Good Is Dead
Good Is Dead focuses on a visual re-representation of tales from the Old Testament,
a canon throughout the history of western art. I place constructed plasticized
models within biblical allegories in order to satirize the representations
of the body evident throughout history as well as those present in contemporary
media. In the thesis work I seek to bridge a gap between the past and present.
I want the images to dwell between the intended moral pedagogy of the bible
and contemporary society’s perceived deviance, by linking historical
painting and current digital photography, and amid antique ideals of the body
and present-day distortions of those ideals.
In this work, I utilize appropriated imagery from contemporary periodicals to illustrate how the manipulation of the body has evolved through centuries of painting dominated by a male perspective. This practice continues to be pushed in current digital practice. In this work, I digitally collage scanned images from fitness, fashion, celebrity, and pornographic magazines to create monstrous people. These creatures I create are as much a comment on the fabrication and retouching of personalities in the media as the strains people place on their bodies to achieve a more “acceptable” appearance.
The phrase, Good Is Dead, began as a way to explain my ideas behind the technical
approach to production of my images. That is the photographic anti-aesthetic,
bad digital manipulation techniques used to illustrate the distortions in
contemporary media. The idiom explores other concepts addressed in the work.
In the religious sense it demonstrates how both the leaders and followers
have moved away from upholding to a moral authority and towards challenging
and opposing that authority. It is in this case, a play on words with the
theories related to Friedrich Nietzsche’s infamous term “God is
Dead” and also relates itself to Immanuel Kant’s reflective judgement
of “Good”. When viewed in context to the idealization of the body,
the pressures of personal appearance, and the manipulation of photographs
it acts as a call to arms. The goal is for the viewer to question the manipulation
of images and how this may lead our society to pursue an idealized but impossible
perfection of beauty.
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