Virtual Exhibition

Part of working within an artistic field is understanding where ideas come from. Knowing why things are the way they and what came before is key to creating meaningful and interesting visuals. Furthermore, recognizing the importance of how information is imparted to an observer is a critical step to creating a subtextual or inferred narrative which lends a great deal of grounding to a world or character.

During the production of our curated museum of a decade me and my team considered these things, as well prioritising information: what was necessary for the viewer to understand the significance of the decade we were exploring.

We chose the 1950’s as our decade primarily due to the prevalence and induction of Pop Art. For me, this was an interesting movement because I see it as a realisation of the direction commercialism was taking us, leading to the world as we know it today. Furthermore, the music of the time greatly interests me as it is the precursor to much of the music I listen to personally. My own prior investment of these things made it an easy decision as I knew I would produce much higher quality results if working on something that enthused me.

As a team we worked together doing research since that enabled us to give immediate feedback to each other regarding what we felt was most important to go into the gallery. My contributions include the prominence of Elvis in the display as well as the idea of creating the entire area to be a diner in the style of 1950’s diners. This, I felt, would give a greater sense of immersion of the society at the time.

After deciding what we felt would be most important to display we separated to begin creating assets for use. I started work on bar stools to put into the diner. I also created a door, some walls and a table to go along with the bench that Kerry created and UV unwrapped all 5 and then textured them. After that I created a counter for the corner and a plate to go on the tables.

Once we had all the main parts of the diner produced I started work on putting them together to create the scene. After the bulk of that was done I created a few extra informational posters to give context to the objects. Then, with those placed in along with everyone elses hard work I had finally finished and we had produced a 1950s Diner with some information about the decade.

Considerations on the presentation of our work:
I feel as though the work was presented adequately but was not as detailed or thoroughly explained as it could have been. I also feel as though I failed to properly show off the hard work off our team and look at the diner itself and finished up too quickly, a result of nerves. Unfortunately, I also started talking at one point, picking up from where a teammate had gotten stuck a little- which would have been fine if I had then handed over the reigns afterwards. I zoned in, got carried away and didn't allow either Kerry or Tim demonstrate their ability to present or their knowledge.