Visual Response: Does Non Conformity exist?

Given my focus on conformity and and compliance I thought it would be worth exploring whehter or not truly non conformist behaviour given how strong the evidence is that we inherently pre disposed to conformist group behaviours.

It has been argued that as you age you become less conformist which makes sense as when you are younger, particularly during teenage and adult years, there is for most an on going anxiety relating to fitting as well as an ongoing fixation with notions of what is or isn't cool. 

The part of this I find interesting is that, despite the conformity which it results in, many people belonging to this age group choose to adopt and comply to certain lifestyles and cultures in attempt to give themselves a unique or conformist identity. This irony is explored in both a Nation of Rebels by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter as well as by Naomi Klein in No Logo, both of which argue that this desire of the youth to rebel and be different is now some thing which brands can directly market and appeal to.

Therefore I created a series of figures that, when put next to each other appear very different and unique, as would many teens belonging to particular sub groups and niches. However to highlight how this in itself can be a form of social compliance I then created several images compositing of the just one of the supposedly unique figures repeated again to demonstrate this.

However I wasn't overly pleased with the aesthetics of these images and felt that the meaning was some what convoluted. Therefore I decided to bring my approach back to the idea of reductive image making that I have highlighted both in my artist research and previous visual responses.

With this in mind I created a series of collages, two of which were figurative, although very reductive in their description of the human form, with the rest being much more abstract. Although I prefer how the abstract ones look due to their much more balanced compositions as well more interesting textures I feel that the above figurative images communicate the idea of an individual trying not to conform and instead stand out from a crowd a lot better. Although as a metaphor I do quite like the idea of one shape breaking the mould and not fitting in with the uniform squares in the bottem image.

I felt this process much better firtted the theme conformity as it alowed me to create exact replicas of the motif I wanted to repeat given that I could simply draw round the first image, cut it out and repeat the process. I could see this process transferring well onto screen through the use of, for example, vectors.