For the third project, I decided to create a collage. My project was centered around project 2, specifically Christine Nangle, who was the Woman in Red I wrote about in my paper. It is my intention to embody Christine Nangle through the collage. It was important for me to represent crucial aspects of her identity and the struggles she faced as she strived for her career and in the course of her career. The intended audience is possibly the entire nation (those who end up viewing my collage on blogs). Nangle doesn’t have a really strong presence on the internet even though she is behind a lot of programs that a lot of people enjoy to watch. You can find information about her here and there, but nobody has actually delved deep into her life and created a biography for her.
For my project my mode is art and I used photographs and stickers that I believed represented Nangle. I tried to create a balance by using color and black and white. An image of Nangle is at the center of my collage and I placed colorful images around her outfit to create a bold statement. At the back I added black and white images of situations I came across that represent the discrimination and sexism she faced throughout the course of her life that prevented her from exploring her creative side and what she faces as a comedian. The black and white was meant to represent negativity and the color represented positivity and it overpowers the negative.
My choice to create a collage ultimately helped simplify the argument I presented in my second project. My paper was very long and I analyzed a lot of articles and situations I found that exposed gender bias and disparity on Wikipedia and centered my argument around its impact on female comedians, Nangle particularly. By viewing the collage I believe that there is a clear argument presented. I added quotes I found while researching for my second paper in order for the viewer to get a clear understanding. Photos can represent a lot, but with the addition of a few sentences the main idea becomes clearer.
A constraint I faced while creating my collage was finding the proper editing tools to cut certain images, remove backgrounds, etc. to fit them the exact way I wanted them to. I ended up using Picsart to create the collage with Nangle’s image and then Canva to create the collage in the background. I got free trials for both applications so I was able to use all the tools possible. However, using Picsart took a little while because they had a photo limit. They only allow you to use 11 photos, so I had to save the collage to my photos three times in order to add all the photos I wanted. Ultimately, I dealt with it and liked the outcome at the end.
I believe that my collage is ready to share to a more public audience. My collage is representing a woman who does not get recognized for her greatness so it would expose her to the public. Every single detail in the collage references early life, personality, and career so it is well rounded. However, I am not so confident about my artistic skills. I originally had a more complex idea, but I realized that it would be very difficult to do digitally and would be very time consuming if I did it by hand. I do think my collage turned out much better than I thought it would and I believe that it would increase Nangle’s recognition if people outside of school were able to see it.