Rebecca Horn.

For this assignment, I chose to research Rebecca Horn, a German installation artist, most known for her body modifications and performance art. While Horn has done an array of different types of art, including films, sculptures, spatial installations, drawings, and photographs, I was most intrigued by her performance art and body sculptures and thus decided to make that the main focus of this project.

Rebecca Horn (1944-present)

In 1964, while Rebecca was studying at the Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts in Germany, she contracted lung poisoning from working with glass fiber without a mask, something nobody had warned her about. From then on, she was only able to work with softer materials, such as fabrics and feathers. Horn became very isolated while confined to her bed, which is where her inspiration hit. "I began to produce my first body-sculptures. I could sew lying in bed." The goal of her art from that point on was to suppress her "loneliness by communicating through bodily forms." In her early body sculptures and performances, she also explored the equilibrium between body and space, as well as creating works of art that either inhibited or emphasized bodily movement.

Stills from some of her works:

Pencil Mask, 1972

White Body Fan, 1972

Rebecca Horn had an issue that she was addressing with her pieces - to quash her loneliness. For my piece, I wanted to address an issue that was personal and relevant to me. I chose to do a performance piece on emotional manipulation and how controlling people can sometimes be of one's emotions. While I made my issue something relevant to me, I also wanted to implement Horn's experimentation of body and space within my performance as well as emphasize bodily movement. I did this by using string to create a two-person body sculpture.

Here are some stills from my performance, "Manipulation":

"Manipulation"

Fly On the Wall.

For this assignment, I was given two slips of paper - one reading "Illustrative" and the other "Top of the wall." The adjective was to describe our artwork and the other instructed us where we were to put our final product for our critique. I played around with the word "illustrative," looking up all the different possible definitions and synonyms. I liked the synonym, "demonstrative," so I decided to make a giant paper mache fly and demonstrate or illustrate the cliche "fly on the wall." I took it a little further by secretly recording my classmates' conversations, then playing them during my critique. This was my first time working with paper mache, and it was actually a lot of fun!

Photography/Human Body Canvas.

This has been my favorite assignment to date. I was doing something that I absolutely love and had a lot of fun experimenting with using the human body as a canvas. The objective of this project was to create a piece of work as if we are in our major, using one material that we're familiar with and one that we've never used before. Because I want to go into Photography and Film, I decided to combine both skills into one project. I photographed my friend, using paint on her face and shoulders as my unfamiliar material or concept, then I took those photos and made a slideshow/video with them.

Here is my end result! :)