Artist Statement (Dispatches)

To go with our artwork that we have produced during the project of Dispatches, we have been asked to create an artist statement allowing the viewers to have an insight of our thoughts and process of making.
This artist statement has to be in Arial (font) and font size 12".
It only has to be half a page long so I have to think about what is the most important things to talk about on my statement that I want the viewer to understand more about.

This is the artist statement that I have written that I will display next to my pieces of artwork:

Following the ideas of consumerism from last semester, I wanted to look at how language can communicate to its audience and how easy it is to understand.  I started to look at company slogans and how they are presented to us, finding out that most don't convey much truth. My first idea was to alter company slogans, inserting the truth in areas that were not originally portraying this. The main problem that I encountered was that it began to present me with negative responses  Therefore, I researched into a few artists under the name of 'Barbara Kruger' and 'Jenny Holzer'. This gave me a greater insight into how imaginative and clever language could be used to draw in an audience but still direct it at consumerism. Barbara Kruger stood out for me as she used found images/photographs from existing sources and applied text to communicate and connect with the viewer. Taking some of the elements/aspects of her work, I started to think of various sayings or sentences that would generate an impact on the audience. The two that I came up with was 'the other line moves faster' and 'is there more to live than having everything'. I spent a day or so thinking about what images would be suitable for these slogans. Furthermore, when I thought of the slogan 'the other line...' I was in a queue in a shopping center and heard a woman say that exact phrase realizing that, we are always in a rush to do everything. This inspired me to look at images of queues to back up the piece of text. Regarding 'is there more...', people want the latest gadget or clothing or technical object, but one thing that they forget are those that don't have these things like the poor and homeless. Therefore, an image displaying this I believed to be appropriate. My main problem that I would change if I produced the 'the other line...' poster again would be to re-position the lettering and maybe enlarge this further. Overall, I really enjoyed producing these pieces and will keep developing them further.