Wk 8 — Artist — Joseph DeLappe & Micol Hebron
Artists: Joseph DeLappe
Micol Hebron
Media: Gaming performance, sculpture, and electromechanical installation
Studio work, curating, writing, social media, crowd-sourcing, teaching, public speaking, and both individual and collaborative projects
Website: http://www.delappe.net/
http://micolhebron.artcodeinc.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/josephdelappe/
@unicornkiller1
Art is something that allows its owner to present their ideas and thoughts in any manner they seem fit. It is up to us as observers to try to distinguish what they are saying through their art. Artists have created everything, from world-famous paintings to giant stone statues to piles of plastic taken out of the ocean, each of these can be considered art by their owners. 2 artists that we are going to take focus on and dive into their art are none other than Joseph DeLappe and Micol Hebron, both of whom have similar yet extremely different forms of art. DeLappe, who specializes in online gaming performance, sculpture, and electromechanical installation have been shown throughout the U.S and abroad. On the other hand, Hebron is a female activist who shows her art through her body and focuses her work majorly on the female body.
Of the artists and their works, each can be seen and traced back to a single point/goal. Artists' goals can be similar in terms of how they are expressed and displayed. In which you can find similarities in the works of artists, DeLappe and Hebron. If you happen to view the art that both of these artists have created, you can quickly realize what their goals are and what they are fighting for. Both of these artists, DeLappe and Hebron, have used the internet as one of their main ways to relay these goals. DeLappe has become very prominent in the online community thought his works on video games, mainly “Killbox”, an interactive video game that was based around drone warfare and “Elegy: GTA USA Gun Homicides”, a GTA mod that reenacted the total number of gun homicides for one year. Hebron on the other hand focuses her use of the internet and her art on the injustices faced every day by women. In her artwork “(In) Decent Exposure”, she uses her body to question the thought of women’s bodies being seen as sexual regardless of the task they are doing. Both Hebron and DeLappe both use very similar ways to express their work and both have strong goals in which they want to achieve by educating others.
Although a wide majority of artists share the same common feeling of wanting to achieve their goal and teach the public of their issue, most of them have their own ways of doing so. As for Hebron, she is a teacher at Chapman University and uses public speaking combined with social media to appeal to her audience. She focuses her work around the female body, gender equity, and freedom of speech. Her artwork mainly consists of individual, crowd-sourced, and collaborative projects in which she rarely uses the fabrication of objects as her sources of art. On the other hand, DeLappe is a professor at Abertay University. Unlike Hebron, DeLappe uses sculpture and video games to construct his artwork and appeal to his audience. His work has been shown around the globe and tends to focus on the military as well as a large section of his work contributed to Gandhi. Both of these artists are able to show their art to the world through different means of expression.
To me, both the work of Hebron and DeLappe is truly inspiring. Each artist has his/her own way of showing their view of the world and their goals for what it can become. I am particularly fond of DeLappe's work, which consists mostly of online video games that he creates. Both of these artists have shown me that art can be anything if one is willing to look into it. Art doesn’t have to be bound to the paintbrush and paper, it can stretch far beyond that and can take meaning in simpler yet deeper things such as a photograph of a nude woman watering her lawn or driving a car. Each of these photographs has a deeper, more powerful meaning, and only those who are willing to pay attention and look closely can determine the true meaning.
