Barbara Kruger
Kruger is an american conceptual artist and she is most known for her series of work consisting of black and white portraits screenprints overlaid with declarative captions such as, "Your body is a battleground", "I shop therefore I am" and many more. Kruger's artwork centres on visual language of consumerism and branding in order to condemn the current mass extent of consumer culture, and to criticise hierarchies and structures of power, identity and gender, to promote her own thoughts and discourse on this subject matter. Her work prompts us as a audience to ask to ourselves what we see and hear in mainstream media and how it in turn these messages spread to the masses affect the way that we shape our personal identities, one way that Kruger creates this feeling in her viewers is the use of personal pronouns such as, "I", "You" and "We" within her bold statements in her work to make us feel closer connection to the work. Below are some examples of her work:
“I try to make work that joins the seductions of wishful thinking with the criticality of knowing better.” - Barbara Kruger
Barbara Kruger repurposed images for these famous pieces and layered aggressive texts in her "iconic colour schemes" of red, black and white, to create some of her most famous pieces. If you look closely into the images you can see the texture and shading of the images are made up of tiny little spots, similar to key pop art techniques such as pointillism, however, in the context of Kruger's work it is known as "Colour Halftone".
Colour Halftone is a printing method that was popularised in the 20th Century, in which small concise patterns of dots work together to make up an image. At a period of when various printing processes were restricted, "colour halftone" was used as a printing method to create colour and shade in images, however, now today that colour printings are more developed artists and photographers only generally use colour halftone effects to reference to or play around with retro media printing techniques.
I want to take this technique of colour halftone into my own work, as it is a useful technique to create texture and depth in the photo through sequencing of small dots.
How to create a colour halftone effect on your images:
1. Select the images you wish to add a colour halftone effect to onto adobe photoshop.
2. At the top of your navigation bar you should be able to find a window that says "Filter", press on this and it should reveal a drop down menu. It will come up with options such as, "3D", "Blur", "Blur Gallery", etc.
3. From the options in the "Filter" drop down menu, select Pixelate.
4. Then choose "Colour Halftone" in the "Pixelate" menu. From here, you can further adjust other variables such as the radius of the dots, to affect how the colour halftone texture appears on your chosen image. From here you can print it off and further use it in your stencil making in screenprints further along the process.
Below is an example of using the "colour halftone" effect on an chosen image I will use later on in screen printing taking inspiration from Kruger's work:
I have also taken inspiration from Kruger's use of bold statements printed over her work. In order to make this extra stencil to overlay the image above, I used adobe photoshop and a sequence of the text tool to type out the certain phrases I want to use I feel works with the image. I have also used the shape tool to draw a border around the image, as Kruger did the same thing in her works, and I feel it just adds an layer of structure and power to the image, and makes it seem more like a piece of activism art.
I will use both these stencils in my processes of silk/ screen printing, as a direct influence from Kruger's own pieces using black ink for the portrait and mainly using red for the phrases and border, but open to experimenting with different colours as a way of probing at the conceptuality behind the work.
