Monday 4 January 2016

Hannah Hoch and Dadaism

Hannah Hoch

Hannah Hoch was a German Dada artist who is best known for her work in the Weimar period. She was also one of the originators of the photomontage technique (see images below).

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 I remember looking at Dadaism back in college and revisiting it now makes a lot of sense as Dada at its roots is a rebellious art form, Dada was a protest against the bourgeois, nationalist and colonialist interests which the Dadaists believed to be the cause of WWI. The Dadaists also rebelled against cultural and intellectual conformity in art and also in society.
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I feel that Dadaism as a whole relates really strongly to my current practice due to the embrace of chaos and irrationality in the work. Hannah Hoch more specifically I found more interesting due to the photomontage technique and her use of text in many pieces in a disjointed manner. At the time she was creating her work many of her pieces were critiquing the mass culture beauty industry which is something I am challenging in my art practice currently. Hoch also sources her images in a similar way to how I am now in my practice, she collated images from contemporary magazines with women as a central theme.

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Vikki Stevens is an emerging artist interested in many areas including body image, mental health and abstraction. Her latest series of work aims to show how images and perceptions of women are “put- together”/ manufactured, and how these images and perceptions affect how women feel about their own body image. Vikki’s ideas for her artwork are expressed in mediums such as paint, collage and sculptural objects, mostly incorporating repurposed images from magazines and found documents. Artists such as Tracey Emin and Hannah Hoch have a large influence on her work. Both the personal perspective and distorted images play a major part in creating pieces that discuss personal as well as cultural issues within mainly the western world/media sphere. Stevens is planning on developing her work into a more abstract sphere to investigate feelings that she has herself and how she can communicate them by using and developing abstract techniques, continuing with collage as a starting influence. Currently the materials and processes she has used in her past work and the work in development are having a large impact on how the work develops and the message behind the work is entirely open. Rather than having a stand out message Stevens is now moving towards a more indirect way of working, focusing more on feelings rather than statements. Current concerns within the work reflect how Stevens feels about herself in day-to-day life and how outside influences affect her and her work. More specifically Stevens is dealing with feelings of anxiety, panic attacks, depression and how she feels as an individual in the world. Artists such as Gerhard Richter, Barbara Kruger, Yago Hortal and Steve Salo are having a large impact on the current work in development.

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