Tuesday 3 June 2008

James Allen - 'Five Hat Racks'










































































































The project shown above is titled 'Five Hat Racks', we were asked to find five genuinely discarded objects from the environment. I managed to accumulate a variety of objects: a lampshade, an exhaust pipe, a builders hard hat, a candle holder and a bottle of Magners. The project had two parts, the first being to run these objects through a system know as the 'Five Hat Racks' which consist of: location, alphabet, time, category and hierarchy. Each system had to have an A1 visual outcome for each object, this was aimed to make us look closer at our objects and become familiar with them.

The second part was to take these same five objects and run them through an emotive set of categories and produce another five outcomes that could be a size and format of our choosing. Some of the emotive categories were as follows:

Temperature / hot – cold
Intrigue / fascinating – banal, dull
Sentiment / soft, tender, alluring – hard, tough, and the list goes on.

During this point of the project I started to become frustrated, after having a few bad critiques by tutors about my first set of posters I started debating whether the categories listed above were actually emotive, in my opinion they are descriptive. Being able to emphasize my hatred towards the project in this emotional part of the brief I decided to show this by breaking the objects into pieces using a hammer. Questioning why we were doing a project of this type in a graphic design class that specifically focuses on typography it dawned on me that this project was more fine art than design. This is what lead me to design/photograph the objects in the style I did, purposely mimicking and ridiculing the brief with a parody on fine art.

http://www.jamesaallen.com

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