Week 6 Collage

 

"You Become Your Heroes"

"You Become Your Heroes"

My collage is called “You Become Your Heroes”, a title drawn from a lyric from one of my favorite musicians, Porter Robinson.

“How do you do music? Well, it’s easy, you just face your fears and you become your heroes.”

That lyric is a guiding message for me in all of my creative endeavors and what I tried to capture with this piece.

The backdrop is a print of the design drawing for the set designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera Die Zauberflöte (lit. The Magic Flute). From there, I used construction paper and tissue paper to frame it like a set. Then I cut out my old sheet music to create heads in an audience and a performer on stage. The performer on stage is draped in a yellow, black, and purple dress created out of construction paper. The performer, along with one member of the audience is outlined in gold glitter, and the performer has a Sampaguita (Jasminum sambac or Arabian jasmine) flower growing out of their head while the audience member has a bud of the flower in their head.

These symbols have some form of importance to my journey and identity. Die Zauberflöte is my personal favorite opera by Mozart (who is my favorite classical composer) and one of my first performances in an opera scene with one of my best friends was from this opera. The Sampaguita flower is the national flower of The Philippines, where both my parents were born. Combined with the white of the flower, the colors yellow, white, purple, and black make the non-binary pride flag, and my gender identity is a massive part of who I am.

The choice to include floral symbolism as part of the human figure was partially inspired by Wangechi Mutu. She included natural and floral elements in forms on her pieces, like This you call civilization?, and I wanted to use that element in my work.

The scene depicted through my collage was partially inspired by Frida Kahlo’s Las dos Fridas. The interpretation that the two people depicted in her work are two different versions of herself that are both a part of who she is struck with me. I combined that with the concept from the lyric I named the work after to incorporate there being two versions of me in the piece. There’s “me” as the performer with the blooming flower and “me” in the audience with a bud that still hasn’t grown yet. The one in the audience is looking up to the stage while the other is the one on stage that is being looked up to. At times, I still am the person in the audience looking on amazed by the art I want to do, and at other times I am the one doing the art.

Frida Kahlo, Las dos Fridas (lit. The Two Fridas), 1939

Wangechi Mutu, This you call civilization?, 2008