Megan Richards
Site Specific
Evaluation
Our final piece was a still image of Robyn and me sitting on
a window ledge each with paper stuck to the wall behind us. The paper had
similarities in black pen and differences in colour pen – this highlighted that
we were focusing more on what society sees in us; our differences.
Strengths:
A strength of our piece was our decision for interaction
with the audience. We decided to speak as ourselves because it enabled us to
explain about the brain and what we have been working on throughout the term so
the audience could gain a full understanding of the context of our piece. This
also gave us the opportunity to ask them questions about their views on how
they are represented in society and how they felt about the topic or
representation and stereotypes.
I feel that we also portrayed the message of our piece. Part
of our message was that we are all the same in the sense that we are all human,
yet people see us differently. We spoke about how when we see people in society,
we only recognise the image and because we don’t get the opportunity to
understand the true personality of the person, we forget that underneath the
layers, we all have the same root – we are human, we are girls/boys and we were
all created from genes, chromosomes and are made of bones and ligaments. As I
explained this to the audience members who passed, it was clear that they
understood the concept and our message as they nodded in agreement. Some even
admitted that they do have tendencies to judge on image. I then explained that
its part of normal human instincts to judge image instead of understand
character which again, connects us all and makes us one.
Due to our instruction of having only 3-5 people in our area
at a time, this controlled the flow of movement between our piece and the
pieces around us. It also enabled us to be able to talk to a few members at a
time and fully engage with them and get them to understand our points of view
and ask them more personal questions. It gave me a stronger connection between
the audience and me and I felt that I took in more of their views and they took
in my piece. The audience were also very interactive with us and weren’t afraid
to ask questions. This was good because it helped our piece to develop and it opened
up more questions which I wanted to ask other audience members.
Weaknesses:
The main weakness was the time we took to prepare our piece.
The original idea was to also have lain paper stuck up on the opposite wall
with pens for the audience to write down their responses to the piece and any
questions they ask about the topic we were exploring. We did not think through
the amount of time we would need to achieve this, therefore we ran out of time
and only had enough time to do our own paper and writing. In order to improve
this, we should have been more efficient and pre stuck the paper prior to the
performance so we would only need to stick up the big piece of paper (in total,
three pieces).
Also, due to the positioning of our piece being tucked high
on a window ledge, embedded into the wall, some of the audience, members walked
past us without seeing our piece because they did not notice that we were
there. There was also a high risk of falling as the window ledge was thin and
high. We positioned high chairs next to the ledge so we could get up and get
down with ease but there was still the unknown chance of losing grip of the
chair when standing on it to get up or down from the window ledge. To ensure
higher safety, we could have purchased small step ladders with a wider base
than a chair so the risk was lowered.
I order to make our piece more attractive and inviting, we
could have added in more movement. Our piece was very still and taking based
whereas, when people walk around an art gallery they usually are in the mind
set to just watch art, not have an intense conversation with the artwork. If I
was to do this again I would have added in a simple movement sequence that
Robyn and I could have repeated while speaking to the audience so it was less
naturalistic and more the theatre world reaching out to the normal world and
getting them to engage in the theatre world.
What will I take
from this?
By participating in the Living Art Gallery experience, it
has taught me how specific you need to be when trying to portray a message in a
way that the audience will easily understand. It has also taught me about the
importance of time keeping and how before a performance, there is no time to
set up your space from scratch, you need to have prepared everything before so
you can just go to your space and place it where it needs to go. It has also
taught me how fun it is to create work from a simple stimulus into a piece of
art with a context that means something to you. It has inspired me to want to
create more work like this based off different stimuli and g deeper into the
topic I am trying to cover and present to the audience.
Comments:
Some people said they found the topic extremely interesting
and they liked how we related it to the brain. They said they learnt a lot
about the brain through our conversation with them and it raised a lot of
questions in their mind about society.
Someone said they did not recognise what we were trying to
say. I then told them that this piece was all about perspectives and what each
part of our piece represented. After they understood fully, they told us that
it was an interesting way of putting the message across and the image we
created was attractive to look at.
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