INDIVIDUAL CURATION
Automat, a painting by Edward Hopper, is often cited as an example of urban alienation. By analyzing the historical and cultural perspective then, one would realize the important symbolism of the painting.
The viewer would not have known the degree of isolation portrayed in the painting if he/she did not know that automats are food chains of the 20th century and food were served by vending machines, allowing the woman to be devoid of any human-interaction.
The notion of isolation remains today but the causes have since changed — there are more causes of urban isolation now.
Automat shows a woman staring into her coffee cup, as though brooding over an important matter. And Hopper, by utilizing a melancholic colour palette creates a sense of isolation while the leading lines of the lights help create depth — it heightens the dramatic tension Hopper would like to portray. This makes the viewers drift their focus from the woman to the leading lights that lead us into a murky tunnel towards the blank void.
It is something we would aspire to work towards for our visuals, by placing our subjects with something symbolic that could show the reasons of his/her alienation in the society and also for our visuals to depict an overall sense of loneliness.
Sinking Captain by Kyle Thompson blurs the line between fiction and reality. Thompson uses emptiness as a central concept and photographs portraits in abandoned places to depict the surreal feeling of solitude.
In this case, the viewers are uncertain of what is real and what is not. The image is photo manipulated in such a way that we are unsure if it is set up or an image of the sea that was used as a composite and placed with the subject.
Also, the sinking ships and the subject who lay sprawled in the puddle of water shares a common fate, and Gestalt’s sensory theory allows us, to view and relate them together. This is coupled with the indexical sign of the ships where sea endeavors and shipwrecks are commonly associated with loneliness and solitude.
This, along with the textural gradient of the trees/grass, water, rain and even the graphite of the road creates a dynamic photograph and with the distortion of perspective (where the subject is just as huge as the ships), Thompson succeeds in creating a dreamy portrait that warps our sense of reality while providing a sense of loneliness.
The visuals that we create should aspire to connote societal judgments through signs (like the ships) and we can photo-manipulate composites to help distort the sense of realism and reinforce the notion of isolation.
