Body Language Investigation into Dark Matters Exhibition at the Whitworth

Exploring portraits we can look at when investigating body language at the Whitworth Gallery, Manchester

Personal Strengths investigation for 'Unspoken'

'Unspoken' Advertising Letter

Session Ideas

I was asked to come up with a few ideas of sessions. I found this quite hard to do, but hoping to share ideas with the artists at my next meeting with her which will be on Monday 14th January. I will also be learning how to use the photography equipment at that same meeting.
This is the list of ideas I have originally come up with, hoping these will be annotated at the meeting:

Background Thoughts:

·         What does it mean to be male or female? Do we do things/ buy things/ wear things because of what we see in the media?

·         Would men want to look muscular, or women want to look slim if there was no such media coverage? How would be see ‘acceptable’ or ‘normal’ without the media?

·         Would gender portrayal be any different if the media was completely dominated by a group of men or group of women?

Basic start-out ideas for sessions:

·         Cutting out images of men/women in magazines and combining different body parts to create a new person

·         Draw how you would like to look if you were born as the opposite sex

·         Close your eyes and draw what you think an ideal man/woman would look like (could create a concertina book of these images) Look at how children draw and see people in early stages of development. Innocence of it. Psychology behind it?

·         Find images of genders from past works of art. ‘Idealised’ and ‘non-idealised’ images and analyse them, what works best? What comes across as being more meaningful? Would the image have looked different if a male painted a portrait of another man, or woman paint a portrait of other women? Do you think men and women see the body differently?

·         Re-create famous paintings/portraits in the studio.  (look at the ‘Remake’ Project) Think about if the pose would be interpreted differently on a different background. How could the participant bring their own sense of personality into the pose via props/lighting/colours etc.

Websites with Ideas on Portrayal Of Gender

Start have asked me to come up with a plan for a session on the portrayal of gender in the media. I have looked through some websites with ideas about what I could do for this, then I shall write up a plan and present it in my next meeting with the resident artist. I have never done anything like this before, so hoping to find some inspiration from some or all these websites to help me come up with a plan.
~http://www.wisecampus.com/uploads/notescans/GENDER,_RACE,_AND_MEDIA_REPRESENTATION.pdf
~http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/resources/educational/gender_portrayal.cfm
~http://www.arttherapyblog.com/c/art-therapy-ideas/

Start2 Website

http://www.start2.co.uk/

Upspoken Well Being Trail Project

Past project carried out at Start Manchester
http://www.manchestergalleries.org/whats-on/community-programmes/past-projects/unspoken/