Family history Tableau

Sarah's Tableau- critique it

do you think it is too busy?
What about the selections? Are they sharp?
Here is the draft of my Family Tableau project.
Theres a little more of me here than my family. I should work on it more. This is just a draft.

The New Jersey Meadowlands with its pollution and oil refineries is in the background.  Both my father and grandfather were industrial engineers and helped build huge industrial process machinery like refineries.

On the top left is a ship like the kind of ship that my great grandparents and one of my grandparents took to immigrate from Europe.

In the left top are also the apples my great grandfather made a living with in Poland.

In the top right are two icons of modernism, the Apollo space mission which I watched as a child on tv, and Dizzy Gillespie who played jazz at my high school each year.

In the middle ground is a typical suburban house with Lucy and her friends, who I use here to identify the kinds of challenges my grandmother and mother face in being women in the middle of the last century. Their lives were limited and they were not expected to be smart.

The children with the tv and the Marias from the sound of music kind of stand in for that real connection to consumerism all generations experienced-- both owning a tv and watching it. The Sound of Music gave an upbeat melodramatic soundtrack to our immigration story.
The man in the foreground is using my grandfathers pipe as a golf club. I decided to be a little surreal here. And inside the house, through a window you can see my father, an engineer at work at his drafting table.

Some collaged landscape examples

This is a photo-collage from 1992 by the British artist Richard Hamilton titled, "Just what was it that made yesterday's homes so different, so appealing?" It combines color with black and white in an interesting way, making it possible to show many different kinds of images in a small space. He also plays with putting images outside the window and even on the ceiling.


The two images at left are by the painter Alexis Rockman. He drafts his composition on the computer, and the way things are cut out resembles computer - based photographic technique. Here he tries to show images of  how technological intervention in living processes might create monstrous results.  Notice how he creates a sense of deep space through the use of a foreshortened horizon.


These images are by the German artist John Heartfield and were made during the rise of the Third Reich in Germany in the 1930s. He was considered to be a pioneer of photo collage that appropriates images from other sources to create new meaning.

Heartfield's work was a critique of Hitler's fascist government, and of all  bigotry and ignorance. There are many more great pieces at this website. Take a look

The above work by the Wisconsin artist Nicholas Lampert is influenced by the work of Heartfield through the use of appropriated images in photocollage, although to different ends.

Here are some other takes on appropriation. While not a collage, this photograph by Dina Goldstein injects dark realism into the iconic figure of Sleeping Beauty. See this article about the image.   from the article's caption, "Unhappy ending: Fallen Princesses, a project by Canadian photographer Dina Goldstein, shows iconic characters having succumbed to tragic fates, including cancer, alcoholism and unhappy marriages

  
 Here is a simple example of an image using three layers. Look at how they are arranged to create a sense of depth in space, and perspective. 

 

This is a collaged portrait of a director of horror films, along with some his crew and actors. The red color tints everything in a gradient that intensifies at the back and bottom behind him. The other people are badly cut out against the background to give a jarring sense- of unease, like a horror film. 

This is an illustration but it is created from the compositing of many similar kinds of scenes. 

Stan Vanderbeek: Science Friction collage film

Science Friction by Stan Vanderbeek