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Description
Portfolio of work for the 2020 Senior Art Exhibition. Work Includes mixed media collages.
Semester Completed
Spring 2020
City
De Pere
Keywords
mixed media, found materials, collage, art
Disciplines
Art and Design
Recommended Citation
Emmel, Alek, "Alek Emmel, Senior Art Exhibition Portfolio" (2020). Senior Art Portfolios. 57.
https://digitalcommons.snc.edu/artportfolios/57
Copyright
Alek Emmel
Artist Statement
Much of my work revolves around stories and narratives, most of which comes from the role playing games that my friends and I have played. The main influences of my work are from film and video, most notably landscapes and movie posters. I am often drawn to sci-fi and fantasy for the content of my work.
Somethin’ Wicked this way Rides is a piece that I made for a smaller one-off RPG that my friends and I did. which revolves around witches going out west to try and escape from those who would hunt them down, and encountering folk heroes and cryptids along the way. As for its style I modeled it after a movie poster. The fact that a movie poster has to have enough context on its own to make the viewer want to see the entire story is something I find really interesting.
The three paneled piece is a combination of the ideas, format, concepts and essences of a holy triptych and a GM screen. In any role playing game there usually is a GM (Game Master or DM/Dungeon Master as they are more commonly referred to) and when running any role playing game they are the man behind the curtain--the GM screen. The GM plays as everyone else in the world, including the gods that reside over it. Triptychs in the western imagination often depict holy figures, many of which with a halo and sometimes their name is included, both of which I included in this piece.
As for the figures on the piece, they were the player characters in a Dungeon World campaign I was a part of which ran from January to June of 2019, all of which are now the gods in the current Dungeon World campaign that I am playing in.
All of these pieces shown are made from found materials, cabinet doors being the surface that I am most drawn to because they make nice frames. It can be a bit tedious to find the right image that I need. My first pass through my stack of magazines is usually for things I think I might need, colors, patterns, items, ect. If I happen to find something specific that I need on my first pass through that just makes it easier, but more often than not, I start putting all the pieces together and once I need something specific I do another search. If I need something resized or a different color, I scan it, edit it digitally and print it off, sometimes multiple times if I print it too large or too small. It is through this process that I take existing images and recontextualize them to create something entirely new.