CPS Week 4 - Found Objects

By Bycharlotte

Theme

Found Objects

Context

As a sculptor, Jiao Xingtao takes the most mundane consumables such as discarded packing boxes, an empty milk carton, toothpaste boxes, a rolled-up Wrigley’s chewing gum wrapper or plastic bags from department stores, and using fibre glass transform them into meticulously crafted aesthetic objects.

In the same way, Jiao Xingtao questions the distinction between art object and everyday objects, his works made me consider transformations among the everyday object, the readymade, and sculpture. In today’s consumer society, Jiao Xingtao seems to be saying, packaging has taken on an importance out of proportion to the object it contains. Packaging may inspire and induce a desire to consume and possess; or confer a certain status.

http://www.artnet.com/artists/jiao-xingtao/

Method

For this project, I basically baked my trash! I collected chips bags from trash cans and after washing them I put them in oven with high temperature until they deformed and changed shape. I took videos of the packaging shrinking in the oven which I later edited with Adobe Premier as well as taking the deformed objects, scanning them and then playing around with it in photoshop.

Response

Inspired by Jiao Xingtao and working with thrown away packaging made me aware of the materiality of the object first and foremost. Other than the materiality I wanted to draw attention to all the trash than we make in this work I tried to destroy the trash as much as possible which is in contrast with Jiao Xingtoa’s work in the photographs that I edited later I tried to diminish the baked trash and have it as a trace.

Editing the video was also really fun, I got a very interesting result especially by mirroring my video in post-production and playing with its colours. The end result looked like a cat that came out of an egg. In saying that If I would take the activity further in the future, I would probably just focus on making a series of photographs.