Candyman 2021 Reboot

The 2021 horror movie "Candyman" was produced and directed by Jordan Peele and Nia DaCosta. The movie is a continuation of the 1992 original "Candyman" movie. In this adaptation, the narrative centers on Anthony McCoy, an artist who, while investigating Chicago's gentrified Cabrini-Green area, develops an obsession with the Candyman mythology. As Anthony explores the Candyman's sinister past, he unintentionally summons the spirit which leads to a sequence of terrifying incidents that bring the Candyman's vengeful soul back to life. The movie looks at issues like urban legends and racial injustice and highlights themes such as reincarnation, generational trauma and denial. During the lesson we found that the movie is a metaphor for the real-life events that have taken place in history and current events and that it is a ruthless cycle of violence, anger manipulation and lies. Matching almost perfectly to a story that took the world by storm, the George Flyod incident where a man was killed in cold blood by the hands of police brutality and it is shown in the movie where there is a scene where Anthony was shot at and killed without valid reason. But in the end was able to avenge himself and those who died before him by killing the policemen and leaving a message to his wife in the form of the 1992 Candyman, to tell everyone of the continuous surge of injustice against black people throughout history.

If the world was upside down

Have you ever thought about what if the world turned upside down? and weather we would be walking with our hands like a well-trained dog in the circus or we would be walking on roofs like in that  one trippy house in the Northwest, there are too many possibilities. but why speak about this you may be thinking, well during Mr. Mark's class we had to draw a portrait upside down without the use of a grid which was very mentally straining and a lot bit odd as the portrait itself did not make sense never the less my world turned upside down during that lesson. Things got restless when people started to turn their drawings upright to check their progress and it was utter chaos; with people having to start again or with people giving up, all the while trying to figure out who this portrait actually looked like.We had drawn the infamous Igor Stravinsky portrait by Pablo Picasso, and an artist by the name of Betty Edwards found when drawing this portrait upside down is a an interesing and confusing exercise.

The goal for this lesson was to see the way in which we interpret shape and lines and weather we change the look of a landscape and reference based on our own understanding or interpretation of a subject matter. We drew this portrait as accurately as possible disregarding our individual art style in order to capture the true essence of the shapes and lines in the original drawing. 

Overall a very interesting and fun exercise that really tested, improved and stretched our drawing capabilities. 

Code of Gender

 Assigning specific traits or behaviors exclusively to a certain gender, the cultural ideas of how a specific gender is supposed to behave based on stereotypes. Code of gender is a topic of discussion that has sat on our tongues since the break of dawn. Male, females, everything in between and outside of those codes and what that means. A classic story associated with this infamous topic is the biblical text based on the beginning of time and our creation; the story of Adam and Eve, - like many other biblical stories it describes the role of a male and female in society, but  outside of religion as humans, we have evolved from the once known and practiced stereotypes and we rebuilt  the meaning of Gender codes in society. For one being an educated female in the past was considered taboo and unacceptable but now it is considered a valuable addition to a woman's worth, but i  think at the heart of it, these changes were made because a man deemed it acceptable. During our class with Ma'am Tebogo, we highlighted some very interesting conversations such as how we live in a man's world and the male gaze and how there is a sick notion of what masculinity looks like and what it poses on women and their Femininity. A lot of back and forth was made but there was a subtle conclusion that was made as well, that without  context could seem a little far fetched. Absent fathers in households, and  this is not a recent occurrence but it dates all the way back to the apartheid regime and even back to slavery, it was a strategic notion to separate fathers from their families to create unstable households within black communities thus in some way weakening them as an alliance to the oppressors. We saw this when a point was made where ma'am asked us how many of us live in a home where there are both married parents in the same household and an unsettling amount of hands were down.