Contexts Of Practice 1 – 18/11/12 – Semiotics

Semiotics was the topic of today’s contextual lecture, defined online as: the study of signs and symbols and their use or interpretation. The relevance of this lecture was very easy to grasp as only a few minutes in I realised that it plays a significant part in our everyday lives. Signs and symbols are one of those things that you see everywhere but you don’t really notice them, let alone question them. They are so heavily integrated into our lives from the emojis we use to communicate, to signs/symbols that we trust to warn us when there is danger, it’s a part of our culture. The lecture encouraged me to reflect on signs and symbols in a way that I had never really considered, one section of the lecture that stood out to me was watching a video made about whether it is possible to make a sign that can warn any human being of a dangerous are for the foreseeable future. My initial response to this was of course we can, but the video made me think differently. The fact that the skull and crossbones symbol, once associated with poison and death is now more interpreted as pirates or Halloween, meant that this task was a complicated one.

The first artist I have chosen to write about is British artist, Gillian Wearing. Specifically, her series of work Signs that Say What You Want Them To Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You To Say (1992-1993). In this series of coloured photographs Gillian went up to complete strangers and asked them to write something on the sign and hold it up for a photograph, with most of the things that people wrote being feelings or intimate convictions. I see the work as a celebration of individuality and I think using signs was the perfect way to portray this, signs are a visual symbol that are supposed to universal, so using them to say something very personal has a powerful effect.

The next artist is linked to signs and symbols in a very different way to Gillian Wearing, they have a more literal approach to the topic. Yung Jake is an eccentric visual artist based in Los Angeles, who creates artworks using one of the most common use of signs and symbols used today, emojis. A lot of his work explores the role of technology in our world, so inspired by this and the pointillist movement Yung Jake created a unique artistic technique. These ‘Emoji Portraits’ of famous celebrities are said to be a celebration of daily lives, individuality and our current culture.