The postmodern frame

Refer to the artwork image and text to learn about Banksy's artwork, and then complete the following activities.

Record your responses in a document to share with your teacher, including images of your artwork and any planning sketches or research material.

Critical and historical studies

• Paste a copy of the artwork image and citation into your document.

• In 'Flower Thrower', Banksy creates meaning through the use of ironic juxtaposition – placing images with contrasting meanings together to make a statement. What different meanings do the flowers and the figure throwing them have? What new meaning is created through this contrast?

• Banksy is a famous street artist, but their real identity is a closely guarded secret. Why do you think Banksy keeps their identity a secret?

• What makes 'Flower Thrower' an artwork, rather than just a piece of graffiti? Would the meaning of this work change if it was displayed in an art gallery or museum?

• How does 'Flower Thrower' challenge mainstream or traditional ideas in the artworld? How does it challenge ideas or values in the real world?

Artmaking

• Choose two images with opposite meanings. You might explore themes like war/peace, love/hate, abundant/scarce, natural/artificial, happy/sad, dangerous/safe or active/passive. For each image, explain how it represents your chosen theme, then discuss how the combination of these opposing images creates new meaning.

• Create an artwork that combines your two images as a Banksy-inspired stencil style artwork. You might choose to create your artwork by cutting out shapes of different coloured paper, drawing using pens or markers, or manipulating a digital image using the Photoshop's 'threshold' adjustment (or a similar filter in your preferred image editor).

Photoshop is available for free to NSW school students via OnTheHub. For technical guidance, refer to the Adobe Photoshop tutorials on combining multiple images and using adjustment filters.

Refer to the artwork image and text above to learn about 'The New Bathers', and complete the following activities.

Record your responses in a document to share with your teacher, including images of your artwork and any planning sketches.

Critical and Historical studies

• Paste a copy of the Anne Zahalka artwork image and citation into your document.

• Appropriation is a technique often used by postmodern artists to make their audiences re-consider their ideas about the meaning of well-known artworks. Appropriation artworks create new meaning by borrowing, sampling, copying or altering familiar images or well-known artworks.

How has Anne Zahalka changed elements of the original work in her appropriation?

Make a list of features in her artwork and explain how they are similar or different to Charles Meere's painting. Think about: the people that are represented, what they are doing, how they are dressed, and what objects they have brought to the beach.

• Read the Anne Zahalka quote. What 'dominant images' and 'stereotypes' is she referring to in her artwork? How has she questioned or challenged these? What new meaning has been created?

• These two artworks were created over 50 years apart. What does Anne Zahalka's appropriation reveal about aspects of Australian society that have changed and aspects that have stayed the same?

Artmaking

• Anne Zahalka has appropriated many famous artworks to comment on contemporary Australia – see her series The Landscape Re-presented and The Landscape Revisited for examples.

• Create your own artwork that appropriates an existing landscape painting to make a statement about your experience of contemporary Australia.

Start by looking at some of the artists from the Heidelberg School, which Anne Zahalka references in many of her appropriated landscape works. Your artwork should have a clear reference to a famous landscape painting. Save a copy of your reference painting, with a citation, in your planning document.

To make your artwork, you could choose to take a photograph that carefully re-creates the composition and placement of figures, like in Anne Zahalka's version of 'Down on His Luck' (based on the original painting by Frederick McCubbin). Alternatively, you could use Photoshop or another image editor to make a digital collage that inserts contemporary images into a work from art history, like in Anne Zahalka's 'Spring Frost - An early morning shoot' (based on 'Spring Frost' by Elioth Gruner).

Photoshop is available for free to NSW school students via OnTheHub. An online tutorial on combining multiple images in Photoshop is available via Adobe's Photoshop Get Started course.