ARTIST INSPIRATION: SIGNE PIERCE

On Friday 3rd March, I attended the Design For Dance show at CSM put on by the BA Performance Design and  Practice course in collaboration with Central School of Ballet, London Studio Centre and Rambert School of Ballet & Contemporary Dance. The show was very interesting to watch, especially considering my recent inspiration from Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, and encouraged me to think about using our bodies as a form of physical expression.
Following this, I happened to check my Instagram and see that an artist I admire, Signe Pierce, was filming a livestream of a reality art piece. She was riding through the streets of New York in a pink toy Jeep, wearing a small neon pink dress and enacting a character of a rich, privileged girl. She kept saying  to passers by things like 'Excuse me oh my god I am so sorry', 'thank you so much' and 'I am so sorry, I'm just trying to get to my dads house'. From the comments I could understand that she was en route to Trump Tower.
Like Chetwynd, Pierce combines performance and imagery, using photography and film to accompany what she calls her 'reality art'. Through her satirical and colourful approach, Pierce achieves a sense of depth and personality to her pieces whilst also tackling serious subject matter.


I looked at her photography a lot more after this performance, and it has been a recurring inspiration in the shoots I have done so far. Her use of neon, plastics and exaggeration of colours is relatable to a kind of ironic internet art, where we're examining something but also taking part in it, and using it as a platform to grow the thing we are making. To use my work as an example, I shot photographs after filming my piece commenting on the reduction of women in social media to 2 dimensional stereotypes, creating a brand for each type - then I posted some of those photographs on my own Instagram. In a way it's a type of hypocrisy, but it could also be argued that it is the opposite, seeing as I am going against these ideas and actually pointing them out instead of being complicit in them.

I am also interested in the social aspect of making work and watching how people will react to it. Watching this reality piece by Signe Pierce and Ali Smith titled 'AMERICAN REFLEXXX' caused me to realise how far these pieces can go, but also how important it is to let them get that far. I know that my project does not involve too much audience participation, but I think it is an important thing to keep in mind in order to figure out how to keep my ideas growing and moving forward.