For my 5th sustained investigation I focused on the decade of the 90s which gave me inspiration for the piece. My sustained investigation question is "How have the different decades/eras of the past changed and influenced life today? How does life differ today from life back then?"
For this piece I knew that I wanted to focus on some of the bigger 90s movies and pop culture events, but I also wanted to incorporate some big news headlines such as the LA riots and the death of princess Diana. My first step was finding something that could show the world emerging from the mind of Cher, from Clueless the movie. I found this clay world on the internet and I liked the style and the style of it because it gives the piece a more animated and young look that I found really cool because I could envision more images surrounding the globe that would allow me to fully create the vision that I had.
I decided that I didn't want to use the globe because I found the image of the coke and fries being poured and I thought that those worked better for the direction that I wanted to take the piece. I also got rid of the globe because it was taking up too much space and I didn't like that the images would necessarily be "inside" of Cher's head.
After that, I started to put some images of different elements of pop culture from the 90s emerging from the mind of Cher. I wanted to use something that gave the piece an interactive look from the coke bottle being poured into her head and the McDonalds fries being poured into her head also. I like the effect that this gave because it gives the viewer something to think about and shows the theme for the piece of different aspects of 90s pop culture being what Cher mostly thinks about. Some of the images that I used are a picture of princess Diana wearing her infamous revenge dress, different cars of the 90s lining the colored lines, Brittney Spears, and a picture of Jack and Rose from the movie Titanic. After I finished finding images for the head, I made the background into a black and white daisy flower pattern because I thought that it was pretty neutral and didn't clash with any of the images that I put in, but also continued with the 90s theme and the idea that the top half of the piece is more lighthearted.
Lastly, I used different news article headlines throughout the decade contrasted on a black background to show the difference in what many teenagers were thinking about during the 90s and what the rest of the world was seeing. I really like how this turned out because I think that it adds so much depth and interest to the piece, but it still stays light hearted and intriguing to look at. To make the headlines, I found images online and turned the opacity down, then added a layer mask and blended out the edges to give it a seamless look.
Here is my final piece:
