Beginning to Go Public

What I Did:

This week, I drew more faces and put them up in the bathroom at the Art School. Then I came up with a plan to go even more public.

Here is how long I spent on each topic:
3 hours drawing more eyes and mouths on notecards
1 hour coming up with dialogue for the faces and places to put up each one
.5 hours spent in the bathroom putting up faces on the mirror, towel paper dispenser, and inside the bathroom stall and then noting people's reactions to them
.5 hours researching artists
6 hours drawing large facial features
1 hour talking with people about how the faces and dialogue makes them feel


These are faces with very different expression that I wanted to put on specific objects in public places.

This one is intended to be a public computer...

This one is intended to be on a trash can...

The next three were (or are intended to be) on a public bathroom mirror...

This one was on a paper towel dispenser...

And I have not yet decided on this one....

Here are pictures from inside the bathroom. They are not good quality, because I wanted to do it fast so nobody would see me. I had a strong sense to have nobody know that I made these, because I wanted to see their true reactions. I did not want them to think that they were being tested by the person beside them carefully making glances in their direction.

From here, I got some good feedback and suggestions. One of the suggestions was to make the faces large scale so that I can put them on large objects such as the shower that I illustrated before. I did some research and found large stickers of faces from nouvellesimages.com. Here is a sticker that you can place on your wall for a decoration.

                                                      Mona Lisa by ARTHUR

 I decided to make my own large face that I can put on a wall or a large object. Each facial feature is a little over a foot wide.

What I Accomplished/ Discovered/ Encountered:

After experiencing the reactions in the bathroom of the Art School, I realized that I love to get big reactions from people, whether it is making them laugh, gasp, be disgusted, confused, or angry. There were a few reactions in particular that were very strong. One girl laughed, took a picture of the faces on her phone and told me she just wondered who made these. Another woman read the paper towel dispenser, which said "You better not use too much paper towel," and then turned around to use another one. Someone else took down the sign in the bathroom stall that said "What did you eat??" alongside a disgusted face. This experiment made me want to go even bolder and try to get even more reactions from the audience. The experiment along with suggestions from others made me want to go bigger scale, which brought me to my large scale face. I felt that the size and the detail of the large scale face would really shock people and evoke more of a reaction than the small eyes and mouths. I was right in this assumption when I brought classmates into my studio where the face was displayed and all of them basically had a surprised reaction at first and told me that it creeped them out a little bit. I also want to go more public with my faces to get a bigger audience.


What I Think I Should Do Next:

With my large scale face, I want to make them into huge magnets and put them onto metal things in public. This will allow me to be able to take them down with ease in case anyone yells at me for it. With this disgusted face, I want to put it on a dumpster. I want to make a few more faces to fit other objects. I walked by Borders today and thought how great it would be to place a giant sad face on the doors. Since I used to work there, I thought it would be even more fitting, and feel that not very many people would be opposed to this. I want to make statements with my faces and make people think about the decisions that they make. Americans throw away so many things because we are such a consumer society, and it is partly because of society that Borders went out of business.