Barbara Kruger is a female american artist who is best known for her visual art featuring magazine clipping style art where striking text is layered over images. Most of Kruger’s work consists of monochrome images with black and white or red text. Her work tackles subjects such as capitalism, consumerism and feminism.

One of her most famous images was used as a poster for the 1989 women’s march in protest of legal and safe abortion. The image (pictured below) features a split photograph of a woman’s face, one side being a black and white version and the other the negative of, one can only assume, the same photo. There are three red rectangles that separate the image, one and the very top, one and the bottom and a smaller one in the centre. The rectangles have white, slightly italic text played over the top reading “Your body is a battleground”  The same slogan was used for a commissioned billboard for Wexner Centre for the Arts (pictured above), 12 hours after the pro- choice billboard was erected an opposing pro-life billboard was placed directly next to it, depicting an 8 week old foetus. Although Kruger’s work supports feminist ideals and Kruger personally identifies as a feminist, her work also deals with superficiality which ties in with the theme of consumerism and how women are presented and choose to be presented in the media.

The image on the left featuring the phrase “Adorn your prison” particularly spoke to me as someone who enjoys makeup and getting dressed up from time to time. The combination of the text and image is a little different from most of Kruger’s work, the word “adorn” appears in it’s own rectangle and the words “your” and prison” appear in the same incredibly long rectangle that spreads across the entire width of the image, the spacing between the words is notably large which gives as disjunct feeling to the reader. The disjunct feeling is also mirror in the bottom heavy nature of the image with the there being no red or text in the top half of the image. The piece also has a strong sense of intrigue, this is provided by the use of the mirror as the back of the subject’s head, as well as her reflection. My interpretation of the phrase “adorn your prison” is that women are seen as objects and they are seen this way because of their sexual bodies, they cannot escape their own bodies so they may as well make the most of it and put some makeup on. Give the people what they want.

I want to take inspiration from Kruger’s work by adding text to my images to give them another dimension and a wider sense of interest. I also think that the addition of text will help my images more overtly tie in with the idea of feminism and self reflection.