Richard Gadd is a Scottish based comedy performance artists that use sketch comedy and symbolicism to raise issues that surround the modern day man, in his most recent peace “monkey see monkey do” Gadd plays with the themes of masculinity, mental health, and male stereotypes. From this Gadd uses comedy to make the peace inviting to the audience, but at the same time raising key questions about problems that many males face but don’t talk about. The piece symbolizes the idea of the stereotypical side/ man as a monkey character that chases Garden around his life testing him in various sketch show situations to see if he can act like “a man”. This representation of the monkey refers to are the neanderthal/reptilian part of the brain and Is one of the ways that guard wants us to think about the dangerous ways that our brains can go against us.
The aesthetic is stripped back with only a running machine and a projection screen center stage with a couple of colored stage lights, Richard, himself-wears small pink shorts and a white tank top with pink headband, but even though the show is stripped back in its use of props and objects on stage those small amount of props and their colors have big effects of the idea of male and female representation, and to note the use of everyday object such as the running machine is practically effective in showing the journey of his story and a symbolic object of male hardship with regards to body representation. the use of the projection screen is particularly interesting because it shows landscapes beyond the performance and the battle of Richard’s “inner man”. Through this, we are able to use the idea of film and forms of mixed media having an impact on the work. For example, in one section uses the real people's thoughts towards depression from twitter comments and also having a section where to close-ups of chins have a therapy session about the effects of depression and all the time Richard has not felt like a real man.[1][2] Saya Woolfalk “Saya Woolfalk is a New York-based artist who uses science fiction and fantasy to re-imagine the world in multiple dimensions and with each body of work, Woolfalk continues to build the narrative of women's lives, and questions the Utopian possibilities of cultural hybrid.”[3] Woolfalk;s work looks at the way we can make realms and utopian performative space so that she can explore her issues around women and women as a race. Although I am working around the idea of men and the realm of the male mind, her performative spaces carries a key aesthetic that I would like to use in my work. First Woolfolk works with bright vibrant colors and neon in a lot of her performative spaces and art installations, the idea being that it sets her first in the SiFI genre and also creates the utopian feel to her work.With this huge pallet of colors, Woolfalk interweaves its meaning and representation by the presentation and arrangement of these colors with big bright colors being used to signify the key bodies and the areas of interest. Woolfalk also uses the symbols shapes and lines to connect areas together to make symbolic meaning. All her work uses these forms of shapes and patterns and leads to the way that she uses costume, costume again has big element of SiFi with usually seeing various receptors and shapes coming from heads and joints of the body. Another key theme is Woolfalk use of media and what that adds to her art. For instance, in her 2012 performance Empathics, the use of video has used to break away from the space and create an all new one that is in another realm. It's from this that she works with the idea of dualism and the ways that the mind and body can be separated.
The application Woolfalk works to my peace, comes in the way that we look at gender as a race and want to explore further the realm of the body and the mind being in some instances separate entities. Another application of her work is the choice of bright colors shapes and symbols, but it is within the correlation and arrangement that that most interests me in the application into my work and practice.