Making a Shop Window.

After spending a day looking at examples of shop windows in real life and in paintings we were able to create our own shop windows. One example we looked at was Berenice Abbott's photograph of Heymann's butchery in 1938. What astounded me was the amount of advertisement the shop gave off and I felt almost bombarded by information and just by looking at the photograph. Also the fact this this level of advertisement and layout of signs has been passed through the years and still strongly exists in nearly every high street shop.

First I started by mind mapping ideas of slogans and images based around my mass produced object, although my ideas weren't very strong. This was probably due to the reason my object was a sandwich shaper and the only reason I picked this item was because of how useless and obscure it was. So I joined up into a group and we based our shop window design on some neon coloured test tubes. Creating a display based around nightlife and the bright vibrant colours you can encounter on a night out. We put up shelves at jaunty angles to give the feeling that the display was falling in on itself. Although as the display evolved it became a lot less about nightlife and more about an experimentation of different vibrant colours. This worked incredibly well as we filled the test tubes up with different coloured inks to create some really interesting combination's. Our display was also given another dimension of movement when some of the test tubes toppled over splattering ink all over the display and creating almost a radioactive looking stream running down the angled shelves. I felt this worked really well as I liked that our work had been improved by chance creating an unexpected but effective result. However once we had finished the background to our shop window didn't carry the same visual impact the rest of the display did. Once this was taken into account we filled it with mono prints that were based on our shop display itself. These were printed onto luminous paper to continue the overwhelming colour scheme that was carried through our display. One artist I thought was similar in the way he emphasised the use of colour in his installations was Haim Steinbach. His work is based strongly around the relation between colours. He creates an incredibly strong visual impact and also questions the line between what is an ordinary mass produced object and art.