Madison Anderson

Art 1010

Window Shopping – Our World Views

I’d been contemplating my art project since nearly the beginning of the semester. I’m a

Computer Science major so I spend most of my time with code and numbers and I use a

computer as my medium. I’ve always loved art and I can draw a little, but my issue is I’ve always

felt like I can never create something I can only replicate. I thought I should maybe bring in

some creative help and asked my mom is she’d collaborate with me, which she agreed to, so I

acknowledge and give her credit for the work she put in.

As we talked and brainstormed, we got off topic and started talking about her recent

trip to Europe. We started getting lost in her beautiful photos of cute little shops until we’d

been looking at the photos for over an hour. Once we realized this, we started talking about

how easy it is to get caught up in looking at pictures and videos. Then a thought began to drive

me. Often as humans living in a digital world, we look at pictures, especially on social media

sites, for hours at a time. We sometimes even go as far as wanting the things portrayed in an

image or video so badly, we forget to live our lives or be grateful for what we have. Then my

mom had the brilliant idea that it was like the window shopping they did in Europe; staring at

beautiful, perfect things through a window, that are completely unobtainable to us.

Window Shopping shows our modern-day world where the current unobtainable

shopping we do is of unrealistic images, and the windows we look through are screens on a

phone.
 With the ideas laid out we had to start creating. At first, we thought about doing a 3D

sculpture, but we weren’t really sure who we could borrow a couple of life-sized mannequins

from, so we scaled down. I started looking through magazines that my mom had at her house

and came across the page with a realistic phone image on it. From there we took an online

image of mannequin silhouettes as well as apps from four different social media apps and

printed them out. We added the words Perfect and nothings perfect as a kind of commentary

as with the title of the piece. We completed it by pasting the images on top of other images to

form our collage. I decided to play with the placements of the apps and commentary and

decided this was best. Luckily after finding the right idea and items the project seemed to come

together quite nicely.

I hope you enjoyed my piece and the concept and purpose that drove it. I very much

enjoyed this assignment and where the end eventually took me. Special thanks again to my

mother, Desari, for her support, ideas and effort.