Inspired DADA Collage

For this project we created collages inspired by the DADA art movement. The DADA movement sparked as artists responding to the first world war, and is know to reflect it's creator's take on social, global, or national issues. Knowing this I was immediately drawn to creating something related to what is perhaps the most relevant global even; the outbreak of COVID-19. Anyone who has paid any attention to the news knows of the virus's ability to spread like wildfire. As of today (March 22, 2020) there are 318,556 CONFIRMED cases of the virus (many more considering all of the people who have contracted it but are not tested due to lack of healthcare availability) and 13,671 reported deaths. We all know of government's and healthcare system's urges to practice social distancing, keep good hygiene, and to stay at home. However, the news has been riddled with stories exposing the hundreds of people blatantly ignoring these requests and flocking to their spring break destinations or crowded bars on St. Patrick's day.

So, when reading the criteria for our DADA assignment, I remembered an article I had recently read on BuzzFeed titled "The Most Selfish People In The World". In it, they showed images of packed beaches in Florida, a scene I decided to recreate for my project. To do this, I ripped or cut out images from two large books of American paintings and used glue to attach them to a heavy piece of paper. Pulling from various landscape paintings I created the sea and sky, and using cutouts from portraits I layered people in the foreground to give the illusion of depth and sand and palm trees to suggest they are on a beach. I tried to keep the mood of the crowd a little chaotic, but still keep the art piece balanced. I used elements of line, shape, and color to arrange the landscape so it would clearly be a broken-up college while still having unity. I wanted to add a few more clippings that would help connect my project more clearly to the current events of out society. Seeing as I only had these two books of older American paintings and no newspapers, I went on my laptop and printed some logos (such as the 'Miami Beach Club' and 'Spring Break 2020'), images (the cutout of the cruise ship- the Diamond Princess, recently in the news), statistics and article headings.

One we finished our collages, we were instructed to make a reproduction of our collage using any materials from around our house. I have a plethora of acrylic paint, so I decided to use this to do a simplified-recreation of my art piece.

I am most satisfied with the illusion of depth and layering in the crowd. I struggled getting this to look right, especially because I had so many little pieces which took a very long time to cut out. Eventually I began using a system of going row b row of people, and checking beforehand to make sure I could find other shapes that could layer over it without leaving white space.