic dreams are falling apart.

In linguistic study of graphics, what is placed at the top is often seen as the ideal. And what is placed at the bottom is seen as the real. Hence the clouds are placed on top. And in traditional landscape, grass is usually at the bottom. But this time round, replacing grass is stiff wooden fence, further fencing up the cage, and preventing people inside the cage to escape.


For the making of this assignment, I used both photography and photogram.


First I took photographs of the sky.




And then I bought a tiny cage, and scanned it such that it becomes a photogram.




I also bought a miniature wooden fence and scanned it to become a photogram.




Lastly I took photographs of myself.










I then pieced the photographs and photograms together.





That's all.
:)